A complete mystery!

[creative craig]

Just looked through todays stats and log files for one of my sites, a non profit information site. Its nothing major, a 98 page site that gets between 75 and 150 page views a day, but is steadily increasing all the time.

Well today has beaten the records for this site and I cant find the answer why.

354 page views and 201 are for a page that has a three line description on what a HERF gun is (high energy radio frequency gun). 98% of the OS's used today were Linux, Solaris and Unix and with some strange browsers I have never heard of ;) My first hits from Solaris for this site.

All came from Google and Yahoo, the split was 85% to Google of course :) and the bookmark button was hit an extra 74 times today as well. It was spread out nicely over the whole day.

This post is more a vent of frustration as I would love to know what went on, there maybe some major traffic source that I am missing out on :( or it could be one that has just found me, I just dont know yet.

Might post back if anything else interesting happens :)

Craig

[deejay]

perhaps this item was used in a mystery widget contest at an alternative geek type community?

Or a question related to it ended up in a school assignment somewhere?

Have you checked the IP numbers to see if they're grouped?

[creative craig]

No there didnt show to be any grouping for the requests in question, when I checked the country list it only gave a few extra countries from the middle east and a few eastern Euro countries, nothing that would show a spike in traffic though.

Craig

[deejay]

hmmm tis a bit odd.

I've had similar spikes twice to an oddball page on a similar low traffic site, but in both cases I was able to track the traffic back to a university.

A later request for info from a student confirmed that a professor had referenced a technique they needed to understand that happened to be referenced on this page.

[creative craig]

I did have an oline tutor ask if he could reference a few of my pages for a course he was doing a couple of months back, I will email him and ask if it was anything to do with him or any of his courses.

Craig

[creative craig]

Just got an email bacl from teh online tutor and it wasnt anything to do with him!

Yesterday topped out at 486 page views, with no apparent reason except for the thirst for knowledge on herf guns :)

Craig

[dmorison]

I think this will explain everything:

[science.slashdot.org...]

adds: I think we can call this a "Secondary Slashdotting" :)

[deejay]

Yikes... talk about a mixed blessing. :/

[creative craig]

Thank god I dont tell people how to make them :) as its only a 3 line description of what they are and what they can do.

Thanks dmorison for clearing that up for me.

Craig

[tbear]

Somewhat off topic, i know, but isn't that an awful lot of code for just 5 words on a grey background¿¿

;+)

[dmorison]

His HERF gun was no match for Slashdot's HREF gun.

/webmaster joke :)