A confession

See that little green bar graph in the top left corner?  I've been watching you.

Please don't get mad and leave.  It's not as creepy as you think.  It doesn't let me spy on you through your webcam as you sit at your computer in your PJs eating mini chocolate chips straight from the bag.  It doesn't even tell me exactly who you are (or if it does I'm not clever enough to figure it out).  Sometimes it tells me what city you're from, but often it misleads me because it approximates locations from partial IP addresses, which means it can be hundreds of miles off.  Mostly I just like to look at how many people stop by, how long they stay, and how they found us. (If someone follows a link from another site to our page, it shows up as a referral.)  So if someone in Iceland Googles a phrase I just happened to use on our blog and it leads him to our page, Sitemeter tells us we got a referral from Google.  Want to know which of my posts has reeled in the most Googlers?  The one in which I referenced Lady Heather.  Bunch of perverts. 

This past Sunday night I decided to check Sitemeter for the first time in a few weeks, and I discovered multiple hits on our site from Wayne, West Virginia.

"Hey Scott.  Someone in West Virginia has been going to the blog every day, several times a day.  They've even made us one of their Blogger favorites.  I can tell 'cause Blogger shows up as the referring site on their visits.  They just logged on again 5 minutes ago!  We have a new fan!"

I'm sitting at the computer smiling to myself and scrolling through the Sitemeter info when two things jump out at me:

A)  Our new fan happens to also be a Charter customer

B)  The cookie I'd set to tell Sitemeter to ignore my own visits to our blog had been disabled

My new fan?  Was me.

Oh yeah, and here's a post-nap photo of Owen since that's really why you're here :)