2002-02-28 - 22:54
fun with sitemeter

So, I should really be working right now (someday I'm going to compile all my entries that start like that, and link to them all in one "best of procrastination" entry), but I'd like to take a moment to discuss the little counter at the bottom of this page, and what it tells me. Tonight, after fiddling with my HTML, I decided to take a peek at the statistics for this site. There are usually few surprises there, and I can generally go, "Oh, that aol.com visitor in that time zone is x, the reed.edu is y, who the hell is reading from Japan? well, whatever."

But I got the oddest results tonight, not just of locations, but of what pages people were looking at. There have been several people in the past couple weeks--unique hits, not the same person--going directly to various entries from my Japan trip without entering through the front page of the diary. Someone with their computer set to the "Russian Federation Zone 1" time zone went directly to what seems to be a completely random entry from January. Another visitor's entry page was the drag entry from early last semester--a visitor from Germany this time. I took a look at the time zone and domain results, and there was the expected spike in the Pacific time zone, but there were other blips all over the map.

I was so intrigued by all this that I finally signed up for the (cheapish) pay service at Sitemeter to get all the bonus things, like tracking the referring pages or internet searches that sent people to the site. Of course, this only applies to future visits, since I didn't have the fancy Java thingy before now. (Now I am tracking you... bwahahaha.)

So... Germany? Russia? Canada? New Zealand? What the heck? Anyone want to fill me in?

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