an experiment / by Katherine Hajer

Yesterday I had two people, who were never with me at the same time, ask if I knew how many people visited my web site.

I had a response all ready. "The 'web site' is one page," I said. "I haven't even launched it yet. Not until I get the first draft of my novel done. Right now isn't the time to be fiddling with web pages. I need something to talk about first."

Unfortunately for my ego, they both had the same counterpoint all ready to fire back with. "But what about your blogs? You've been running those for over two years now."

"Those are just because I like to write about topical stuff," I said.

This is true. I do not want to be one of those whiny people who are always saying, "Oh, well if you read my blog..." But I write. And writers like to be read. Also, I agree if I'm putting it out there, maybe I should pay attention to who's glancing at it, much less reading it.

So tonight I went on Google Analytics and got tags for both my blogs and my web site. Judging from my comments rate, I'm not expecting to find a secret legion of Eyrea-visiting web denizens. But currently I don't have hard numbers of any kind.

If you have made it this far, I humbly request 30 seconds and two mouse-clicks from you. You don't have to do anything else. Really.

I need to make sure all of the analytics scripts work. One of them is on this blog. The other two are here:
Please click on the above links. That's it! You don't even have to read anything. If you load the pages, it'll show up in my report as a visitor. I'd do it myself, but I suspect Google filters my own visits out. I'll play around and see.

And no, the reports don't tell you who exactly visited or anything fancy/privacy-invading like that. Just how many people visited, where in the world they were visiting from, and how long they stayed. So if you want a personal thank-you (which I would love to give you), please leave a comment to let me know you helped out with the experiment!