I don’t obsess over my referers, much. It’s interesting to see what pages people have visited, and where they have come from, but I don’t write the stuff on this site because I’m trying to make myself heard, or popular. It’s more of: “Here’s some information I’ve come across: if someone else is searching for it and I can help them, that’s all good!”
Having said that, I have had days in the last month or so where I have had over 400 page visits. Many of those are to the one post I wrote on Sudoku, ages ago, but they still keep coming. Even though I don’t actually provide much information in that post! I even had a day, a month ago, that had 690 referers, although a big chunk of them were actually some spider, as they were all DIRECT referers, and all seemed to be accessing weird URLs.
More recently, I’ve discovered the Gvisit page, and have been able to see my most recent visitors locations, on a Google Map, which is very cool. I’ve even thought of making a category link, a home page link, and so on. But that seems like it might be too much work.
Today, I noticed I only had 24 referers at around 2:30 (ACST: +0930), a time I usually number around 150. I thought, “Hey, there’s something weird going on here!”, and looked at the monthly view. 125 yesterday, and 174 the previous. Prior to that, each day had around 3-400 referers.
I’m not sure why my traffic has suddenly halved: my Google Page Rank is a fair 5/10 (Boing Boing has a Page Rank of 8, Blogsome 6)
My referrals tend to reflect loads of traffic for an older article I wrote on resetting NVRAM. It’s a decent, though general article but keeps me high in searches. Possibly the best traffic generator I’ve ever had was from the good folks at ecto putting a review of my blog up. My traffic has doubled! I know that when Adriaan gets a new review up that my stats will fall, but I’m enjoying the wave whilst I have it!
Thanks for the Gvisit link. I’m gonna give it a play.
4 hours, 7 minutes after the fact.
Hey, the ecto blog of the [week|month|whatever] was how I heard of your blog!
4 hours, 24 minutes after the fact.
Excellent!
Just tried the gVisit thing and put it in my sidebar ‘Geek!’ category. It can take an hour to update, but it’ll be fun for me to peek at once in awhile…
Also, thanks for the Google Talk with Adium article. I realise there’s a tutorial on the Google Talk site, but I saw and followed yours first.
Cheers!
4 hours, 44 minutes after the fact.
I’m actually running into some issues with connecting to Gtalk. It fails to connect when I first start Adium up, and then it suddenly works!
2 days, 4 hours after the fact.