The party’s over.

Back on June 23rd, I noticed a spike in visitors to my blog, from 53 on June 14^th,  to 3,915 the next day.  A week later it was still going on and I noticed the bulk of the visits were from Germany.  I had no idea whether I had become an overnight sensation in Germany, or if it was some anomaly caused by a computer virus. 

Well, yesterday I looked at my stats graph and saw that it had flatlined, which means that either the computer virus was cured or I fell out of grace with Germans overnight.  I suppose I’ll never know.

At least I had my 15 minutes of fame.

And the spike goes on…

In this post I was pondering the cause of an overnight 7,000% increase in page views  on my blog.

Well, the trend is continuing, with a new daytime high of 6,095 page views on the 24^th of this month.

So I did a little bit of digging into the stats and found out that pretty much all of these new found page views are coming from Germany.  53,969 of 56,008, or 96.4% of page views in the last month.

But it’s not one single person hell-bent on messing with my statistics.  If you look at the browsers being used, the most used one, Firefox, only accounts for 38% of the month’s page views.

That means that either somebody in Germany wrote a virus that makes random computers access my blog, or I’ve become an overnight sensation there.

So;

Wenn Sie eines der vielen Deutschen, die den Zugriff auf meinem Blog sind, lassen Sie mir einen Kommentar ließ mich wissen, über Ihren Besuch hier.  Wussten Sie hierher kommen absichtlich oder versehentlich? Suchten Sie sich etwas Besonderes und mein Blog auftauchte, und wenn ja, was haben Sie gesucht? Oder hat mein Blog nur Pop-up ohne Grund?  Wussten Sie dableiben und check it out, oder haben Sie schnell zu verlassen? Bitte hinterlassen Sie mir einen Kommentar, ich bin wirklich neugierig, was los ist. Vielen Dank.

Und auch, bitte vergib keine Grammatikfehler in meinem Deutsch, ich bin mit Google Translate, das zu schreiben.

Thanks

Something’s going wacko on my blog.

• 26,847 page views in the last month.
• 3,280 yesterday alone and
• 5,132 on June 17^th, for the busiest day ever.

Before this unexplained inundation hit on June 15^th, with 3,915 page views in one day, the highest number of hits I’d had in one month was 4,802 in October of 2012.  That’s an average of 155 a day, or 3% of June 17^th‘s high.

I would love to believe that I’ve suddenly become a blog sensation, but I have a hard time believing in an overnight 7,386% increase in readership.  And it can’t even be attributed to one single post, or even a limited few.  Another Facebook Find is my most highly viewed page, and has only had 4,678 views in all time.

Personally, I think Blogger Stats has gone haywire, or some schlub in Podunk, Nowhere has spent the last week just looking at all my posts over and over to mess with my stats.  Or s/he is really, really bored.

I dunno.  If this trend keeps up I’ll start to believe I gaining a big audience.  If the trend goes back to normal I’ll be left baffled at what anomaly caused the spike of 2013.

C’est la vie.

Fifty Grand

As you probably read in my post yesterday, I’ve been really busy this last week.  Which is why I missed this blog hitting the 50,000 pageview mark.

According to the stats, it happened sometime last Thursday.  It was a busy day for my blog, some 165 pages were viewed that day.

To all the people dropping by – Welcome.  Glad you took the time to see what I have going on here.  And a special Welcome Back to all the people who keep coming by to see what I’m up to.   I love reading the comments I get here, so keep them coming, or feel free to say something if you haven’t before.

Welcome all.  Can’t wait for the next 50,000.

Statistics

My writer friend, Lisa, wrote a post today about her blog stats, so I went and checked mine.

The top two viewed posts of mine are, in this order:

1. Walmartians, run for your life:…….….2,857 views.
2. Of Kaffeeklatches and JNCO jeans:….1,289 views.

Ever since I’ve started watching my stats, these two have been in the top 5 viewed posts for the All Time, Month, and Week categories, every time I checked.

This has always bothered me, because it means that my stats are a little skewed, and I’m not getting a good feel for who is coming by to see my stuff on a regular basis.  The popularity of those two posts is shown in the search keywords, people who are searching for JNCO Jeans and Walmartians and are not intentionally coming to visit my blog.

Now, I haven’t been losing a lot of sleep over it.  The truth is that I blog for the personal satisfaction I get from it, not to see how popular I can get.  I do truly appreciate and love the few regulars that drop by and comment, and I’m not completely immune to the compliments I get.  But if all I really wanted to do is rack up a huge list of followers I’d just get on Facebook, make a bunch of comments (good or bad) on Justin Beiber, Twilight, Harry Potter and World of Warcraft III and I’d have a list of 14 year-old “friends” a mile long. (Which is why my Facebook account remains dormant for months in a row).

So, all that leads up to this: For the first time ever, neither of those posts are on the top five viewed posts for this week!  Even better, 3 of the top 5 are from this month and JNCO jeans fell off the top five list for the whole last month.

Which means that even though the overall number of page views has dropped, more of them are for current posts and bound to be intentional.

Thank you.  I love your comments and trading comments, ideas and opinions with all of you.

Who are you, and what have you done with Max?

I’ve often said that if it weren’t for cars, I’d be a rich man.  I just bought my 56^th vehicle.  That’s not surprising, but my decision was.

You see, I’ve never been exactly practical in the purchase of my cars, and on Friday Mr. Gearhead headed me toward this 1977 Datsun (how many of you remember Datsun?) 280Z.  I went to look at it and fell in love with it.  It’s a 2 seater, rear wheel drive sports car, and it was in excellent shape body wise.  The engine sounded great, as long as you pinched off the gas line and until it ran out of gas.  It has a little flooding problem.  But with a price of $700,that would leave me about $800 to take care of the problem.

To be honest, if I could have driven it home that day I would have bought it, no doubt in my mind.  As it was I came this  || close to buying it.

But when I got home two things came to mind.  1. Rear wheel drive sports cars suck in the winter and 2. Rear wheel drive sports cars suck going up the 3½ miles of dirt road to the family property.  And those are two of the 3 reasons I was looking for another car.  The third was gas mileage, and even though it is a small car, sports cars don’t get as good mileage as a Ford Escort.

So Saturday I found this car on KSL.com, a 1998 Ford Escort LX.  It’s blue, it’s small, it’s bland but it’s in great running condition, the interior is all but perfect, the body isn’t perfect but it has very little rust that is all surface issues, it only cost 1,549.95 (I found a nickel in the trunk), AND it’s a Ford.  That means there are now 6 Fords parked at my house (and only one of them is a parts car).

So far (knock on wood) I’m pretty happy with it.  It will get good gas mileage, it starts right up and the clutch feels tight.  I already have the safety inspection for it (he had it done) and I drove it all the way out to the Great Salt Lake and back, and it drives great on the freeway.  It won’t be as fun to drive (on dry pavement) as the Datsun and it won’t get the looks the Datsun would have.  But, that’s what I have the big old Fords for.

Click on “more” if you want to see some stats on the cars I’ve owned.

Stats

I was just looking at the stats for my blog, I decided to check out where most of my traffic is referred from.  Other than my own URL (srossi.net) and Google, Writer’s blog (157) and Carmi’s blog (125) are the top two places people come to my blog from.  Thanks.

It still amazes me that for the day, week, month and all time my People of Wal*Mart post from over a year ago still ranks as the most viewed post.  That’s why you see me tag my posts with Wal-Mart and walmartians every now and again, just messin’ with the masses.

As for the countries that I get the most viewers from, the USA tops the list.  Throughout the categories (day, week, month, all time) Canada and Russia bounce back and forth between 2nd and 3rd place.

80 to 85% of my audience come to me from Windows, 10 to 15% from Macintosh and the rest seem to be different types of cell phone platforms, except for one page view from a Nintendo Wii.

45 to 50% are viewing my blog on Internet Explorer, 25 to 30% on Firefox and 10 to 15% use Safari.  I have had 33 page views (<1%) on something called Jakarta Commons-HttpClient, whatever that is.

So, there’s a little trivial statistics on my blog.