The 1000th* Visitor!!

Congratulations to someone in Washington DC! You are the 1000th visitor to my blog! You looked at three separate pages on my blog and stayed for a full 1 minute and 25 seconds. I don't know your name, but thank you for visiting my blog. I feel honored.

Creepy. How do I know this about you!?

You may have noticed on the left of the screen there are a few different boxes that show where people come from. One of them is called Sitemeter, and this particular web site tracks where each person comes from.

That's right. I know. Why do I do this? No particular reason - I just think its kind of interesting. It provides quite a bit of information:

• IP address
• city
• country
• time you came
• how many pages you visited
• what link you clicked on to get to my site
• how long you stayed for
• what link you clicked on to leave my blog
• a dot on a world map showing where you came from
  

Hm... listing it like that makes it sound a little creepy. It almost makes me want to stop tracking it. But I won't. Most of my visitors come from Bahrain, and then the United States. If you click on the Clustrmaps, you'll see that, in fact, I've had visitors from every single continent except Africa. In fact, someone from India returned to the blog for a while.

I recognize the locations that most of the locations. For instance, dots that come from Arkansas I know are my friends Amos and Meredith. Dots that come from the Ukraine is my friend Alicia. Or at least I'm assuming they are them.

Now, having this 1000th visitor does not mean that 1000 distinct people came to my blog. Rather it means that my blog was visited 1000 separate times. Assuming that the same people visit every time there are 1-3 new blog posts, it probably means that there have been 30 or so regular readers (and add 5-10 non-counted on facebook). I'll make a wild guess that

Another anomoly of the system: My blog has been visited 600 distinct times in Bahrain, but I would guess that about 20% of those times have been my wife - and only because I set my blog as her home page. So every time she opens up her computer, it goes to the blog, and the information gets counted in the system.

So there you have it. Statistics. I kind of like the numbers and information, so its neat to see it on the website, even if I don't actually use it for anything. 1000th visitor, if you feel brave enough, feel free to identify yourself. You will get no prize, though.

*This is not truly the 1000th distinct visitor. That person will remain forever unknown. Rather, this is the 1000th distinct visitor since I have started tracking visitors, around the end of December 2008. At this pace, if I had started keeping statistics when I first started blogging, I'd be closer to 3000 distinct visits by now.