I installed web-stats-package Mint two days ago, apparently in a bid to destroy my productivity. Mint is a bloggers’-eye-view of your web stats: that is, it doesn’t focus on what users are doing on your site so much as how they found you in the first place. Mint uses javascript to record data in real time, so you can refresh obsessively and find out, for example, that:
- Everything and everyone you mention by name will get googled, without exception. Mention the fried-mozzarella truck at the San Genarro festival by its brand name of “Mozzarepa”, and the inventor of Mozzarepa will read your post. The inventor of Mozzarepa will read this post about that post, too. It all gets read.
- This will happen all the time. Posts that you, the blogger, think of as old and buried in the mysterious past, will come up every day in targeted searches. Just 16 minutes ago, a post I wrote in 2001 about the magnificently surreal Paso Doble Ballroom in Levittown, PA pulled a reader. Dear God, I hope that reader isn’t the owner of the Paso Doble, or I’m going to wake up in an ice-packed bathtub missing a kidney, or something.
- My Great-Grandmother’s Grand Tour diary pulls way more traffic than I expected for the very reason that she mentions a lot of places and people by name. Unfortunately, the transcriber used “XXX” to indicate “illegible”, though, so that diary also pulls searches for “XXX Donkey.”