February 11^th, 2004

I guess I should start by stating that, as far as rants go, this is pretty minor.

Here's what happened: Since I switched over to my Web Hosting company's new statistics packages, I've been able to keep fairly close track of the number of visitors to my web site. The numbers started out at a level I thought was somewhat boggling: I was averaging 10 visitors a day. Now, that may not seem like a huge number for most websites, but if you consider that my website is something of an ego-fest full of my own writing and music (and, lately, these rants and other such nonsense), it is more than a little surprising that I could find ~300 people a month to come and take a look. Oh, and those people tended to look around; they didn't just hit the home page and quickly click Back.

Then, as the months progressed, I watched the daily average rise. Here are the stats up to December of last year:

Mar 2003 - 10
Apr 2003 - 12
May 2003 - 12
Jun 2003 - 12
Jul 2003 - 13
Aug 2003 - 16
Sep 2003 - 19
Oct 2003 - 18
Nov 2003 - 21
Dec 2003 - 22

So, as you can see, the number of people coming to this site has been increasing from about 300/month to 650/month. Well, yay and yippee, I really am thrilled to bits ... and they've been reading stories, downloading MP3s, looking at pictures of my renovations, and reading this page of rants.

And then, something somewhat surprising happened in January:

Jan 2004 - 66

Hmm ... over 2000 people came to my website in January, that's three times the month before. The reasons for this are because some hacker/cracker dude posted my MP3 folder as a link on a message board where people go to find links to free porn and music (the Internet is such a corrupt little cesspool in certain corners, isn't it?)

So, a few people hunted around and looked at other things, but primarily they downloaded the MP3s and my bandwidth usage was in danger of pissing off my Web Hosting company and eliciting a nasty email (or cut-off). But nothing bad happened, and soon my stats returned to something resembling their old values.

But this month, I would have expected something like 22 or 23 people a day (on average) coming and visiting my website. Well ... no, actually:

Feb 2004 - 16

So what's up with that? Why are my stats as low as the stats for August of last year? Did the sudden influx of visitors last month have an effect on the number of people this month? And if so ... how? Is it just a coincidence?

Hard to tell.

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