Just before I went off on my trip, I happened to open up SiteMeter to see how my hit counts were doing. It’s not something I obsess over, by any means, but I do find it interesting.
I was (non-obsession aside) a bit dismayed to notice that my visitors and page hits in October had dropped way down, to less than half of what they’d been earlier in the summer. Was it folks getting tired of web-surfing pre-election? No, the weeklies in November were still down the same way? WTF?
Took me a bit of digging, but I eventually found that when I upgrade to MT3 and went to dynamic publishing, I’d missed including SiteMeter in the individual archive pages, so anyone visiting those wasn’t contributing to the hit count. I fixed that, and the counts are back up to “normal.”
That is interesting, though. I design my blog around the front (home) page, but clearly that gets only a fraction of the traffic of the blog as a whole. Extra traffic by folks looking at comments? Folks going direct to the pages via an RSS feed? Cross-links from other pages? Google hits? I don’t know. But it’s interesting.