Commentary by Timothy Horrigan; June 14, 2008
Soon after I started up my site TimothyHorrigan.com, I put in Sitemeter bats on every page. These have been counting the number of hits since sometime in October 2004 and around 1:00am East Coast Time on January 13, 2009, the counter rolled over to 100,000!
This does not necessarily mean that 100,000 people have looked at my site. Some of these are repeats: at least 2,500 of the hits are my own. And counting page views is a very inexact art anyway: Sitemeter works by tallying how many times its image gets downloaded and/or its script gets fired up. (Normally both events will happen when someone views a page with the SiteMeter bat on it.) SiterMeter does try to filter out 'bots. A few 'bots do sneak through anyway— and more to the point quite a few real web surfers successfully manage to avoid downloading the images and firing up the scripts. The average number of pages viewed per visit is less than 2: the average visitor finds my page on a search engine (most often, Google Images) and looks at the one page they search engines gives him (or her.)
The log file entries for this hit were:
76.176.223.238 - - [12/Jan/2009:21:59:22 -0800] "GET /jenna.bush.wedding.html HTTP/1.1" 200 33558 "http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/images/jenna-bush.wedding-dress.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/jenna.bush.wedding.html&usg=__9I7cBTJ8KyeIQZKl-tFj6rE-jAg=&h=600&w=400&sz=42&hl=en&start=7&um=1&tbnid=oa3VtCv9p4X5YM:&tbnh=135&tbnw=90&prev=/images%3Fq%3DJenna%2BBush%2Bbride%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1T4GGLF_enUS274US274%26sa%3DN" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)" 76.176.223.238 - - [12/Jan/2009:21:59:22 -0800] "GET /images/jenna_henry.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 13147 "http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/jenna.bush.wedding.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)" 76.176.223.238 - - [12/Jan/2009:21:59:22 -0800] "GET /images/henparty.jenna.barbara.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 22177 "http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/jenna.bush.wedding.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)" 76.176.223.238 - - [12/Jan/2009:21:59:22 -0800] "GET /images/jenna.henry.bunting.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 8742 "http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/jenna.bush.wedding.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)" 76.176.223.238 - - [12/Jan/2009:21:59:22 -0800] "GET /images/bush.south-lawn.080509.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 31913 "http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/jenna.bush.wedding.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)" 76.176.223.238 - - [12/Jan/2009:21:59:23 -0800] "GET /images/jenna_hager_dancing.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 8089 "http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/jenna.bush.wedding.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)" 76.176.223.238 - - [12/Jan/2009:21:59:23 -0800] "GET /images/BuyABook88x31_np.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 1048 "http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/jenna.bush.wedding.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)" 76.176.223.238 - - [12/Jan/2009:21:59:23 -0800] "GET /images/1d_black_bw.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 4670 "http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/jenna.bush.wedding.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)"
My 100,000th visitor was from somewhere near San Diego and was referred by a Google Images search on the keywords "Jenna Bush Bride".
The URL "76.176.223.238" corresponds to "cpe-76-176-223-238.san.res.rr.com", which means the user is on Time Warner Cable. He or she was using Internet Explorer 7 and (probably) Windoze Vista. My visitor looked at just one page:
This is my second most popular page, right after TimothyHorrigan.com/bushtwins.html. This is a little frustrating at times because the people who are interested in my Bush Twins pages rarely if ever click on ads or even look at the rest of the site. It wasn't even easy to get my guests to even look at my other Bush Twins pages: just putting in a few blue underlined hyperlinks was not enough to clue people in that there were other pages to be looked at. And I doubt that my guests cared at all about the original political point of my page, which was that they were partying while many of their contemporaries were getting killed in their father's illegal war. My single busiest period was in mid-August 2007, when Jenna Bush announced her engagement to a former Karl Rove aide named Henry Chase Hager.
My Google Analytics data, which goes back to March 30, 2006, currently (as of January 15, 2009) says I have gotten approximately 53,000 page views and 90,000 page views.
See Also:
My Jenna Bush wedding page (as if it needs any more traffic)
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