I was just checking over our site statistics. We seem to have settled into a groove of about 250 to 300 unique visitors per day. Our readership continues to be disproportianately concentrated in the Eastern United States. However, as the map below indicates, five percent of our recent visitors seem to be coming to us from Pakistan.
I am curious about two things. First, although we have a lot of visitors to this site, we do not have very many sites that link to it. How are you — the T&S reading public — finding this site? Second, where exactly are you? Please post answers below. We’ll be sending the results of this scientific survey to Congress.
Um…not to burst the bubble nate, but I think that Gordon’s india trip probably accounts for the hits in that area.
personally…i log in via Philly, and UT, when I’m back in the neo-non-zion state.
Nate,
Technorati shows you have 19 inbound blogs and 34 inbound links, so you seem to be doing okay on links. The Mormon blogosphere is still pretty limited.
I’m doing my best to support the West Coast demographic. I can’t explain the predominance of the Eastern Time Zone. Maybe the Bush White House is covertly watching T&S to track emerging conservative social trends. Or maybe Supreme Court clerks are lurking, picking up clever arguments to slip into their bench briefs.
Lyle, I am not sure how often SiteMeter updates this map, but that bump is not from me. I noticed a small bump while I was in India, but it disappeared shortly after my return. Maybe I left a cookie on the computer and someone is visiting the site!
The high statistics for the East Coast may be misleading. Most stats programs log the IP address of visitors, and IP addresses for most dial-up Internet users rarely have any relation to the actual location of said user. For instance, most of AOL’s servers are in Virginia, which may explain the high East Coast numbers. I’m visiting from Southern Utah, and I most of the people I know who read this site are either in Mountain or Pacific time. I’m guessing that most of their traffic is being routed through non-West Coast hubs. Of course, this doesn’t explain the Pakistani contingent, but it may explain why Utahns aren’t registering as high as expected.
I’m in Minnesota and found T&S through LDS-PHIL. By this point, I no longer need a link to get me here. ;-)
Am in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Fairbanks, Alaska. Not enough of us here to make a glitch, I suppose. FYI, Alaska has its own time zone, between Pacific and Hawaii.
Actually, we don’t get that many visitors from AOL. I can’t get an embedded image to work in the comments, but some interesting tracking charts are here:
http://timesandseasons.org/archives/tracking2.4.bmp
http://timesandseasons.org/archives/tracking2.5.bmp
How are you getting geographic location? I wonder where I am showing up, for instance, since I am (unfortunately) using MSN on a DSL line at home and comcast at work.
As far as I can tell, Site Meter is getting information from people’s browsers.
Also, the charts provided are really not very rigorous — they only use a small portion of total data (I believe it’s the last 100 visitors). I think we can get more detailed information if we switch to a paying account at Site meter, which is unlikely in the near future. :)
I don’t think Site Meter (or any other stats program) can get location information from tracking users’ browsers alone. The location information has to come from an IP address, and (as Clark pointed out) most Internet service providers bounce traffic around quite a bit. I’ve seen people discuss this issue on several other sites and I’ve tried (unsuccessfully) to track location on a few sites I run, and the consensus seems to be that it’s pretty tough to pinpoint users by timezone. (P.S. – Have you thought about installing a stats program on your own server? There are several great, really comprehensive programs out there, like Webalizer or Awstats.)