Who are you people? Part 2

About a month ago, I wrote a blog entry about the “hits” that my blog gets. At the time, I was just checking out my cluster map to see how many visitors a day I get. After some comments…I added both sitemeter and neocounter. Because I want to know who comes to this site. And who actually reads my ramblings. I mean, who are you people?

Neocounter is really cool because it tells you total visitors from each country. At first I had a city counter…but if I wanted to continue to use it after the trial, I’d have to pay for it. Ummm…the rivers of cash from Amazon and ads are in a drought…so, the free version is what I use. I’m always amused to see new countries added to the Neocounter. Just added Saudia Arabia today. I have actually had to look up one country: Montenegro.

Montenegro is a country on the Adriatic bordering Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Albania. See:
I have had visitors from 31 countries. Who are you people? You’ll notice that there are a lot of countries with just one visitor. That means they didn’t come back. Perhaps it was a mistake when they stumbled into my patch of the internet. The only international that has posted on my blog with any sort of regularity is Lorna from Socks and books – she is in Denmark. But what about the hits from Australia? Or The Netherlands? Or England? Who are you people?

Now, Sitemeter allows me to go to a whole new level of obsession with my blog statistics. I can see how many people are on my site at a certain time…how many hits per hour…the number of page views…how long they stayed…and where they came from. I can see if they jumped over here from another site. Or, what becomes endlessly fascinating are the Google searches that are done. Oh, wait. Let me clarify. Endlessly fascinating. To me.

There are some “normal” searches that yield hits to Sunshine and Lemonade: book searches – someone looking for previews of “Lover Enshrined” and “Brisingr.” Lots of people looking for reviews of “Body Drama.” Then there are recipe searches – for Irish Soda bread or chicken cordon bleu. And more recently, people have searched for “sick Japanese Maples” and “Japanese Maple Farms in Georgia.”

There are strange google searches. Like for poison spiders. Or four day old diaper. Why would someone do a search for that?! And I have had my first “porn” hit. They were searching…with a variation on the words “Katie Cooks.” Not exactly spelled the same way. Which makes me curious. If they were looking for “cooks”—why would they actually click on my blog. It’s *obviouisly* not what they wanted to find. But they looked anyway. Just in case. And that search has been done twice. I don’t really want to know who these people are.

Really…who are the rest of you? Come on, click on comments and say “hello.” Stop lurking. Blog lurking. Blurking. Stop it. You know you want to say “hi” or “hola.” Or whatever. Pretty please. Or I might have to find another stat counter. And obsess a little more.