January was a good month for “The Always Insightful Insights of Trent Hergenrader.”

Taking a look at the stats shows that the website set a record for the number of pages viewed and visits this month and is second in every other category (hits, files and KBytes) to the month of May when brother Troy had his twin girls and posted daily updates from the NICU. (My nieces, by the way, rock and are doing awesome.)

If you know anything about these stats, you know that they don’t tell you a whole hell of a lot. Fifteen different people checking from one location register as one site and one visit; one guy checking the site from fifteen different locations registers as a fifteen sites, fifteen visits. What I do know is that my usage has remained pretty constant and dropped a little because I’m no longer using a web database to track my submissions. [I keep the database on the portable drive for the sole reason that I know how to do more nifty stuff in Access than I do in PHP, so I can do cool stuff like automatically calculate how long stories have been out and have reports that tell me how many stories I've sent to certain markets, which markets are open, etc. A web-based system can also do this but it's beyond my programming capabilities, so I go with what I know.]

Point is, more people are coming to my site and that’s a good thing from a self-promotion standpoint. From what I can tell, some come for the pictures, others come for this blog, and quite a few check out the About Me page, as well as my writing, and what I have to say about my Clarion experience. So if you’re new to my site, Welcome!

The stats are fun to look at, but not nearly as fun as the search strings used to find this site. These are phrases people typed into search engines like Google or Yahoo! to come find me. I like how the most popular search for the month of January was “Jamie Trecker,” a soccer analyst I regularly and vehemently disagree with, coming in first with all of 6 searches. My name comes in second (!) with 4 searches. “Priapism” comes in third with 3 searches (don’t ask–it’s a long story,) and then it gets really random. Some of my favorites from January:

• underrepresented mexicans
• first wisconsinite to choose minnesota and phil kessel
• mick luckhurst: former nfl kicker had bigger balls in england
• online pokeher games
• somnophilia stories
• i hate the gre
• oregon coast wwii bunker

I’m quite certain that the folks who visited the site looking for the above left disappointed. Sorry about that.

Current Mood - Okay |
Currently Listening To - The Clash - “From Here to Eternity”