It’s been a bit over a year since I last ran the numbers on WIST. In that time, I’ve continued my daily updates, plus shifted things over to WordPress. Let’s see how things have changed.

The Miscellaneous Quotes number is down a bit due mostly to my moving Bible quotes into the “Authored” category.  But I’m very pleased by how the overall total has gone up — amazing what 5 quotes entered nearly every workday can do  for those counts.

As to the top authors cited, taking 50 as a threshold …

Teddy, Abe and Albert have all gotten back into the Top 10 (which only required 44 quotes last time).  Ben and Bill have dropped out, and Ambrose Bierce has completely disappeared (heh).

Note that the changes can be somewhat skewed by how I select quotes for entry — some is randomized from various sources, but I’m also slowly going through the existing WIST database by author (at three points around the alphabet), and, as I get to each, trying to research any “Attributed” quotes as well as come up with more quotes for that author, which then go into a weekly rotation.

Still, a bunch of old white guys all of whom are either dead or retired.  Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but there it is.

The current Top Quotes (by views) are always shown in the sidebar at WIST.  As a snapshot:

• Teddy Roosevelt: “The New Nationalism,” speech, Osawatomie, Kansas (31 Aug 1910) (497)
• Seneca the Younger: De Tranquillitate Animi [On Tranquility of Mind] [tr. W. Langsdorf (1900)] (329)
• Michel de Montaigne: “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” Essays (1588) [tr. D. Frame (1958)] (327)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, “Introduction: The Custom-House” (1850) (319)
• John Steinbeck: Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (295)
• Robert Frost: “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (287)
• Lord Chesterfield: Letter to his son (9 Oct 1746) (284)
• Robert Louis Stevenson: “Aes Triplex” (1878) (265)
• William Henley: “Invictus” (1875) (243)
• Patrick Henry: Speech, Virginia Ratifying Convention (5 Jun 1788) (202)

Now, why those particular quotes, I have no idea.  Most of them are not particularly famous.

Finally, as far as all the Google Analytics numbers, I’m doing about about 560 visitors (470 unique) hitting around 750 pages per week.  That appears to be down from the last time, substantially — but still enough to make me feel like someone’s appreciating the effort.

The vast majority of hits are from the US, but other English-speaking countries (UK, Canada, Australia, India) round out the top 5.  82% of visitors are new, the rest are returning customers. Three-quarters of the traffic is via search engines; 10% are referred from other sites, and over 15% enter in the address directly.

And those are the numbers, to go with the words.