A milestone of sorts

According to Sitemeter, this past Wednesday evening, around 7:20 pm, someone clicked into this blog from Ronkonkoma, New York -- say that with me now: Ron-kon-kom-a? Ron-kon-ko-ma? -- and became my 12,000th visitor.

That's a lot of people who've come by -- and it would be even better if more of them had stayed.... but I'm very grateful to those of you who do come by regularly. Thank you.

I haven't obsessed over my Sitemeter lately; I went through something of a phase, starting with this January post and ending with this early February post during which I analyzed, scrutinized, hypothesized, and anguished over Sitemeter statistics and referrals to the point where Empress Bee warned me to stop, lest I go blind. And I'm not starting up again, I promise.

But Sitemeter has just gone through a face-lift and Second Effort just crossed the 12,000 visitor barrier, so I thought I'd look again and see how people are arriving at this blog.

Sitemeter says that 76% of my page viewers are from the United States; that's up from 71% in February.

But you may have noticed the "Who Links to Me" button in my sidebar. I'm not sure where I stole borrowed the idea to install that from. I've borrowed a lot of promotional ideas from Skittles' Place over time, but I think this particular button idea came from Star8278.

Anyway, clicking on this "Who Links to Me" button leads, eventually, to a menu of links to this blog including "Alexa Traffic Details." I've seen Alexa boxes on a number of blogs I visit regularly -- and when I click to get the details for my blog I find this:

Secondeffort.blogspot.com users come from these countries:

United Kingdom 66.7%

Philippines 23.3%

United States 6.7%

Malaysia 3.3%

So, do 76% of my visitors come from the United States -- or 6.7%?

Perhaps it is best not to put too much stock into these figures?

Anyway, according to Sitemeter, my 12,000th visitor clicked on a Google image of the Jack Higgins cartoon I used to accompany this post from August 2006 about airport and courthouse security, at a time when I was thrilled to get even one comment to a post. (And thank you for it, Captain Picard.)

But the current number one traffic producer for my site, according to Sitemeter, is this post -- a You Tube video of the "Potter Puppet Pals." It's a cute video, but its available in lots of places. Why should people come here to look at it? All I can figure is that, as the publication date of the final installment in the Harry Potter series approaches, people are getting anxious to find out if it all ends happily.

Unfortunately, Ms. Rowling has not seen fit to take me into her confidence; I can provide no insight.

Maybe I'll become privy to that sort of cool inside information when I reach the 100,000 visitor mark.