Watching the Counters

I (and I suppose most people who have ever built a web site) am obsessed (too strong a word, but it will suffice), by the hit counter on my web site. I've had various sites in the relatively short lifespan of the internet. The only site that had any hits to speak of was a site that gave the first lines of a few hundred books - at it's peak it was clocking up 50 hits a day. Not a lot, but as I didn't average 50 website visits a day, I figured that made me a provider rather than a consumer of websites. I can't remember exactly what caused the demise of that site about five years ago, but apart from a succesful Fantasy Football site which catered for a closed group of friends, I remained a resolute consumer until earlier this year when I decided to give the first-line site another go. This was mainly to flex my amateur skills in different directions in particular PHP and MySQL. But of course I was vain enough to add a hit counter. Hit Counters have moved on and I used one, StatCounter which had the two key requisites (free and no annoying ads), while having more than just a basic count. Funnily enough, the number of page loads a day currently averages about 50, so I suppose the number of extra consumers has been neatly balanced out by the number of extra providers.
The extra statistics show the number of visitors and when they visit. The time between visits is slowly reducing, currently averaging about an hour and a quarter.
But the biggest fascination is where the visitors are from. So far I've attracted visitors from 50 countries (apart from Morocco and South Africa, none of these are in Africa), the bulk of which are not English speaking. And they haven't visited the site by accident, they've got there from a Google search on an author or a title or a First Line - in English.
Just as interesting is the visits (and lack of visits) from US States 38 (+ DC) have visited, which means that 12 haven't. Have a look on my Spreading The Word page.