Monday, 6/17

Summer, where are ye?

Don't worry; I'm not gonna bore you whining about the weather. However, I did put the October-like temperatures (in June!!!!) of the weekend to good use, working on a bunch of stuff I've either been meaning to get to or need to get to. Some of that involved prepping a newspaper article for my upcoming “..And Put Up A Parking Lot” tour for the Marquette Regional History Center. Another involved working on and/or cleaning up a couple of blog sites with which I'm involved, including this one, and that's when I started thinking about a couple of things.

Now, as we all know, when I start to think, that can be a dangerous thing. Here's why. I've been writing these little...whatever you wanna call thems for 18 years now, since 2001. Over those 18 years, I wonder how many other countries we've touched? I know that when I write my trip blogs there's a little thing you can click on to tell you what countries readers are from (or, at least, in which countries the servers they're using to connect to you are located), but up until now I've never actually checked it for this little thing (or, at least, for the three years it's been hosted by Blogger).

So that's of the things I did this weekend.

Looking at the statistics for this site made me laugh, if only because of some of the, uhm, interesting places from which readers apparently come. The U.S., of course, popped up first, followed by the countries where we've gotten to know people over the years—France, or Belgium or Germany. But then it gets weird. Over the past year, India provided us a large chunk of readers, while there also seem to be hits from places like South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and Russia. Quite a few from Russia.

How people from those countries stumbled across a stupid blog from a dork (or how their spiders or search engines robots did so), I do not know. But apparently it happens, and apparently it happens quite a bit.

So here's the deal—if you read this regularly, or have even just stumbled on it by accident, and you're from a country outside of the U.S., please let me know. My e-mail address is always at the end of each post, and don't worry—I won't mention you in any way. I know almost everyone who reads this does so as a “lurker”, and I'm cool with that. I don't want to “unlurk” you. But I'm curious, so let me know, and we'll see how many people in how many different countries actually read this, or how many countries just have spiders or bots prowling the web.

It'll be interesting. Maybe, perhaps, almost as interesting as the perplexing blog entry that seems to have been the most popular I've written in three years. That story tomorrow.

(jim@wmqt.com)