A mere six months ago, I wrote a post when my Sitemeter count had nearly reached 1,000 visitors. Now, the count has nearly reached the next milestone, 2,000 visits.
As I wrote last time, 2,000 hits isn’t much; many of the more popular sites will see traffic like that in an hour or less. The always excellent Lifehacker ranks number 8 in Sitemeter’s list of Top Visited Sites. I looked up their stats and they receive an average of 735,803 visits in a day; that translates to 30,658 every hour. Wow. In a way I hope I can someday hit numbers like that, but in many other ways, I’m very happy with my meager 11 visit daily average.
The site has changed a little since then; I applied a different CSS theme — Upstart Blogger Minim with a few tweaks here & there, added some Google Adsense addy’s to the left column (made a whopping $1.54 so far!)… But essentially the site is what it’s always been, just a random collection of stuff that I find interesting and take the time to write about. And I just think it’s kinda fun that others find some of the same things interesting, are able to find my little thread of the World Wide Web, and stop over, even for a short visit.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with Sitemeter’s performance. I’ve also got Google Analytics working on the site. And while Google does an ok job, Sitemeter is much more accessible; ie… no multi-click plus password routine to get to the summary of information. Also, there often seems to be some disparity between the stats produced by the two, and I’m not sure who is right. So I look most often at Sitemeter and sometimes at Google, but try not to overanalyze the difference in the numbers.
Sometimes I wonder if I obsess with the site stats too much. I’ll check them daily or so, just to see where the inbound clicks are coming from, and to see where some of the readers are located. Not surprisingly, most of the visits are from locations within the US, and many others from Europe. Not many visits from non-English speaking countries; again, no surprise there. The more popular pages are a bit more surprising, at least to me. Most hits come from search engine traffic; Google seems to like my content and helps my site to have a relatively high pagerank on some keywords. Sitemeter doesn’t seem to have a stat page that shows the all-time page ranking for the site, just for the last 100 visits. From memory, the pages that seem to consistently get a lot of hits are as follows:
Be A Good Do-Bee — Romper Room
YouConvertIt.com
Grandfather To The SUV?
Stupid Computer Trick — VNC Echo
’09 Dodge Purple People Eater
The Virtual KVM
Hillbilly Horseshoes
Citroen 2CV Rat Rod
The post that probably sees the most traffic is The Dash 30fx; it’s linked from at least two different Mac-centric sites and gets a Google hit or two on occasion. There was a time when I thought I might put that old guy up for sale, but in truly rare computer hardware, older is better, so I think I’ll hang onto it for a while longer. Might be able to retire on that someday. Or at least use it to prop open the door to my shop.
Another one that seems to be a perennial favorite is It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere, the post about the ’54 Ford Delivery with the boat-topped camper trailer. (I saw that rig at the Automania show in Sioux Falls last year; this year’s show is coming up next week, so I’m hoping it’ll be back, and I’m also hoping that there will be some other notable cars or trucks there.) The photos of that thing ended up on Neatorama, and from there ended up in several different places, bringing in hits from all over. One of the problems is that since that one went up about this time last year, I changed web hosts, and somehow in the process of moving, the link to that page got changed, but all the other linking sites still have the old one. So visitors from those sites get a 404 error page, but I’ve modded that to include the proper links. Not sure how helpful that was, but it’s something.
So here’s to davintosh, another six months older, and with ever-increasing popularity. It may still be fly-over country of the World Wide Web, but I see a bit of an upward trend here!