The blue line is unique viewers to this website in the past 24 hours and the red line is separate page views in the past 24 hours.(Posts are what I add to every day. Pages are the bar across the top) If you are inexplicably in love with this website and check it every minute you will still only get counted once per IP address. New viewers are likely to check other page views, while familiar visitors probably won’t.
Last summer we had reliably 250 views a day (less on the weekend because, don’t be shocked, but apparently some people check this website from WORK!!!), and when there was a snow flurry of media attention sometimes we got as many as 500. After this years festival we were reliably getting 500 a day, which made sense because we had a lot of media attention and curiosity. Since then, though we’ve been regularly getting 700 viewers a day.
The obvious question: Who are these people? They can’t all be in Martinez. And even if we counted our friends from Frankfurt, New Zealand, Massachusetts and Alaska that’s still only four. Heck even if you counted my mom, and three of my friends that’s still only eight. There were curious visitors from the two Egbert interviews, and a brief peak afterwards. Sometimes people come to our site “accidentally” because they’re looking up something else (no not that!). Things like particular quotes or references I’ve included can draw visitors that aren’t interested in beavers, and I’m sure at least for at least one of them it was a happy accident. For example, the most readers ever came from the article about beavers and social democracy. Not because the writing was so brilliant, but because it had a graphic that middle school students were probably looking for as part of their American history reports.
Long ago, in the great beaver controversy, we were ‘advised’ against having open comments to ward off all the careless and mean things that might be said. This may not have been a mistake, but I think we missed out because of it. Yes the gmail accounts gets bursts of spam and offers for miley cyrus unclothed, and someone is checking our domain tools to find out who owns us almost daily, but I would like to hear how people came to this website and what there interests are. My greatest wish is that people come to this website when they google beavers with a particular question and find out something that helps them make better choices—then maybe decide to come back. Maybe they’ll tell me something they’ve learned about and I’ll learn it too, and pass it along through the website to others. I’d like this site to be a environmental hub, and sometimes that has happened in surprisingly successful ways. Just yesterday I heard the good news that Penny Weigand will hook up with Scott of the Burrowing Owls, and Carolyn Jones of the Chronicle is interested in the story.
In the meantime I’ll keep waking up and trying to think about new things to say about beavers and the environment. It’s been uncannily easy so far, although I recognize each distinctive Peanut Character in my 662 posts.
