About a month ago I noticed that some bloggers have visitor counters. Ever acquisitive, I immediately wanted one for myself. It turned out there are several free trial versions and they are easy to download, so I nobbled one and started having fun.

You can learn all kinds of things from modern counters. They don't just tot up a head count: they're far more sophisticated than that. It's possible to see where your visitors come from, geographically speaking, and also how they found the site - through a search engine or another web page or by typing the address into a browser. You can see how often they come, how long they stay, and what they typed into the search engine.

In the last regard, some of my visitors must have felt quite frustrated when they got my page instead of what they were looking for! People tend to type whole sentences into a Google box and then wonder why they get so many irrelevant hits, not realising, perhaps, that if you put relevant bits of your query inside quote marks you're far more likely to get what you're looking for. For example, here are some of the searches that landed people on this blog:

• time to say goodbye in russian
• what is the background music to the tibetan personality test?
• fancy doorstops/paperweights
• coffee maker certificate, adelaide

If these seekers had typed instead, for example…

• "time to say goodbye" russian
• "tibetan personality test" music
• "fancy doorstops" paperweights
• "coffee maker" certificate adelaide

…they would probably have landed on more helpful sites. Although I don't recall ever discussing paperweights or doorstops, fancy or otherwise, so Google only knows how that shopper landed here!

Not that I mind them coming, of course. I'm delighted to see that I'm getting so many visitors. And there are many more regular visitors than one might imagine from the number of comments. Several people have come back over and over again, reading a few of my archived posts each time. That's flattering! If you are one of those, do please write a message to say g'day and tell me what brought you to my blogstep. I would love to hear from you.

It's great to see that my visitors come from everywhere - at least one from each continent, with the worldwide breakdown showing most visitors are from Australia and the Pacific; then North America; Eurasia West; Eurasia East and finally South America and Africa clocking in at just one each.

Hmm - how to get one of those little maps onto the blog? I feel a new project coming on:-) And the counter only goes to 500 before it turns into a pumpkin, so maybe I need to upgrade. Oh dear: technology, like Christmas, tends towards proliferation!