MINEstrels

Hitslink - for many it's a tool, the way we see how many people have visited us recently. For those of us that copy others' introductory paragraphs, it's a dark insight into the minds of our visitors. A terrifying visage of the world around us.

Anyway, Moesring pretty much only uses Hitslink for one single purpose these days - and it isn't actually for tracking recent blog visitors. More on that in a moment. Here's something unexpected that Moesring did notice though.

Here are three recent Hitslink items. It should give you a fairly good idea of the sort of things that have been cluttering Moesring's Hitslink. (The picture has been very zealously cropped to reduce blank space.)

Since the bottom search is truncated- and also, not everyone is a most awesomely polyglot (although one person definitely is ) - they are searching for a Turkish dating site, a Bulgarian dating site and an "uncommom dating site in the U.S."

Moesring is embarrassed to admit that when he saw a Nigerian specifically looking for a dating site catering for Americans, Moesring's prejudices instinctively led him to expect it to be a scammer.

Even so, when did Google decide that Moesring is an international dating website guru, and thus sends people's searches here?

Moesring hasn't checked, but he imagines that they were all directed to a moaning post that Moesring wrote ages ago about a perceived sudden influx of members thinking with one organ - which unfortunately was not their brain.

The main reason that Moesring is actually logging on to Hitslink these days is collecting statistics for a graph. At the moment, the graph looks like this (click on the image to enlarge it, or you can view the large graph here).

The yellow line is the data obtained from Hitslink and the red line is the trend line. Admittedly, the trend line isn't a very good one but it is actually the most appropriate one for this data. The highlighted section of the graph corresponds to one particular week.

If that graph doesn't correspond to a blog post then what is it for? Well, the graph illustrates - yes, you guessed it - usage of that particular CSS generator that you're all sick of hearing about.
Similarly, the week highlighted on the graph roughly corresponds to the time that the "Dynamic blog designs" post was on the front page.

The main reason Moesring is updating the graph is because Moesring's Hitslink account only seems to store data for the current month and the month before it. On some Hitslink reports, you can see aggregate data from periods before this, but you can't view specific details.

Final quick question. How many people actually saw both images? It came to Moesring's attention recently that the way he's been putting images into posts is archaic - and thus he is trying to start doing it the modern way. Problem is, Moesring doesn't know if this new way is as well-supported as the old-fashioned way of doing it.