Interesting Occurance

First of all I must preface this story with a comment on hit counters for web pages. The one I use was set to count unique visitors, and counted hits, not visitors. So needless to say I did not realize that this meant that my traffic figures were off by like a factor of 5....so if I got what I thought were 1000 users I was really getting 200. Needless to say I fixed the counter.

So I was going to casually never speak of this to anyone ever again. However something came up that's kinda interesting, and of course is to good a story to bury in my Internet shame. Over the last year my traffic has been steadily climbing and my highs (not my old highs) were around 330. Then as we got to the middle of the month my traffic which has been edging higher over the last 4-5 weeks by about 10-15 visits a day, jumped by about 10% to a high of 388, 399, 424, 528, 848, 1,808 and then 2,289. You can see the giant spike in the accompanying graphic. One hour got me 249 users, which was equal to the entire amount of visitors last Friday

The numbers made me think I had screwed something up again and of course sent me looking for a new hit counter, however Sitemeter.com has a section where I can look at where my traffic is coming from, and 50% to 70% was coming from a search for a picture I used on Thanksgiving Day 2005. The picture is shown below.

Apparently this image is appearing on the first page for google images when you search for images of Thanksgiving. So the traffic is all going to the archive page for November 2005. Not for my brilliant witty observations on the state of Round Lake but rather for a turkey!