Watching You, Watching Us

You may not have noticed it, but about two weeks ago I added a visit counter to the sidebar on the blog (you can see it below, it's the number highlighted in green). I think all bloggers have moments of doubt when they wonder whether anyone is in fact reading their productions, and alas, we are no different. So now we can keep track of how many visitors we've had, beginning in mid-July (313 as of this moment!).

What I had not anticipated was that the website that let us put up a free visit counter would also provide (still for free) a significant mountain of data about all of you, our readers. In other words, we know when you refresh the blog every ten minutes because you don't want to be working. Seriously, though, in the interest of fairness, curiosity, and sheer voyeurism, I thought I'd share some noteworthy statistics that have appeared in the last few weeks about you:

• You know us. The vast majority of "entries" to our blog come with no link, so you know our url, and you use it.
• Eighty of you have visited us for the first time, though this number is by computer. So those of you who check at work and home count twice. But that still means we probably have more than fifty readers, which is pretty sweet. And that doesn't include those of you who read the blog through Google Reader or some other aggregator and don't click through to the actual blog.
  
• For the most part, the location of our visitors makes complete sense to us: an awful lot at our university, and then places where our families live. Maryland, New York, and Indiana top the rankings for most visits by state.
  
• On the other hand, we apparently have made it into Blogger's "random blog" list, because we've also gotten hits from the UK, Germany, Norway, France, Egypt, Spain, Sweden, Peru, and Brazil.
• And, those of you who got here by way of searching (and this is only about 10 out of the 300+) found us mostly by searching "Snugglesaurus." People have also found us by looking for variations of things about peanuts. Go figure.
  
• When you leave, you go look at our photos. Or you go somewhere completely different.
  
• A majority of you use Firefox, and have pretty high-resolution screens. It took me a while to figure out why the counter would even record that information, but then I realized that a business designing a website would need to maximize the site's appearance for how people interfaced with it. But it's useless to us.
• I can't possibly believe that their "visit length" metric works properly. It thinks that 47% of you have spent more than an hour on an individual visit. Which, in all seriousness, I find a bit unbelievable.
• The counter obviously doesn't compute this as a metric, but we're very educationally oriented. A large majority of our hits come from ISPs at colleges and universities. Which means that you're not working on your dissertation right now, are you? (Of course, neither am I!)

So there you have it. In a nutshell, we're on to you. But we hope you keep reading. And please feel free to comment whenever the spirit moves you, because we're also happy to make this a conversation.