200,000 pageviews... and some dodgy Blogger stats

I noticed that my blog hit another landmark recently, exceeding 200,000 pageviews. I was therefore curious to see once again what were the most popular posts. At 100,000 pageviews, the top three were:

1. Expanding Macbook Air disk space with SD cards (4002 VIEWS)
2. OMICS Group Conferences - Sham or Scam? (Either way, don’t go to one!) (4000 VIEWS)
3. How to root a phylogenetic tree (2662 VIEWS)

The updated top ten, according to the “Stats » Posts” page on Blogger look like this:

So, no change in the top three other than a reversal of #1 and #2. Except… looking at the “Posts” page revealed that a number of more recent posts exceeded some of the listed posts. Last year’s Paddy’s Day post, for example, has 707 views, not the 524 listed. Not a big problem in the grand scheme of things but a little annoying. (What’s the point of providing stats if they don’t agree?!)

Out of curiosity, I decided to go through the individual post counts. The top six are the same order, at least, just with higher page counts:

1. OMICS Group Conferences - Sham or Scam? (Either way, don’t go to one!) (11503 pageviews)

2. Expanding Macbook Air disk space with SD cards (9054 pageviews)

3. How to root a phylogenetic tree (7913 pageviews)

4. Are “Happy Eggs” really happy? (And are Viva really pro-welfare?) (6047 pageviews)

5. How to stop Outlook on Mac OSX replacing quotes & apostrophes with superscript numbers (5883 pageviews)

6. Avenged Sevenfold - my kind of Nightmare for Halloween (1803 pageviews)

However, then it deviates in both order and number, with the rest of the top 20 posts beating the 1000 views and thus the listed ranks 7-10, which are either missing or muddled:

7. Putting photos on Picasa with an iPad = 1684

8. Artificial Selection versus Natural Selection = 1641

9. (≠10) Kumala Zenith Merlot/Cab Sav/Shiraz - another bargain red = 1604

10. (≠8) Who does Microsoft Academic Research think you are? = 1301

11. (≠7) When snowmen go bad (Christmas graffiti) = 1286

12. Making e-Books with Wikipedia = 1263

13. Differential survival, (inclusive) fitness, selection and evolution = 1207

14. Blogging in Markdown with Blogger and Markable (on a Mac) = 1124

15. When is a Moro not a Boost? When it’s an Aussie Cadbury’s Mars Bar! = 1107

16. iPlan with Onzo revisited (and not recommended) = 1100

17. A review of the “Instant Markdown” eBook from Packt Publishing = 1064

18. Finding Nemo’s sex-changing father = 1063

19. Marvellous Markdown = 1031

20. How to read a phylogenetic tree = 1014

The Paddy’s Day post was way down with 707 pageviews. Indeed, three posts that I feel are much more worthy weighed in higher (along with some others):

• Wallace was not forgotten and Darwin did not cheat him = 922

• Prominent anti-GM campaigner becomes GM defender after looking into the science = 748

• Australia: a country so big that its rainfall can affect global sea level = 735

I guess the take-home message is: don’t count pageviews!