Bafflement

I'm a total sucker for stats tracking on my web sites. This is not news. I use FeedBurner's stat tracking and Google Analytics both, and they're good for different things.

Mostly my stats tracking doesn't tell me anything I couldn't guess on my own. Most of my readers live in the greater Washington DC metro area, and my guess is that most of you are people I know in real life. This is cool. That's really why I started blogging in the first place, to help keep up with folks I knew but didn't necessarily see every week.

I get occasional hits through someone's webmail, probably because I have a link to this blog in my email signature, and I post occasionally to the Historic Knit and H-Needlework lists. Likewise I get a smattering of hits every week via Ravelry. This too is cool. I wouldn't put the link there if I didn't want people to click through and visit.

There are also the random websearch hits -- the various permutations on 'bats + knitting,' the image search hits that land on Pretty Things (seriously, it's my best visited post. Maybe I should shut up and link to museum collections more often), and the inexplicable combination of 'belfy cheating' for which I seem to be Google's top link. (I know what post they're hitting -- it was from this spring, and was about cooking. What I don't know is why anyone would pick those two terms in a single search). These also are cool, especially when they come from distant countries (someone in Lithuania visited my blog? Awesome!).

None of these readers tend to land on my site for very long. Coupla' minutes at time, usually. However long it takes to read the day's post.

So I am curious as to why I've gotten direct hits this week via three blogs I don't normally visit (indeed, one of which I'd never heard of). I can't find out (or at least haven't easily been able to find out) where the voyage to chez Nora started (did one of them link to me? I can't find a link if they did). I'm sorta curious about all of them, though I am most baffled about the hit that came through a lefty-feministy-politico blog. Partly because I'm not that kind of blogger myself, I just can't quite figure how, or why, someone would get here from there. According to Google Analytics, whoever it was spent a good long time browsing here, too, something like half an hour, multiple pages.

So if you're still hanging around, mystery guests, drop me a note and tell me how you got here. I promise I don't bite much.

Just don't move firewood. It's not cool.