Keeping track

I wasn't able to login on Friday and the internet was down when I returned to London, so this is the post that I intended for Friday. I'll save the other one for a future date. And, I'll recap the trip tomorrow. I need to time to decompress. With no further ado:

So I put a counter on the blog awhile ago. It helps me keep track of how many people are checking the site which is really for nothing more than ego gratification when it comes down to it. But there's one feature that I did not expect and that's that I can see from whence my readers came. So, for example, a good number of people come directly to my page - it's bookmarked on their browser. Others, however, find the site through more random means. You can click "next blog" at the top right corner of every blogspot blog, for example, and you'll find all sorts of random shite. I wasted precious hours doing this once; here's a brief recap of what I found:

- Family contact sites: Marge and Homer had a baby boy (Bartholomew), see the pics, yada yada. These types of sites aren't usually well written or even that interesting, at least not to the general public. They have no intention to entertain, merely to provide information to their relatives who live far away. I have no problem with these sites.

- Business contact sites: This one surprised me. There are a number of blogs that are quite literally small businesses that provide information about their companies - contact, location, etc. These blogs are truly obnoxious because they never post anything really useful, they just repost the same info on a routine basis so that google will continue to spider that information and they'll be searchable.

- School sites: These fall into the useful, but totally irrelevant to me category. Usually it's Mrs. Smith's 9th grade geography class or something of that nature. I'm sure the kids get a kick out of it, but it's obviously for a small audience (pun intended). My favorite, however, was the one about dentistry. I think it was for a dental assistant training course. Lots of big words involving variations of "perio". Good times.

- Edgy for the sake of edginess sites: These sites fall into the category of the totally bizarre. You'll have someone out there who must be truly weird (or weirder than I) who actually thinks it's a good idea to post something like this on a regular basis:

"Mothership longs for respite to planet Xolar. Extermination rats feel creepy in dark puddles of oily resin. Hail mindless master bowing forth from lower possums breath. Victory at last."

(And yeah, I made that one up myself. I'm the f*cking man, yo.)

- And finally, sites like nobcentral that intend to inform and entertain at the same time. These sites are universally hit or miss, but you can find good ones. I have a couple links on the side panel that are worth looking at if you have the time and the penchant.

Anyway, back to the original point, which was other ways people find the site. Mostly, people find it through word of mouth. After that grows a bit, then you see some of the random encounters - people that used the "next blog" button and happened to find something they like. There's also the link factor - this site is linked to others and vice versa which inevitably spreads the word. But, my favorite above all else is the search engine. People type in truly disturbing things into search engines and for some reason, my site comes up more often than not. For example, recently, someone typed this into google and it led them to nobcentral:

"essays on how yo protect you sex partner from aids"

and more recently,

"roses smell like poo poo".

In the past, I have seen a variety of different terms, but the one that truly was the most entertaining was the person that did a yahoo search with these terms:

"How to stop your man from belching and farting."

I'm sorry ma'am, but I don't think you'll find any help with that one here.