Grit in the Gears

I am the grit in the gears, the missing bolt, I am the poker of sticks into spokes. I like to know how things work, but sometimes when I take them apart and rebuild them, I have a few pieces left over. I am a man, so I tend to leave reading the instructions until after it goes wrong. And like all men I have a comprehensive mental map of the world and never need to ask directions. I never get lost, only sometimes I'm late, or end up in the wrong place entirely. It's what we do.

Sunday, 3 January 2010

Site/visitor meters.

I have two, Site-meter, and activemeter. They didn't both start counting right at the beginning, but even accounting for that there's a big discrepancy between what they pick up.
Some people are completely invisible. I know they've been, and when, if they left a comment. But sometimes neither of the counters recorded a visitor at that time.
Now I'm not obsessive about it, honest...
The thing that interests me most, is a) referrers... Where did you come from, a sidebar link on somebody's blog? Google? where?
and b) Where in the world are you.
That's only approximate, of course, the info is where your isp's server is located.
Like this:

Grit in the Gears
By Details > Visit Detail
Visit 50,137

[<<] [>>]

Domain Name

(Unknown)

IP Address

xxxxxxxxx(I xx'd it to protect the innocent.)# (Frontier Communications)

ISP

Frontier Communications

Location

Continent	:	North America
Country	:	United States (Facts)
State	:	New York
City	:	Rochester
Lat/Long	:	43.286, -77.6843 (Map)

Language

English (U.S.)
en-us

Operating System

Linux UNIX

Browser

Firefox
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009090216 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.14

Javascript

version 1.5

Monitor

Resolution	:	1024 x 600
Color Depth	:	24 bits

Time of Visit

Jan 3 2010 11:49:46 pm

Last Page View

Jan 3 2010 11:50:39 pm

Visit Length

53 seconds

Page Views

Referring URL

http://www.blogger.com/home

Visit Entry Page

http://gritinthegears.blogspot.com/

Visit Exit Page

http://gritinthegear...NhCBcD1s3awhqM43L6dx

Out Click

You're a linux user? I'd never have guessed.

Somehow I thought you might have a shiny mac....
Then again, I bet hmmmmm......
Grit in the Gears
This Week's Visits and Page Views

Anyway, it having just ticked past midnight, and work at six in the morning, oh sadness, I'll just compare the two counters again, see what discrepancy they've amassed on an unusually busy page-hit day.
Sitemeter, 400 page views
Activemeter, 435 page views

Plus the uncounted invisibles...
So if anybody's got a better counter, I'd love to hear of it, G'night everybody....

50,000th visitor

The 50,000th visitor, as counted by Sitemeter, came along early today.
Something odd is happening though.
One post, with pictures of lighthouses, here has been getting an avalanche of hits all from the same google-image referrer, and all of the hits come from isps in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

I can't imagine why everybody in the German-speaking world is suddenly google image searching lighthouses, and then clicking on the link to my blog.
If any of you are reading this page... please tell me how you got here, and why, because I can't figure it out. Currently, that page has been accessed 357 times today, which is 357 times more than in all of last week.

Ahhh:-

Hinweis weiterleiten

Die von Ihnen besuchte Seite versucht, Sie an http://gritinthegears.blogspot.com/2007/06/pressure.html weiterzuleiten.

Falls Sie diese Seite nicht besuchen möchten, können Sie zur vorherigen zurückkehren.

Now, I never learned german, but I think it says (roughly) The site you were trying to visit refers (transfers?) you to.. gritinthegears etc. If that isn't what you want, you can return to the previous page. Looks like a glitch in Google.de's image search Nothing I've done, anyway.