Because Dan said so…

So I only comparatively recently discovered that wordpress has a “blog stats” page, which allows me to see a variety of things about my blog. Not just how many times my blog has been visited by different people, but lots of other interesting information about it as well. So I can see where people found my blog by searching online, or where they clicked to my blog from if they were on some other webpage and clicked a link to get to here. I can see what posts have been read more than others, and all sorts of fun stuff like that.

A logical question that any sane person might ask is, why is this interesting information? Well, it’s interesting because I was a little surprised at how many people come and visit my site. The counter is clever enough not to count multiple hits from the same person on the same visit. In fact, it seems to be clever enough that if you quit your browser and open it again, it won’t count that as a new visit, so I guess it’s tracking things by IP or something. Maybe it will allow one visit per day to count, or something like that.

The interesting thing is that my site gets hits from random people, in addition to the friends whom I would expect to be reading it. And a whole lot of these are still people reading about the tetanus shot reaction I had back in August. That post has had about ten times as many reads as any other post on my blog and it seems like a couple of people find my blog every day by searching for tetanus shot reactions. I’m still near the top of google’s hits if you type in “flu reaction tetanus shot” or some other permutations thereof. I’m not sure how the google search engine works, or why I ended up so near the top, but I did. My favorite thing about that whole tetanus shot business is that the blog entry on that ends with comment about how I’m contemplating what my character concept should be for JP’s Amber game. So Infinite Amber is getting lots of publicity as well, although it’s probably with people who haven’t the faintest idea what Amber is, or even what roleplaying is. Still, it amuses me a lot.

But it seems like quite a few people are getting to my site from my friends’ blogs, which I would expect. Some people are getting to it by doing image searches for types of fish, as far as I can tell. That seems to bring up stuff from my Eleutherea Journal entries, I guess. Anyway, maybe I can’t really imagine that the Eleuthera journal is of interest to anyone who doesn’t know me. But what do I know. Much the same goes for anyone who looks at the ‘crime scene’ photo of my seizure from last winter. I guess they were looking for information on seizures or something? Clearly they will have learned that Ernie’s involvement should not be overlooked (click here for the picture).

Anyway, I don’t know if you can do this kind of tracking with wordpress if you’re not hosted by them, but it’s well worth checking out if you can. And if not, there are a number of free services that do a smiliar kind of thing. Maria has a link to one that she uses on her blah-g (since she’s still in the dark ages using blogger rather than being with the cool kids using wordpress).

Thanksgiving report and pictures to come.