A milestone for this little blog...

I reached my 10, 000th visitor the other day!! I might have missed it, except it was my own sweet husband checking out my newest post the other night. Technically, this is 10,000 visitors since I set up my sitemeter. But the blog has been up since February 12, 2005, with 234 posts, one deployment and four relocations in that time.

I know that some of my readers have their own blogs, and some even have a sitemeter, or counter. I am always checking my sitemeter records. Maybe I should have been a statistician, because I love charts and graphs and trends and all that. Just by clicking on the counter on my sidebar, I can see the last 100 visitors to the blog by location (either a list, or a world map with little pin points), by referral (where did they click in from, sometimes it is from a google search for something like 'okinawa housing' or 'crochet travel tic tac toe'), by outclicks (if they followed a link from my page to somewhere else), but not by name. Yes, there all sorts of ooey-gooey details like latitude and longitude, browser, IP address, even how long they spend on the site, but no name. So I have records of visitors in towns, in NC, for instance, where I didn't even know I knew people. Confession - sometimes I use Google maps to find the town name that appears and see if it's close to anything familiar. Someone I know checks the blog from work and her connection gets routed through Colorado. I know this now.
Since we have moved overseas, and I am now listed as a 'local blog' on okinawahai.com, I am getting more traffic on the blog and from all sorts of places. Since my free account with sitemeter only lets me see the last 100 visitors' details, and I am averaging about 34 visits a day, I've only got three days worth of records. But in the last three days I have managed a wider spread of visitors than usual - Canada, Israel, Russia and the Philippines in addition to regulars from the southeast to New England, some new regulars from California and throughout the midwest.
So this is what I see when I go to sitemeter from the link on my sidebar. At the site, on the actual map, you can hover over each pinpoint and it tells the location, city and state, or city and country, and click the pinpoint for even more details. Anytime you're interested, you, too, can click on the counter and see all of this. And if you happen to figure out which record is yours, please let me know if it shows up as another town I wouldn't recognize, so I can stop guessing and wondering!