I recently installed a plug-in called FireStats, and it is really interesting to see all of the information that it gathers. It’s much better than the service provided by my hosting company. I thought I’d mention a few things that have surprised me. First up, I’ve got to give a shout out to Sweden. What’s up, Sweden! You apparently count for 15-20% of my daily traffic. 
You don’t say much, though. I’d love to get a comment from someone who reads this blog in Sweden. If not, that’s cool too - I appreciate your visits. The top 5 countries of origin for my visitors are the United States (33.07%), Japan (23.21%), Sweden (18.02% today), Canada (9.27%), and the United Kingdom (5.04%). I also get hits from South Korea, Croatia, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Cuba, Italy, Germany, and Indonesia. But they fluctuate a lot. Anyway, I’m tickled pink about it. The good thing is that as far as I can tell, FireStats does a pretty good job of rooting out (or at least marking) bots. So some of those stats might be real live people!
I’m not surprised that people hit my site after searching for dubious things. I get the typical weirdo pervy search results that mostly take people to posts about hot springs or whatnot - you are intelligent enough to figure that out. It’s the individual instances of really random stuff that make me scratch my head. For instance, who searches for “mmmmmmk” with exactly 6 m’s? You’ll be shocked to discover that I’m the number one result when you use 6 m’s. Not 5, not 7, but 6. I got a hit from Google from that search. What the heck? Ha ha ha. My severe Mac troubles have also brought visitors to my site. It’s weird to me that I’m the number one hit for the 10.4.10 update .pkg file and on the first page of results for the .dmg file. I also show up in searches for Toto Washlet Instructions. Fun! Ha ha ha.
I also get lots of hits from image searches. Lately, that has primarily been people searching for vision tests, the letter e (I know…odd), Snellen or Landolt charts, and eye exams. All of those kinds of images pull up this post, for which I seriously need to issue a public apology. I broke a cardinal rule of mine when I posted that because I had no access to my FTP space at the time. Therefore I hot-linked (shame) to images hosted by other sites, and I am now accidentally stealing bandwidth and traffic from them via image searches. To my knowledge, it’s the only time I’ve done that (though please point out other instances if you recall any). I had intended to fix it, but lost it in the mix. Now that I see so many people finding my site that way, though, I’m rather embarrassed by it. I hereby promise to update that post when I get my computer back. I’ll stick the relevant images on my own space and use my own bandwidth. Sorry, it’s a really blatant internet foul. Anyway, other image searches include yellow watermelon (page 2 result), てんじぶろっく, and 4 hits from a search for purikura - but I can’t duplicate the results, so I’ve no idea when that was. In the meantime, it’s really amusing to see how people stumble across my site.
