10,000 visitors to The-Eversdens         November 2006                                          Tail Corn Reports

On Sunday 19th November 2006, the number of visitors to www.The-Eversdens.co.uk passed 10,000 for the 500 or so days since the “hits” counter was introduced on 22nd June 2005. For a while the daily number of visitors was in single figures. The daily figure now hovers around 30. The counter does not always tell the absolute truth. However, the days it exaggerates are compensated for by the fact that it misses many AOL users and doesn't record at all the visitors who have disabled cookies.

The counter offers all manner of information - but not names and addresses! It does give the country and sometimes the town of each visitor. I can make a guess at the identity of some visitors if I happen to know their server and the pages they tend to visit. A certain Tiscali user visits pages about church bells and village lunches so I hazard a fairly safe guess there. Because the counter is free, it stores detailed information about only the last 100 pageloads (upgraded to 500 in 2007. DF). So if the last 4 visitors look at 25 pages each, the counter lists only 4 visitors. As a result visitors can come and go without being spotted.

Although the counter gives details of only recent visitors, it keeps a running score on a day-by-day basis right from 22nd June 2005. This runs to six pages. With a wide enough piece of paper it would be possible to make a graph from this information which would illustrate not only the gradual rise, but the weekly high and low spots, the spurts of use, and the busy times of year. The graph took a marked upturn when more people adopted the village site as their home page. Some visitors will register briefly on the counter whenever they go on line perhaps just to check emails. Some will deliberately visit The Eversdens for a specific reason or just to see what's new. And some will alight on the website and give it a thorough going over.

A new service the counter offers is a map of recent visitors. A world map appears with little flags marking their locations. I can click each flag and look at the pages this person has visited, what size screen is in use, what operating system, and other snippets. But then I can zoom in from the whole world map right down into the street! At that point I can switch to satellite view and see if the car is in the drive! It's just a gimmick, of course, because the counter can only go to the location of the visitor's server - and it doesn't always get that right because some servers seem to have several locations. Some are pretty specific - like the Cambridge academic server - but others are vague. My own server is based in Sheffield but it shows up as London on the map. It's fun, though, to pretend that you are zooming in to the visitor's back garden and that it is happening in real live satellite time. ("Look, she's hanging out the washing!") Perhaps in a year or two!

The most visited pages are the picture galleries of the Eversdens. Every day, someone goes through all the pictures of the village, including the shots of the deflating robin and Honeysuckle Cottage's new thatch. Visitors from overseas particularly look for photographs of the village. There must be many Eversden people living in exile. I picture them lying in the sun sipping rum and orange and heaving a wistful sigh for muddy lanes and foggy mornings back in the old country.

Another of the counter’s features is to indicate if the Eversden site has been found as a result of a search. Sometimes the search is for a person. The search-engine magically finds the name lurking in some ancient cast list (in the case of the Eversden Players site) or tucked away alongside an old photograph and takes the searcher straight to that page. What a world of wonders we live in. And to think, the first website EVER by Tim Berners-Lee was published just fourteen short years ago this month!

David Farnell   (Drawn from Tail Corn Winter 2007 and The-Eversdens website 19th November 2007)