I subscribe to a web server statistics report for this site. Originally, I opted for this mainly out of simple curiosity. There are Perl scripts available for dumping stats to a file, but I lost patience back in 1995 with wading through all that garbage, just to see if I recognized any URL's.

This statistics report is provided by my ISP. It doesn't tell me if "Ted" or "Al" looked at a page, which is fine with me. In addition to an amazing statistical breakdown of hits, the report does tell me what pages were looked at, and from what page the reader "jumped" to get to my site.

To my amazement, I found the report quite educational. The SummitLake readership is much more diverse than we might suspect.

Statistics here are for the period Mon-29-Jun-1998 09:43 to Sun-31-Jan-1999 03:35 (215.7 days).

PAGES: The pages with the most hits (as a category) are those one might suppose to be less popular (i.e., La Parola and Commentary). My Matthew Shepard tribute, and the earlier "Inventing AIDS" critique, are generating twice as many hits as the next most frequently requested files, and the Matthew tribute hasn't quite existed for half of the sampling time period.

A lot of you are cruising for new recipes! Roast Pork Marsala and Rack of Lamb Italiano were popular, as was Laura's Stromboli. All 3 were beat out by Key Lime Pie.

We had 35 visits to the puzzle, but no one has sent in a solution proving or disproving whether the German owns the zebra.

C.Bear is mad! Not enough people know about him and his pals. But he vows to change all that with planned new additions to his story page, C.Bear's World.

DIRECTORIES (not counting graphics and proprietary):

#reqs: %bytes: directory
-----  ------  ---------
 3665: 25.77%: /LA_PAROLA/
  933:  8.55%: /COMMENTARY/
  678:  8.27%: /WRITING/
 1461:  7.91%: [root directory]
  996:  6.35%: /COMPUTERS_NET/
 1519:  5.73%: /RECIPES/
  865:  4.59%: /SummitLake.com/
  140:  1.50%: /STORIES_FICTION/

HITS: The hits for the roughly 7 month report period add up to more than the index page hit counter since 1995 (about 4,900 hits). We've lost count or had broken counters for parts of those years, but, more to the point, the hit counter is designed to count only new hits from outside URL's.

Our hit counters don't inflate the count due to repeated returns to the main index or other counter page.

The downside is that we're grossly under-representing the amount of actual readership that SummitLake.com is attracting.

Total successful requests: 20,614 (3,253) 
Average successful requests per day: 96 (464) 
Total successful requests for pages: 4,836 (1,045) 
Average successful requests for pages per day: 23 (149) 
Total redirected requests: 116 (5) 
Number of distinct files requested: 1,273 (695) 
Number of distinct hosts served: 1,324 (303) 
Number of new hosts served in last 7 days: 217 
Total data transferred: 103,130 kbytes (19,753 kbytes) 
Average data transferred per day: 489,492 bytes (2,822 kbytes) 
(Figures in parentheses refer to the last 7 days).

REFERRERS: That's where readers came from, to get to SummitLake.com. Not surprisingly, most of them (by far) arrived via other pages of SummitLake.com. Most readers start at the main index page (3548 hits), and browse from the Menu (2101 hits, not What's New (265 hits).

This suggests that most visitors who find our site do stay and browse awhile, which says we're doing something right. Of referrals from other SummitLake.com pages, the number of requests is quite consistent with directory requests (above).

Of referrals from other URL's, we receive frequent visitors from WebRing, PlanetOut, America Online, and search engines. One of our essays has become a homework assignment for students at DePaul University. The assignment is to grade our essay for objectivity, but we don't know what kind of grade we're getting.

Yahoo leads the pack for successful searches, by far, with hotbot a close second, and altavista a distant third.

Of the search queries leading to our pages, Recipes leads the pack by far. There were also numerous queries for communism, soviet propaganda, and Boris Yelzin which led to our Pravda essays, and it appears Yahoo and AltaVista queries led readers to our Bear Stories. There were at least one or two hits for every representative section of our site.

Generally, it appears that readers of our essays already knew what they were looking for. There are far too many pages of individual referrers (generating one hit) to mention. Of the search engine queries, our favorite was "why+rome+fell". The answer, of course, should be obvious: it was top-heavy.

DOMAIN REPORT: Geographic areas, from which our readers arrived at our site. Given the international diversity of our visitors, it's interesting to note not so much as one visitor from the remaining hard-core totalitarian states. This would tend to confirm reports that all those governments have effective firewall and internet registration censorship schemes. Because it gives us an idea how global the Internet truly is, I'm reproducing the whole list:

Printing all domains, sorted by amount of traffic. 
#reqs: %bytes: domain
-----  ------  ------
 8006: 43.48%: .com (Commercial, mainly USA)
 7406: 29.49%: .net (Network)
 2351: 12.19%: [unresolved numerical addresses]
 1576:  8.84%: .edu (USA Educational)
  233:  0.89%: .ca (Canada)
  105:  0.66%: .us (United States)
   92:  0.49%: .org (Non-Profit Making Organisations)
   98:  0.46%: .au (Australia)
  118:  0.42%: .uk (United Kingdom)
   82:  0.36%: .nl (Netherlands)
   70:  0.35%: .de (Germany)
   70:  0.32%: .mil (USA Military)
   64:  0.28%: .my (Malaysia)
   56:  0.23%: .gov (USA Government)
   23:  0.20%: .ie (Ireland)
    9:  0.20%: .ch (Switzerland)
   41:  0.16%: .sg (Singapore)
   21:  0.13%: .be (Belgium)
   29:  0.13%: .co (Colombia)
   26:  0.12%: .hu (Hungary)
    6:  0.12%: .se (Sweden)
   18:  0.08%: .fr (France)
   16:  0.08%: .hr (Croatia)
   15:  0.08%: .tw (Taiwan)
   17:  0.06%: .no (Norway)
   14:  0.06%: .mx (Mexico)
    8:  0.03%: .gr (Greece)
   10:  0.03%: .in (India)
   11:  0.02%: .es (Spain)
   14:  0.02%: .jp (Japan)
    1:  0.01%: .dk (Denmark)
    2:  0.01%: .it (Italy)
    1:       : .is (Iceland)
    2:       : .fi (Finland)
    2:       : .nz (New Zealand)
    1:       : .at (Austria)

MISCELLANEOUS: 9,685 requests were served to Netscape, and 8,868 to Netscape-compatible browsers. The report no longer distinguishes between Netscape and MSIE. A browser called Googlebot (18 hits) beat out Prodigy browsers (8 hits).