After the jump are some ‘ratings’ of sorts for posts at HogwartsProfessor.com, ratings created by the interior number crunching program in the WordPress platform on which the site runs. It generates ‘Top Ten’ lists of the most visited posts for the week, month, and lifetime of this weblog.
Would you have guessed that only two of the seven new posts that went up last week would be in the top ten of posts viewed that week? That a post I wrote before Deathly Hallows was published in 2007 would be the most visited piece in the last seven days?
Me, neither. But there’s a pretty simple explanation. Today’s post is a break from Agatha Christie’s influence on Rowling and Galbraith for some ‘inside baseball’ reflection that only the true HogPro All-Pro will enjoy; join me after the jump if that’s of any interest to you!
Most Viewed Posts: Last Seven Days
- “Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!” Four Words for “Other”
- J. K. Rowling Says Goodbye to Twitter
- Name that Not Quite Legible Book Title! The Mysteries on Rowling’s Book Shelf
- Lethal White: Ibsen’s ‘Rosmersholm’
- Harry Potter by the Numbers: 1,084,170
- Lethal White: The Big Change at the Turn The End of the Strike Agency in Book 5?
- What did Jo Rowling Study at University? French? Classics? Both?
- John Granger — “The Dean of Harry Potter Scholars”
- Christie’s ‘Murder at the Vicarage’ Bellatrix Lestrange’s Debut in Fiction?
- Stephen Fry Recordings of Harry Potter?
What’s up with that? I’m guessing the counter does not include ‘hits’ to the home page. Everyone that stops by on as daily basis and reads the posts on the site’s front page and even the ‘more’ feature for those posts but does not click on the post title to see it in full is not counted.
This chart, in other words, pretty much only reflects visitors to the site who click on links from another website that bring them to that specific page. I’ve always been pleased (and surprised, frankly) at the number of readers who are here every day even during long droughts between posting; I get weekly reports from Google analytics about those visitors. While nothing like LeakyCauldron, MuggleNet, or the Harry Potter Lexicon, HogwartsProfessor has a large and loyal readership — and their visits and reading choices are essentially invisible in these Top Ten tracking lists.
Here is a list of the most viewed posts the site has ever had over its ten year lifespan. Number 1 is about a movie adaptation that wasn’t made — of a book not by J. K. Rowling! — and #2 is the post that topped last week’s chart leaders.
Hall of Fame: Most Viewed Posts, 2008-2019
- Ascendant (aka Allegiant Part Two) Movie cancelled; may be TV movie instead.
- “Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!” Four Words for “Other”
- What did Jo Rowling Study at University? French? Classics? Both?
- Crimes of Grindelwald: Deleted Scenes
- Is ‘Nagini’ the Name of the Maledictus in ‘Crimes of Grindelwald’? ‘Nagini Gaunt’?
- John Granger — “The Dean of Harry Potter Scholars”
- Deathly Hallows Movie Notes: The Dance Scene
- Three Good Reasons to Read Suzanne Collins’ Five Underland Chronicles: Gregor the Overlander Meets Harry and Katniss
- Lethal White: Ibsen’s ‘Rosmersholm’
- Visiting Cormoran Strike’s Pub and Denmark Street Premises in London
Color me ‘Gobsmacked.’
Well, not really.
The Ascendant piece must have been the go-to post on the web for Veronica Roth fans desperate for news about the subject; there are tens of thousands of hits on the post in a very short period of time. The Crimes of Grindelwald posts on the list at #s 3 and 4 and the Cormoran Strike posts at #9 and 10 probably reflect a similar phenomenon. My Gregor the Overlander post, #8, is one of the very few discussion of this Suzanne Collins series that is out there.
And who else is writing about Rowling’s disappearance from Twitter? The Presence still has 14.6 million followers, down only 100,00 after a seven month absence from the platform. I suspect Google searches on this subject will continue to send people to that HogwartsProfessor page.
I’m guessing, too, that the four word speech of Albus Dumbledore post enjoys a link on Wikipedia or the Lexicon page for the Headmaster. Same for Rowling’s subject of study at the University of Exeter. I think the page about me on the site ranks as high as it does because the new visitor inevitably goes there from whatever post a link brought him or her to HogwartsProfessor to read.
So… ‘lies, damn lies, statistics.’ The HogwartsProfessor faculty and team of Guest Posters will continue to produce quality reading material for the serious reader of J. K. Rowling and try not to take too seriously the Top Ten lists on offer via Word Press. Look for a special treat on 1 September, a ‘Back to Hogwarts’ Special Series from Oxford’s Beatrice Groves — stay tuned for more on that.
Feel free, though, while you wait at Platform 9 and 3/4 for our virtual Hogwarts Express, to link to our Pillar Posts on Literary Alchemy, The Hunger Games, Lethal White, and Crimes of Grindelwald if you have a website of your own or you edit Wikipedia pages on those subjects! And thank you as always for stopping by and for joining in the conversation. You are the proverbial wind in our sails.
There was a Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! theory making the rounds on Twitter last week within the Potter fandom. After reading this post, I went and checked out your 2007 post about your theory. Going with this line of reasoning, I would have thought that blubber refers to crying, such as when Gary Oldman, in his role as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, asks a group of people on the London Underground to forgive his “blubbing”. Looking forward to 1 September.