10,000 And Counting

Sometime this past Wednesday, if I'm figuring this correctly, my stat counter recorded the 10,000th visit to this blog. Yeah, baby--break out the champers and let the good times roll!


I remember when I first decided to add the stat counter. I did it out of sheer curiousity. The blog had been in existence for about a month and a half, and because most people--and I include myself in this--go to a blog, read it and then leave without a comment, I had no idea if anyone was reading what I wrote. I was thrilled when I saw the first day results--almost 250 people! It was nice to know I wasn't operating in a vacuum. And now, slightly more than a month later, I feel a similiar thrill knowing the blog visitor count is at 10,000 and climbing.

Thanks to the statistical analysis available with the stat counter, I know that the majority of people who drop by here come from the United States, but I do get visitors from all over. Most days it's not unusual to see hits from over 20 different countries around the world. I think the best single day I had saw visitors from 27 countries--28 if you count, "Unknown". (That must be those "Parts Unknown" that so many professional wrestlers herald from.....) Thank you one and all for looking in!

I can also, in a very general way, see what city people are connecting from. For a blog called Spanking Minnesota there really aren't that many visitors from the land of 10,000 lakes. (Hey, I just realized--I got one hit per lake! I wonder if that's somehow significant?) Anyway, to all those people who visit my blog from Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth, Inver Grove Heights, Chanhassen, Cottage Grove, Rochester and Blaine--thanks! Keep on dropping in!

If people use a link to get to me, I can also check the stats and see where they came from. With only a few exceptions, the majority of people who visit every day come from the blog Spanking Pixie.....so my thanks to Amber "Pixie" Wells for linking me up. The exceptions to this have been the times when someone else mentioned Spanking Minnesota on their site. When The Spank Statement, for example, mentioned me in a post, for a few days the majority of my visitors came from there. But eventually it always goes back to normal with Pixie leading the way. My thanks also to Dave at The Cherry Red Report. He was the first person to add a link to me.

Another feature available to me is Keyword Analysis--the things that people type into a search engine that brings them to my site. I'm going to save that for a later post, though. If you read Bonnie's blog, My Bottom Smarts, you're familiar with a feature of hers that she calls "Keyword Chaos" where she responds to the keywords people have typed. It's very funny, and always provides me with a good laugh. I've seen Iris do something similiar on her blog, and Devlin O'Neill tried it, as well. Naturally, I want to take a crack at it--but that's for another post.

For now, just let me give all of you--the readers--a round of applause for dropping in and making my day--as well as for making my stat counter happy!