Who are you?

Disclaimer: This post is narcissism at its finest, so if you don't like navel-gazing or other related activities, this one's not for you.

I probably spend too much time looking over the statistics for our blog: who visits us, where are they, how did they get here, etc. That sort of stuff fascinates me. I use both Google Analytics and Statcounter. Google has nicer graphs and better overall navigation, but I prefer Statcounter's drill-down tools for looking at individual visitors.

I enjoy playing detective to try to figure out who's reading our blog. I can usually tell from the location of the ISP. It makes sense that we get a lot of hits from Texas and Utah, where we have lived and have family. We also get a lot of visitors from Arizona, Idaho, and Massachusetts. Internationally, we're quite popular in Nigeria (yes, Dad, I can tell how often you check the blog). If the location isn't enough (and it can sometimes be deceiving, as ISP's can be a little free with the location they give), I can often use the site you used to get here to figure out who you are. For example, people who use the link on Matt and Debbie's blog to get to us are usually shared acquaintances. Occasionally we'll get a recurring visitor that I can't identify (who do I know in Arkansas?), but I can usually tell who people are. It is more difficult to identify individual visitors in high traffic areas like Texas and Utah.

Of course, if you don't visit the site itself, I can't track you. So the six other people subscribed to our RSS feed on Google Reader remain in relative anonymity.

The search strings that guide people here are pretty interesting too. Thanks to this post we have a strong corner on the "milk maid's elbow" market. We get quite a few people searching for "Magdalyn" which goes to show that her name isn't as obscurely spelled as we thought. We also get an inordinate amount of hits from people looking for my mom. I'm disappointed that our blog doesn't show up very high on searches for "Weber family", "Weber", or "Daniel Weber" (yes, I've googled myself - I am that self-centered). I guess that's the result of having a more or less mainstream surname. I was disabused of any and all notions of uniqueness long ago when a nurse accidentally pulled the file of a different patient with my exact same full name. However, if you search "Weber family blog" you'll find us.

Recently we've been getting a lot of undesirable traffic resulting from this post. All I have to say is that judging by the search strings used to get there, there are some really weird people out on the Internets. I apologize to those of you whose comments I deleted - we certainly didn't think that using that word would invite the kind of traffic that it did, and you were just following our lead. It was a good lesson to learn anyway, and we'll be more careful about the language we use in the future.

This has got me thinking about how we're balancing our need for privacy with our desire to stay in contact with family and friends. I really like the fact that family and friends with whom we don't keep in direct contact can look us up on the Internet and get a quick update of what's been going on with us. I really dislike the fact that people I don't know from Adam can do the same. While I think the majority of people who happen onto our site are harmless and generally uninterested in what we have up here (we have a fairly high bounce rate - meaning the majority of people who click onto the site leave almost immediately), there's no way for me to know if people are using the site for nefarious purposes. For now, I think the risk to our family is fairly low, so we'll keep things the way they are, but I can see a time in the future where we'll want to have a higher level of privacy - particularly when the kids' peers are old enough to use the Internet.

Finally, I'd like to invite those of you we know or have known who visit our site but otherwise don't have contact with us to drop us a line in the comments. I'm specifically talking about people who aren't already on the blog roll to the right. If you don't like commenting (it's okay, I prefer to lurk myself), then feel free to email us at dbweber at byu dot net. Chances are, if you're taking the time to keep up with our family, we're interested in keeping up with you as well.

And yes, the real purpose of this post was to strengthen our stranglehold on "milk maid's elbow".