A Grand Collection

of crap.

HannahC, MaxieC, and The Mrs. all got flu shots today. HannieC then barfed and spent the rest of the day whining about her arm hurting until she finally dropped off to sleep around 7pm, which is a good 3-4 hours earlier than usual. She had also gotten up a couple hours early today, so maybe that wasn't all the flu shot.

The Mrs. went to bed quite early as well, as she has "had a touch of something" for a couple days now. I, being the hardy worker that I am, will likely come down with whatever it is just in time to be sick during the weekend.

Check this out (click the picture to make it bigger if you can't read it):


That's a snippet of the output from Google Analytics that tells me from where people are getting to my blog. My number one referrer is the private fambly website. Statcounter tells me it's mostly referrals from the fambly site of The Mrs. and not from my fambly. The, we get "direct," which mean someone has it bookmarked or typed the url in by hand. #3 and #4 are surprising. I get a lot of people searching for my blog. I dunno why. I'm guessing these are people at work who heard through the grapevine that I had a blog, and then went and searched me. But to have over 200 hits due to people searching for me in a 4wk period is odd.

#5 and #10 are people hitting the "next blog" button, with #5 being people who hit the button on an "old blogger" page and #10 being people who hit the button on a "new, formerly beta, blogger" page. [Update: I've also learned that these hits can also be referrals from my profile page.] [Update#2: Actually, as it turns out, these are not at all hits from "next blog", but are all hits from my profile. I switched from old to new near December, so my profile hits switched from old to new then, too.]

#6 - #9 are referrals from the links placed on the blogs of my blogroll associates. I looked at this and said to myself, "Self, that's strange. No hits from your blog-of-the-week Cavagnaro Blogger." So I investigated. That little bastard never linked back to me. I hereby revoke the title of blog-of-the-week from CB, as Cavitation is a completely graceless and ungrateful freeloader.

The "$/Visits" column is bogus. That's only useful if clicking certain things on your website earns you specific dollars. I don't have anything like that. My advertising earnings are calculated through some bizarre secret formula that makes every click worth a different amount, if it's worth anything at all. Like, if someone clicks on an ad more than once, the second click is usually worthless. The "G1/Visit" column tries to report how many ad clicks I got from each referring site, but it doesn't really work all that well. You can see, though, how The JohnnyB and CJ's Blah are neck and neck with number of referrals, but CJ's readers are generating no revenue whereas JohnnyB's are.

This is why I have scaled back my self-promotions on CJ's Blah and have focused more on other sites. This really tells me exactly whose sites I should comment-blog on with self-interested links back to my own posts, and whose sites I can just leave regular snark on.

Maybe I'll go comment-bomb Cavitation's blog and see if I can generate some referrals.