Stats madness III

I wasn't going to post anything tonight, because frankly it's 10.30pm and, although the sky is still orange with the glow of the setting sun* and I only had dinner and hour and a half ago, I was going get an early night with the every intention of turning it into a very late morning tomorrow. But having just spent 45 mins reading through my nightly batch of other people's blogs, I thought I'd pop in to my own and check my stats.

Now, you may have gathered by now that I have a bit of a thing about stats. I'm not sure why. I think it's a webmaster (why does the word 'webmistress' sound so seedy?) thing. I've been running various and assorted websites for I guess about five or six years, and the one thing that always fascinates me is the stats. How many people came? Which pages did they look at? How long did they hang around? How often did they come back? I don't know why I find this all so interesting – it's just some geekish fascination I have. I suppose that amongst webmasters I'm probably not unusual – it just goes with the territory.

Anyway, yesterday I had a big rant and this morning I had some nice comments from people and I can't remember how many visitors I had at that point but it was something like 40. Yesterday I got 71. My highest ever number of hits was 113 on 24 June. Tonight, this blog has had 240 hits. If my floor weren't carpeted you'd have heard my chin hit the floorboards from miles around. And today's not even over. (Bizarrely, 'today' on Blog-City doesn't seem to be over until 12noon tomorrow – I'm not sure how that works but I have seen stats creep up for the day before on the day after. Strange. Either that or I really am badly disnumeric.)

Now, I don't want to sound self-congratulatory, that's not what this post is about. Instead, I find myself echoing Tim over at gatezero, and thinking 'Eh? But why?'. Obviously I write this blog to be read, and as someone who has at times made a living of sorts out of wrestling the written word into submission, I'm quite chuffed that people are actually reading what I post. It's a nice feeling. I'm not sure why you visit, but please make yourselves at home, get comfy and feel free to help yourselves to anything in the fridge. I'm enjoying having you here.

Oh, and in case you were wondering – no Wimbledon update today. I didn't see any tennis because this morning i was running round like a blue-arsed fly and this afternoon I was up in London meeting Christian, who runs Lingo24, the translation agency I use. Very good meeting (although very un-meetinglike), but my voice did start to go hoarse by the end of it. I think we all know what that indicates.

*Well it was when I started this!