So it looks like I am getting a fair number of people coming around from the NaBloPoMo Randomizer. Having viewed many of the other blogs, it is clear that I am sort of out of the mainstream here with my geeky technobabble. So I thought I might write something less boring or more useful to the blogging community (or hopefully both) in a first post, and continue my other topic for those who are interested in a second post.

Today my topic is sitemeter. Sitemeter is how I know people are using the randomizer to get to me and not that I suddenly have a readership. I recommend it. It's free and it answers useful questions like, "does anyone care what I have to say?" by showing you who visits (just by generic info, so I don't really know who you are) and how long they stay around. For example, I know that this morning, I've gotten 4 randomizer hits, but no one chose to click beyond the first page. Maybe I need more alluring titles for old posts.

Sitemeter has a nice feature where you can block your own browser or your own IP address so that you don't show up in your own statistics. I stumbled across a funny sort-of bug (you know I couldn't stay off the topic that long) in the way they block you. I have it set up to block my IP address since I work out the house and am at home 95% of the time. One morning I was actually working out of a coffee shop and I pulled up the page without thinking about the fact that I would show up. No big deal, I could ignore that 1 random hit from myself.

The funny part was after I got back home. I check in every so often during the day to see if anyone has commented (they haven't). On the third or fourth visit of the day I pulled up my stats. I was astounded! Someone was visting the blog like every hour! They must be desperately visiting the blog in a vain hope that I might have posted something that they can read. I must quickly satisfy their hunger! So I posted, and checked back an hour or so later to see if they had visited again.

Looking at the stats I see yes, they had been back! Then I noticed something odd. The mystery visitor's referral page was one of the administrative pages on my blog, something that only I have access to. Further investigation revealed that indeed, the visitor could only be me. How was this possible given that I have myself blocked? Well, it turns out that once I had visited in the morning from an unblocked location, sitemeter must have sent me back a cookie. Then, when I visited later from home, rather than re-looking me up to see where I was visiting from, it just associated that same data with my browser so I appeared to be coming from the coffee shop even though I was at home.

I was disappointed that no one was obsessively checking my blog, but at least got to investigate and solve an interesting problem. To fix it, I just went to sitemeter and had them block my browser, in addition to IP address. I probably could have also just gone in and deleted the cookie. If someone else out there has experienced the same thing and was totally baffled, I hope this helps.