So who's reading this thing, anyway?


Today, just for a laugh, I glanced at my "site stats" page, and to my amazement, I had 126 visitors yesterday. That shatters the previous record of 94 which was set...the day before yesterday. That, in turn, broke the record of 83 that was set last Monday. Now, usually I can predict the peaks and valleys of the blog by when I post. I usually get more hits in the 2 days after a post than I do when I don't. But, I haven't posted in a week. So where's all this coming from? I did some investigation, which was limited by the tools available to me, and found that the articles visited so far this month is far, far less than the 555 visitors I've supposedly had thus far in October. This means one of several things that I can think of:

A) There are some kind of "bots" or other automated internet thingies that cruise by my page for undetermined reasons.
or
2) I have tons of maniacal fans that visit me every day in dire anticipation of an update, see none, and go along their way, dejected and heartbroken.
or
III) My blog has been referenced by someone somewhere on the internet that has caused many new readers to come my way only to be utterly unimpressed with the titles of my articles, scoff, and click away without reading any of them.

As much as I'd like to believe #2 or III, it's more likely A, considering my blog has received one (1) comment in the past 3 or 4 months, which would mean 1 out of around 4000 visitors decided to say hello. One remote possibility is that about a week ago I posted the collection of articles about Peru to my MySpace blog and sent out a bulletin there. I have hundreds of friends in my list that received the bulletin, but if that had generated the hits, wouldn't they have clicked on an article or two? Weird huh? I don't know much about this stuff, but it's nice to fantasize that 100+ people might be reading these comments today, even if that's not likely the case.

Speaking of blog related statistical oddities:
I did a statistical analysis of hits to each and every article posted on this blog over the history of it's existence. That's how much of a geek I am, I come home from my job, where I do statistical analysis, and do more statistical analysis in my spare time. For fun. But I digress.
So, what I found was that the most popular article, in terms of hits, in the history of my blog is my Valentines Rant. For some reason, this article appeared at or near the top of the hit list through July, then dropped off drastically. Not coincidentally, June is the last month where the link for February would have been included in the month links section on the left column. Now, I didn't consider that post to be one of my best, funniest, or most interesting, but there it is. It could be because I posted a link to that article on the valentines rant of another blogger I know, who's fairly popular. I dunno. I also found that my non-photo posts have been viewed a total of 5852 times through the end of September. That's a real good portion of my actual hits hitting actual articles. I threw out the stats for hits on photos, because there's hundreds of photos up, and I was starting to get tired. But if you include those, then maybe all that stuff does add up. It's interesting to look at this stuff, but I have no idea what it means.