Interesting Visits to my websites

I use this really neat service called statcounter.com to help me interpret all of the data logs I get from visitors to my website. Most of the visits to benefield.net are people who are looking for the songs/chords I have posted there, though I am always surprised at how many visits I get from people googling my name. I get a fair number of short visits to this blog from people who googled for "train animation" or "model train bart." I know that my site isn't what those people are looking for. Sorry.

It's fun to peruse the statistics and see if I can figure who is visiting me. (If you think this is a little big brotherish you should realize that all websites can gather data about visitors) Of course I usually can't tell exactly who is visiting my websites, just where their ISP is located. Some of my family and friends, I recognize their ISP name. Some times I get hits from Wasatch Meats. I know who that is. But more often than not I can't even guess.

I used to have a link to my email address so visitors could leave me a message but not anymore. Spammers use programs called "spiders" to "crawl" the web looking for things like someone@website.bla. They then "harvest" the email addresses and that email gets buried in mail. At one point I was getting over 200 spams a day in the email I had listed on my site.

I am currently working on making a comment form for benefield.net. Of course this is a stretch for me and my mid 90's era html skills so it might be a while. Of course people can comment easily by clicking at the bottom of any post on this blog.

In the mean time I have added another email link on my homepage. I created a special email just for the purpose so my main email won't get flooded with spam.

Anyway I'm dying to know who from the BLM in Aurora, CA and who from Moab, UT visited my site this week.