So, What Brings You Here – Website Analysis

Nice to have you reading my prose. My website is here to be read, so you’re scratching my itch, so to speak.

Often I ask, why does anyone care? Are you a Geoff Fox stalker… God, I hope not. Is my life so interesting? Probably not. Yet on any given day, well over one thousand pages are read on this site by not quite a thousand people.

This has never been mentioned on the air at my television station (though there does seem to be a link to this site from their site). How do people find it?

I have logs. They are immense, taking up megabyte of space every month. Looking through them can make a grown man twitch!

I often look at an overview page. In fact I have a number of overview pages I look at and each gives me a slightly different insight into what’s going on here.

The page attached to this site says 236,238 unique visitors have been here so far in 2005, looking at 1,572,912 pages. That is the most misleading set of stats I can post!

Because of the way my pages are set up, one can sometimes count as two. And then there are the pages read by robots, scouring the Internet for who knows what. Some are friendly, like the search engine crawlers. Others… well I have no clue what they’re doing, but they pull down pages and images and take them somewhere.

A more accurate reading comes from a company I can’t mention (or maybe I can. I’m not totally familiar with my contractual agreement with them). They say, this year, there have been 435,466 pages read.

That’s a more realistic number, because it excludes robots and the like. I consider that an impressive number, 1,258 per day, for a personal website. Whether it is or isn’t, just humor me.

Recently, I’ve added another service which looks at this website. Among the things it looks at are referrals, to find out where viewers are coming from.

It didn’t take long to see Google is my friend! Less than half my daily traffic comes to my home page! The rest go directly inside, because they’ve been sent here from elsewhere.

What intrigues me are the search requests that bring people here. Enter “Blue Angels Video” on Google and this is your second hit! People come every day to see my Blue Angels video&#185.

Stranger are the off-the-wall requests. Some was here looking for “John Mayer Marijuana,” “inappropriate commercials,” “Who is the Monopoly guy?,” “Darlene Love on David Letterman&#178,” “Todd Gross WHDH&#179.” When Elena Demenieva does well in a tennis tournament, people come looking for her pictures (I took some excellent shots at the Pilot Pen Tournament in New Haven).

My favorites always have to do with “Carrot Top shirtless.” It’s a long story, but that’s a subject that has been dealt with here.

Over time, as this site has amassed an archive, the number of search engine hits has increased. Maybe this is a good time to remind myself, be careful what you write about. It’s around forever.

Not only are some requests weird, they’re from everywhere. It’s not unusual to look at the plots and see people coming here from India, Thailand or Peru.

So there you go. Maybe you find reading ‘me’ interesting. Probably not as interesting as trying to figure ‘you’ out.

The following list is ‘live,’ meaning what you see is current – not something canned when I wrote this.

&#185 – I have added a better version of the Blue Angels video, but so much traffic goes to the old one, I can’t remove it.

&#178 – Every year, I wait for the show before Christmas when Darlene Love sings on the Letterman show. Do not miss it. Tape it if you must. I believe it will be next week.

&#179 – Poor Todd was fired after 20+ years at his station. I wrote about it.

2 thoughts on “So, What Brings You Here – Website Analysis”

  1. Geoff, I like to read your blog. I did find it thru the station link quite by accident but it’s one of those fun reads you don’t want to miss. I try to catch it daily. You provide insight into many topics that I would otherwise miss as a nurse. Like the mapstat thing. Very cool. Or your many interesting photos!! and stories that make you think… I’m not much of a newspaper fan, but blogs are usually fun…and yours is no exception. Keep writing. Your fans are reading.

    Evi

  2. I think I found you through the station site too. But I honestly can’t remember. My husband does call me a stalker, because I will say things like, “Geoff isn’t doing the weather tonight because he is in Vegas.” He always gives me “that” look. I don’t get to read blogs of many people that come into my living room every night so I think it is neat.

    With the arrival of our daughter this year I haven’t been keeping up with your blog as much, but I enjoy your writing. Your topics. And getting a glimpse into the life of the man who used to tell me when I would have no school.

    Thanks for letting me read.

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