Did You Realise???

As part of figuring out how all this blogging stuff works, I checked out one of the free counters mentioned in the blogspot help material. For no particular reason, I selected one called Statcounter. This may have been a mistake for me, mainly because it's now the first website I open when I log on and I love poring through the reports it provides - I'm such a nerd. It gives me a chart (a histogram, actually -- my language!) showing the number of pages uploaded for each of the last 7 days, the numbers of unique visitors and of returning visitors. I can see from what website they came to mine, which pages they looked at, where their servers are located -- see the map below for the overview. It even tells the IP number for the computer they were on (so this is how they catch the child porn perverts...). So, whilst I don't know your computer number, I can make some pretty good guesses about who are my most faithful readers (Hi, Rick; Hi, Doris) and who told me it was great, but they were on for all of 5 seconds -- yes, it tells me that too, Pat, not that you'll ever read this. It tells what search terms have brought people to the weblog (some poor soul searched on 'couture sewing'; makes me almost feel guilty for using that title). It also told me that I had a very interested reader in Manchester. As 2 of Bill's children live there I assumed it was them, but they looked blank when I asked. Further investigation revealed that apparently one of the servers used for blogspot is located there, so it was my own activity being recorded...the many times I publish and edit an entry until I can bear to leave it alone. Oh, well. The reports also show I have few readers. There could be quite a number of reasons for this, possibly (duh) because I've only told a handful of people about it, so I finally scratched together an email to my extended family and friends to let them know this web log is here. So those numbers are really gonna soar, right?