The Twilight Zone

Following my endeavor to develop a further understanding of the workings behind both these Blog pages and regular web pages, I decided to embed the code enabling Google Analytics to track the comings and goings to this seemingly obscure site known as Eye Dent. The results of this have led me to further development of the page but have also been interesting, just weird and strangely addictive.

The interesting aspect has been just how many people and from where, find themselves off the beaten path and here at my page, whenever I think about it I hear a faint yet familiar voice and the words;

"You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone"

So far the analytics performed by Google has revealed a few snippets into the source of my 'visitors' as well as another aspect of Blog writing I am sure is fairly common, that of popularity.

Firstly my 'visitors' are spread throughout the planet, with the reach of the internet stretching to almost 20 different countries. In honor of this diverse mix of languages I added the necessary code to enable the translation of my site at the click of a national flag (as always just post a comment or send an email if you would like further details on this or anything from my pages). For those multi linguists out there, this is always an entertaining process as the machine translations are questionable to say the least, but it is improving thanks to Google enabling user feedback in order to 'improve' the system by providing better suggested translations.

The weird, is what this Blog makes my visitors think of and how they exit the site. The most popular method for departure is a rather unceremonious closing of the browser window and this account for 76% of exits, however for one strange confused soul; their choice of exits was via the search bar and the word 'sex'. I have decided against tracking sources via their IP addresses.

The addiction, the development as a blogger of an almost obsessive behavior; addicted to checking the number of hits this week, have there been any new nationalities visiting, as well as furiously reading how others maximize their visitor numbers. Although I have not gone completely over to the dark side quite yet, which is evident in the frequency of my posting. None the less, learning what little tips and tricks can help optimize page views can only be good thing as we move further in the Digital Twilight Zone.

Additional thanks to Martin over at the Das E-Business blog for a very good post on the use of machine translation and Google, click here to check it out.