{"id":75,"date":"2008-04-21T03:57:49","date_gmt":"2008-04-21T08:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/?p=75"},"modified":"2022-05-06T06:14:17","modified_gmt":"2022-05-06T11:14:17","slug":"tracking-my-travels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/tracking-my-travels\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracking my Travels"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I have returned from my brief journey to the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coasts. So let&#8217;s wrap up this series of recent posts with a final entry. As I mentioned previously, <a href=\"\/blog\/?p=36\">the mapping tools provided with Google Analytics<\/a> simply fascinate me. Now I&#8217;ve discovered yet another use for them: recording my travels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Resulting Map<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/graphics\/blog\/new_orleans_access_statistics.jpg\" alt=\"Screen print of Google Analytics Map for New Orleans Access in Early April 2008 for howderfamily.com\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>First, my apologies for the quality of this map. It was part of a screen grab. Then I cropped and enlarged it to focus on a particular region of the United States. This created a larger map but with reduced resolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Analysis<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>However it does tell an interesting story even though it&#8217;s a simple map, and even though it may not seem to be saying much on the surface. Here&#8217;s what one can conclude:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>I didn&#8217;t have much trouble finding Internet access as I scooted along the Gulf Coast. A dot indicates traffic to my website that originated from a given town or city. Larger dots signifying more hits. The largest blobs sit right atop Gulfport, Biloxi and New Orleans where I traveled.<\/li><li>I don&#8217;t have a lot of web traffic on my site. If a single individual can skew access statistics then the base must be pretty small. True enough. I&#8217;ve designed the topic around a very narrow audience. If I wanted lots of hits I&#8217;d focused on celebrity gossip or professional wrestling. As a result I get about 100 visitors each day. So if I pop onto the site to update the blog or check for comments once or twice a day it makes a measurable difference.<\/li><li>I hit the site more frequently in Mississippi than I did in Louisiana. Actually that&#8217;s <em>not a valid conclusion<\/em>. I notice when I travel away from my home that new locations oftentimes do not appear in my access logs. On a hunch I checked the IP address for the hotel network I used in New Orleans. It corresponded to a site in Henderson, Nevada. That&#8217;s about 1,500 miles off! It must have been the location of the hotel&#8217;s Internet Service Provider and the circuits must have honed to that spot. Sure enough, I had a bunch of website hits from Las Vegas and its surrounding suburbs during this period.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Simple maps tell big stories. But take care to avoid unwarranted conclusions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have returned from my brief journey to the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coasts. So let&#8217;s wrap up this series of recent posts with a final entry. As I mentioned previously, the mapping tools provided with Google Analytics simply fascinate me. Now I&#8217;ve discovered yet another use for them: recording my travels. The Resulting Map [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,203],"tags":[204,2402,482,1505,481,465],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","category-tools","tag-google-analytics","tag-louisiana","tag-mapping-tools","tag-mississippi","tag-mississippi-gulf-coast","tag-new-orleans"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Tracking my Travels - Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual Places<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Google Analytics told an interesting story about my travels along the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coasts.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/tracking-my-travels\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tracking my Travels - 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