Vote for the Kuufke Shelter!

On behalf of the Dutchies we would like to nominate 't Kuufke for the proceedings of the calendar. Guinea pig shelter 't Kuufke in Limbricht is the only guinea pig shelter in the south of the Netherlands. Kuufke totally depends on donations and the hard work of it's lovely volunteers. Over the last few years Kuufke has suffered a lot of bad luck. All of their computer equipment was stolen and the roof was blown off the shelter. We really think they deserve to have a bit of good luck.

They have a lovely website. They really do a good job showing us pigs at our best to help us find our forever home. Even if you don't speak Dutch, check out their sows, boars and neutered boars. They also have a blog where they post mail from the pigs that have found their forever home and a Facebook page with lots of pigtures.

There are 3 other reasons why you should vote for Kuufke.

1. Igor

Need we say more?

2. Sjeuf

Just like Igor, Sjeuf also found us through Kuufke. Even though we moved to the other side of the country, we still wanted a pig in our herd from Kuufke, just like uncle Igor. We like their southern swagger and we enjoy going to Kuufke. So with the help from Pepper and Jimmy, we went to Kuufke and asked for the sweetest beaux they had and they sent us on a speed date with Sjeuf. He came home with us and has been a gentlepig ever since.

3. Jimmy

Jimmy is maybe better known as agent Zeppelin, from the agent Zeppelin Mysteries. Jimmy has a very sweet and docile character. That might be because he ended up in t Kuufke almost right after his birth in July 2009 and they took really good care of him. Jimmy is currently very happy, living with (a rather lively) Pepper, who also happens to come from Kuufke.


We know Kuufke is not very well known amoung our readers since most of you are not from the Netherlands. But without Kuufke, our Igor, Sjeuf and Jimmy wouldn't have found their forever homes and their voice on this blog. So from the bottom of their big hearts, these boars ask you to give Kuufke your vote.

Related
Nominate a 2013 Calender Guinea Pig Shelter

Friday Video: Guinea Pig Speaks Out

We didn't know a guinea pig did the voice of human Ricky Gervais..



Have a nice Wheekend!

Meet Hazelnut Our Contest Winner

Oh my, how exciting! Peanut Butter is sooooo jealous he squealed the whole time I was having my photo shoot! By the way my name is spelt Hazelnut So, here is a pigture of me when I heard the happy news right after this morning's brekkie.





BTW I thought I might include a photo of me as the intrepid space explorer in case it is useful for the sci fi book



Whee think we have managed to spell your name right this time WOL whee is sorry for doing it wrong

Happy New Year 2013

Sassy in New York sent us this lovely New Year pigture and we felt that it should be appreciated by a wider audience. We told her that it might be one to consider for next year's wonderful calendar.

 

From the Piggyfriends Agents.

Pigs, Spies and Statistics

As the end of the year is coming closer, we decided to take a look at the statistics of our blog. Let's start with the pageviews.

On a typical day in december, we got between 200 and 500 pageviews. Before December, we had between 50 and 250 pageviews. As you can see, the traffic to our blog has been rising steadily, with drops when you all go on holiday, and rises in between the holidays. You can also see that December is a bit unusual. In 2012, on average, we had about 3,000 pageviews a month (in 2011 this was about 2,000, so hurray!). But not this December, where we had a whopping 8,000+ pageviews. Although we like to think we are pretty awesome, we suspect that this is mainly due to the increased attention from spammers (which is no fun, especially when you’re a pig..). We now delete quite a lot of spam on a daily basis. So take the rest of this post with a grain of salt. We like overviews but we cannot say for sure how reliable they are. If we suspect messy results because of the spam, we’ll add an *

Most Popular Posts

1. Friday Video: Wink (2,305 views)*
2. Internet memes: LOLpigz (1,989 views)
3. Friday Video: Mouse for Sale (1,043 views)
4. Who should we donate the calendar proceeds (912 views)
5. Friday Video: Talking Guinea Pig Babies (611 views)*
6. The Undercover Guinea Pigs Calendar (491 views)
7. Dealing with Bloat (477 views, from 2010)
8. A Surprise for us all (441 views)
9. Can we eat Chinese Leaf? (277 views, from 2011)
10. Guinygirlz DIY cage (231 views, from 2011)

So, what do we get from this? What we really liked was the response we got when it was time to vote for the calendar. We love it when the guinea pig community gets together to help shelters. Makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside. We can also see that you seem to like the Friday Video’s, so we'll keep that up (although I wouldn’t bet any money on the Wink Friday Video, since that one in particular got a lot of spam comments). What also surprised us, is the number of page views from the relatively old bloat-post. It is making us wonder if we should put up more health and DYI posts so that people can look up stuff.

Spies
As undercover pigs, we do like to know who the pigs are that are visiting our blog. Since us editor-piggies met on the GPDD, we already know we are quite an international bunch.

So how do you guys get here? As far as we can tell, you Google us, or type in the web adress directly in the browser or have our blog bookmarked. We also get a lot of traffic from Twitter and the Guinea Pig forum.

When visitors enter our blog because of their search terms, they typically do this with the following search terms:

1.    undercover guinea pigs (177x)
2.    funny guinea pigs (89x)
3.    funny guinea pigs (81x)
4.    FUNNY GUINEA PIGS (76x)
5.    guinea pig funny (47x)
6.    funny guinea pig pictures (36x)
7.    guinea pig hay rack ides (32x)
8.    sleeping guinea pigs (26x)
9.    guinea pig hay rack (24x)
10.    guinea pig bloat (20x)

Who knew? Google thinks we’re funny.

Boring stuff

Back in 2008 when we started our blog (well actually, restarted), Internet Explorer was by far the most popular browser among our visitors. In 2012, Firefox is on top of the list (36%). Followed by Internet Explorer (29%), Chrome (14%) and Safari (12%). Also, mobile use of the blog has risen (not that much, but compared to nothing just a short while ago, it is a lot more (4% is about 3,700 pageviews). You can also see that when you look at the operating system stats.

Even though Windows is still the most popular operating system. A huge chunk of it’s competition is taken by the iPhones and the Androids. Why is this interesting? Well, this way we know that when we put something on the blog, it would be nice if it works on smartphones too.

Personal favorites
Most of you visit this blog frequently and then read the most recent posts. We are really happy with these type of visits, but it also means that we cannot see which posts you liked most since those visits add to the general stats (don’t feel bad, we don’t mind ;-) ). Also, numbers don’t equal a giggle or an ‘awww’.

We love sleeping.. err blogposts

That is why we wanted to highlight our favorite posts. For us, it were the blogposts that featured sleeping piggies both the Sleep Research and the Olympigs Fifty Yard Nap.

So.. which blogposts were your favorite?

Friday Video: Starcraft

A starcraft guinea pig parody




Have a nice Wheekend!

Friday Video: 12 Days of Christmas

Yes. We know it is not a friday, but it is Christmas, and with those 12 days, there must be a friday in there somewhere.



Merry Pigmas!

p.s. If you haven't checked the blog today, be sure to scroll down and check the lovely pigtures from agent Schilling