Västra Götaland, come on down!

I was looking for some nice means to track traffic to the blog, and I eventually settled on Google Analytics. Free, easy to integrate with Blogger, and it gaves you some great reports and views of your (in my case tiny) traffic data.

My favorite is the breakdown by geographic region. I can see this as a list of city names, or as dots of various sizes on a world map.

I don't know whether it's just that the blog's been up for a little while, and various spiders and hacker bots are starting to find it, or if Google, plus some Technorati tagging is starting to influence traffic at all, but I'm starting to see a tiny trickle of traffic from outside the immediate circle of people I know -- including hits from France, Singapore, and Sweden. Hmm, as of tonight, Costa Rica as well.

It's amusing to inspect where the traffic comes from. The site in Costa Rica is called Heredia province, which in addition to sounding like a nice place to visit, what with volcanoes and a national wildlife refuge, also reminds me of the author (José María de Heredia) of one of my favorite poems in high school, Les Conquérants (French, I couldn't find a translation), which in turn reminds me of Archibald MacLeish's mighty Pulitzer poem "Conquistadors", which I commend to anyone who's interested in seeing the other uses to which history can be put ...

My French hit (singular) is from Les Pideaux, a bit to the west of France. Scrupulous Googling is unable to reveal to me what a pideau might be.

Singapore we all know.

And finally, my Swedish traffic, from Västra Götaland. West Goth-land? I'm envisioning a fella in furs and a horned helmet, crouching on the outer walls of a huge bulwark, jiggling his laptop and cursing how weak the wireless is outside the main castle.

West Goths, indeed. Where's an Alaric or a Chindaswinth when you need 'em?