The Enduring Psalms

All of my blogs have counters on them which tell me how many people have visited, where their ip server is, and what key words they used to find the site. I watched all this obsessively for the first few months after I started blogging, but it had been a while.

When I left my statistics, iMinister was getting between 10 and 30 hits a day, depending mostly on whether I had posted and, I think, whether Blogger had put it in the queue for the browsing public that day. More than half of the hits came from Albuquerque, and most were repeat visitors. My Psalm Blog, on the other hand, was getting three to ten hits a day, with occasional spikes, and a world wide audience.

So you can imagine my shock to discover that in the past few months, my Psalm blog, to which I've not posted since September, has slowly been gaining market share and now gets nearly twice the hits as iMinister. Most of those seem to be coming from Google searches for specific Psalms, words, or modern translations. Since most UU's don't Google Psalms, I'm assuming that most of my visitors are not UU's. Hopefully, they leave with a good impression.

The key words people use to find this site range from "Mary Oliver" to (I kid you not) "punched Arius in the nose."

That was St. Nicholas who did that, and I did, indeed write about this most unfortunate incident, which happened at the Council of Nicea, on the good Bishop's feast day in December.

In response to my astonishment that someone would look for information about St. Nicholas by Googling "punched Arius in the nose," my son informed me that this was a very sophisticated way to avoid the million Christmas pages that include St. Nicholas, and that this search technique is called "google-fu", like Kung fu, the art of getting what you want by subtle and indirect combat.

Learn something every day!