The site’s 2nd busiest month ever! The busiest month came after this year’s Crazy88 which has been my most-hit post ever. Its fascinating to watch the ebb and flow of traffic – posts have a brief wave that peaks then lulls over 2-3 days, with occasional flare-ups for annual events or heavy linkage. The spikes and continuing traffic follow a general pattern:

• bike stuff especially with pics draws traffic from MTBR, RideAZ and friends’ site.   far and away the most popular
• Adventures and Rocky Point draw a similar pattern but less action
• kids posts get little traffic, unless there are photos, which get gobs of repeated hits from a few people – traffic tends to mirror the number of pics, which usually means its a more interesting post, or people have no appreciation 4 tha rittin wurd anymoor
• no one gives a crap about much anything else I have to say

There are plugins that show you live traffic stats, average time to clickthrough, where the incoming IP is located and much other geekery.   But I didn’t like how it looked on my sidebar, and it seemed rather a pain in the ass to css-enable it.

The search terms that land people on the site are absolutely faskinatin’.   Anything dirty, slangish, or vaguely sexual brings lots of random traffic.   People angry over DUI laws is a big draw – its amazing how many people search for the terms “DUI Laws Are Bullshit”.     If I wanted to artificially inflate my hit count I should make my titles like episodes of Law & Order or titles from letters to Penthouse.   Then there are the hits that make me fear the internet and want to take the blog private.   Phrases like “g@n@vi@v@ pr@tty littl@ pu$$y” or “L!ttle g!rl su(k and du(k” – both intentionally mispelled so as to avoid hits.   A female friend of mine who has developed a vaguely-stalker following on a message board kept coming up in the logs, and when i posted on the board what was happening, the hits stopped.   Eww.   Icky icky eww.