Exactly one month ago I installed one of these free web traffic monitoring gizmos on EGAD. What can I say, even I take some minimal pride in my work, and I was curious to know a little bit about who (if anyone) was reading.
Since I'm a fan of public data releases, you're all welcome to take a look at the stats here, or by clicking on the little multicolored box under "About the Author" in the sidebar. The information it collects is pretty general, but some interesting nuggets can be discerned nonetheless.
Cutting to the chase, it would appear that I do have something of a readership, although I don't yet need any toes to tally you up. At an average of 16 visits per day, less the 60% that come in from search engines, there's about seven of you, plus a handful of occasionals. Thanks for sticking around.
Overall the traffic here at EGAD is pretty spikey; I've had as few as two and as many as 21 visitors in a day. The surges don't fall on any particular day of the week, and if there's a pattern to be found, it's that I tend to get more visitors after I've posted two or more days in a row. Go figure.
40% of you come from the central time zone in the US, and another 20% from the eastern zone (but a chunk of that is probably my sister obsessively checking for updates to make sure I'm still alive ... hi, sis!). I don't know what to make of the almost 20% coming from Israeli/Eastern European time. Almost 80% use some form of Windows, which is a cryin' shame. But with barely 60% using Internet Explorer, I suppose there's hope.
Like I said, the referral statistics indicate that around 60% of the visitors here got here from a search engine, the vast majority of those from Google. Some small number of those are actually the regulars, since why else would you search for Milligan+EGAD? But I browsed through and noticed a few other categories as well:
Fully a fifth of the searchers are looking for information about Jerusalem or the Old City. Another, partially overlapping, fifth searched for a map of some kind (lower Manhattan gets a noticable number of hits, for instance).
About 5% were looking for information about the salinity or other physical properties of the Red Sea. Roughly the same number as were looking for fables about bugs. I'm not sure which of those is odder.
What takes the cake, though, is that almost 10% of the search engine visitors were looking for, and I quote, "signs of the apocalypse." Sigh.
I'll introduce myself, appropriately enough, on an entry entitled "Statistics Project." I'm a statistician at the University of Minnesota. I ran into your blog at the beginning of January and have been a regular reader (lurker?) ever since.
Good writing, interesting viewpoints -- what else can I ask for? I'll think of something.