A Post About You

(NOTE: I'm blogging while I'm listening to some tunes, and my Firefox browser has a nifty feature that will insert what I'm listening to while I'm composing, in real time. Adds a nice "you are there" touch...let's see how it works out. So here goes....

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Now playing: Enya - Aldebaran
via FoxyTunes

I'm doing something with this post that I've wanted to do for a while. As you can see, over on the right I have some links to various meta-blog items like counters and RSS feeds. The counters also happen to be trackers that allow me to see who come to my blog, where they came from, and how they came to me. Don't worry; it doesn't show me specific people, or even individual Internet addresses that could be used to directly track back to you. It DOES, however, show roughly where you're coming from (e.g., Tulsa, OK, or Westminster, CO, or Santiago, Chile). It also shows if you came to me directly, like through a bookmark link, or if you found me via a search engine like Ask or Google or Yahoo. It also shows what search you ran that led you to me.

Now I'm sharing the wealth. Usually this blog is about me, what I think, what I like, and what's happening to me; this post is not about me, it's about you. So let's take a look at where you're coming from and what brings you here.

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Now playing: Hooverphonic - Inhaler
via FoxyTunes

First, the basics. I've had 2,604 hits in the past 12 months. That's 217 hits a month, or just over 7 hits a day. Not bad...not Amazon.com or eBay numbers, but not too shabby for a plain ol' blog that doesn't really do much to advertise itself. (I mean, seriously, my regular readers are pretty much all folks who know me personally, so this isn't really a shocking thing.) My more recent averages indicate that I'm likely to hit around 250 visits a month, about 8 a day, so it's slowly climbing. Perhaps by the time I'm ready to retire I'll have enough hits that I might be able to sell some ads. It's also pretty obvious when I've been blogging more frequently, as the visitor numbers go up pretty sharply. Nothing brings in fresh eyeballs like fresh content.

So some people-specific visits I'm fairly sure about. Chong still reads me regularly...at least, someone who visits from the same address block in San Diego does, so I figure that's him. Someone visits from the atlasok.com range out of Owasso/Oologah...I wonder if that's my long-time reader Carolyn (I sure hope it is, because that one stumps me). My mom peeks in from time to time, and my old pal and former coworker Dion has become a regular reader from his new place over at Health Inventures. Heidi checks the blog regularly, as you might imagine. My cousin Scott also looks in every one in a while, as does my old friend/coworker and fellow Sooner fan Betsy. Beyond that, I'm just guessing, but there are some interesting trends.

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Now playing: Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun
via FoxyTunes

For example, it's easy to discover when someone is hunting for me; I regularly see searches for "chris mallow blog" or "chris mallow daily okie" or "christopher mallow colorado" or something like that. These come from various places so I wonder who these folks are (by the way, if you ARE looking for me, and I'm the Chris Mallow you were hoping to find, PLEASE leave a comment or drop a line). Old high school friends? College buddies? People who want to know why I'm not dead yet? Who knows? It is kind of cool (and sometimes weird), though, to see these people looking for me...makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to know someone somewhere thinks about me enough to Google me.

I also get fairly regular visits from folks who find me via BlogOklahoma. I did join that ring to try to get more traffic from folks I'd want to see the blog, and so far it does seem to bring a little more traffic. Not a huge amount, but I didn't ONLY do it to get more traffic...I love the nifty Oklahoma logo that now gets to adorn my blog. (Yes, you long-time readers know well my Okie pride...)

Then there are the topic-specific searches that trip on some esoteric bit of content on my site. For example, I've written posts about such diverse subjects as why folks generally don't like the police, political caucuses vs. primaries, Horatio G. Spafford, how increasing salaries are ruining sports, cars sold with California lien sale paperwork, and sayings I remember from my younger days. All of these get pulled into the dragnet, so to speak; it's amazing how something I wrote a few years ago still regularly attracts visitors to my blog. The magic of the Internet, I guess. But one of the most frequent and regular searches is "What's the first thing you know riddle" or just "What's the first thing you know?", which always leads to one of my all-time favorite posts.

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Now playing: Lindsey Buckingham - Holiday Road
via FoxyTunes

There are so many things that trip. The Internet is an international realm, and that shows in the regular numbers of international visits I get. I've had visits from Australia, South Africa, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Canada, India, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Russia, China, Egypt...just about every land mass except Antarctica. I wonder what my junk looks like to those people. (It's probably weird enough to Americans who don't know me...)

Also interesting are my numbers for folks who pull my RSS feed. These are a lot more ambiguous than the numbers for the straight-up visits; RSS readers don't typically register much more than their name and type, and Google Reader and My Yahoo don't register anything at all other than that they're Google or Yahoo. But that's not the interesting part; the number is actually CLIMBING! So there are folks out there who care enough about my feed to pull it, and those people are increasing in number. When I first set up the feed, I got 1-2 for a few weeks, then I was pretty steady at 3-4 separate readers pulling a day. That number has really jumped over the past several months and it's now a pretty steady 7-9. I don't know who those people are, but they obviously have excellent taste, technical savvy, and they will be rewarded on Judgment Day.

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Now playing: Gravity Kills - Goodbye [Demo Version]
via FoxyTunes

(Ah...nothing like a little Gravity Kills. I'm not a huge hard rock fan but those guys really do it the way I like it.)

So that's pretty much it for the stats for now, just a quick-and-dirty little summary for you. I'll keep an eye on these numbers. The real key is to watch for ads; you know I've made the big time when I get real ads on my site. :-) Maybe I'll start looking for sponsorships.

Yeah, right.

So let's take it home with...

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Now playing: Squeeze - Black Coffee In Bed
via FoxyTunes

Thanks for reading along.