One of the many downsides of being your own webmaster, in addition to being your own editor and proofreader (And believe you me, I should have fired at least two of those no-good slobs), is that you get to peek at your own analytics, a summary of the metadata fingerprints left by visitors to your website. Most of the information is pretty dry: The web browser and operating system being used, the country and city of origin, which pages are being looked at, and for how long.
I’ve had guests from fourteen different countries, although I suspect that only the ones from the USA and Canada have much interest in Lovewell history. Fittingly enough, one day after writing an item about the Crimean War, a visitor from Ukraine dropped by. Since then, I’ve logged several more visits from Ukraine and the Russian Federation. One day last week they represented the bulk of the page views. One other piece of data provided by the analytic snoops is the identity of the website your guest visited immediately before bouncing to yours. I scratched my head at the number of porn sites that led to mine, until it occurred to me that many of my guests may have been interested in bettering themselves in the art of loving well. And why shouldn’t they? I hope they took away something of value.
The photo page has been a great favorite, and even the music page, which was created on a whim, has proven surprisingly popular. The past few days, however, the frontrunner by a huge distance has been a certain blog entry from late September called “Dark and Bloody Tales.” Shows me that this blog would have a much wider following if I could only think of racier titles.
So, I’ll do that whenever I can. For instance, this brief entry was going to be titled “Too Much Information,” but it’s called something else now.