With other things on my mind in the past few months, I haven’t kept a real close eye on my Web site statistics.  Perusing them today reveals some interesting things, and one puzzle.

Visits to my site rose quickly last spring, to a high of about 5,500 unique visitors in April, and then dropped quickly to 3,900 in May.  This drop corresponded with a huge decrease in the amount of referral log spam that I was receiving.

Visits in June were about the same as in May, but then it spiked again in July:  5,800 unique visitors.  August and September were about the same, and October came in with a whopping 9,932 unique visitors.  November was down to 7,000, but that’s still way more than my average over the past two years.  And I don’t know where they’re coming from!  I still get a little bit of referral log spam, but nothing at all like what I was getting last spring.

Web browser traffic has been pretty steady over the months with Microsoft Internet Explorer usually right around 70 percent, Firefox in the 13 to 15 percent range, and a scattering of others including “Unknown” right around 10 percent.  That’s probably not an indication of the entire Internet, but rather just this one site.

I was surprised to see that “emotional vampires” has placed in the top 10 search terms since I posted this entry in August.  Unsurprisingly, I’m not the only person to have come up with the term.  Psychologist Albert J. Bernstein has a book, Emotional Vampires: Dealing with People Who Drain You Dry.  Looks interesting.  I haven’t read it.

Other notable search terms:

• People are still looking for nude pictures of Ham So-Won, and wondering what “foxtrot uniform charlie kilo” means.
• My monthly Random Notes archives contain a lot of words and as a result I get some odd hits from time to time.  One of the oddest recently is “email contact of fishermen captain’s and people working in ocean”.
• I don’t know why somebody was searching for “jim’s buggy parts,” but if you find a replacement for my left shoulder, please let me know.
• “mexican illegal alien catapult” has to be a joke.  Right?
• I suspect that whoever searched for “budgeting guncash” actually meant GnuCash, but it was amusing to wonder if he was selling guns or attempting to gain income at the point of a gun.
• To the person who asked, “How do I clean a smoker’s car?”  My advice is, “burn it.”

Okay, so the search terms haven’t been terribly funny lately.