Interesting blip and why sitemeter is cool

I realize that this is too small for most of you to read but the bar graph at the top makes my point just fine in this scale.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have been much more interested in the sitemeter feature on my blog in the past few weeks. Most mornings I pop by the page and see if I can identify who's visited recently based on the ridiculous amount of information that sitemeter provides. I've also started checking what brought them to my page (ie. Googled keywords, blog aggregator, specific input of my address, etc.) and occasionally I check my overall traffic numbers. Sitemeter can plot this on a graph like the one you see above by hour, day, week, month, or year.

This morning I half-heartedly checked to see how I'd been doing the past 7 days. I was shocked to see that yesterday (November 20th) had massively more numbers than I ever recall seeing. I expanded my parameters to look at the past month and saw that this wasn't my imagination. As you can see above, the 20th (those without magnifying glasses will have to take my word for it) is by a factor of 3 higher than my average for the past 30 days! The division of color in the bar for each day denotes visits (yellow) and page views (orange). Apparently if Google identifies my blog as matching a search criteria, this qualifies as a page view even if the searching party doesn't actually visit my blog. Even so, the graph shows over 90 actual visits, where I'd never even hit 40 in the past. Sorry to cover my sitemeter addiction again, but I got excited and I hope that the numbers spike indicates that more people are reading.

If you are reading this and have no idea who I am....thanks for making my day by inflating my numbers (and ego).