Strangers (Waiting, Up and Down the Boulevard)

WHEN YOU BROWSE the Internet, your browser communicates certain things to the sites you visit. Some of this information is useful for designing websites--for example, your operating system, browser, or screen resolution--and some of it is useful in targeting content: to visitors' language, location, and point of entry to your site.

Dessert Tickets traffic breaks down 66% direct, 26% site referral, which includes blogger.com and Google Reader--and 7% search engine referral. Of that 7%--41 total visits as of this writing--a few are wacky keywords that brought in the sort of hit that immediately leaves (a "bounce"). That's one guy in Dixon, Illinois looking for "coronation rickshaw grab", which led him to my demented analysis of that Vampire Weekend song, one in the U.K. searching for support for his "fear of soggy food"--Animal Crackers, that's your love--and even one in Saudi Arabia curious about "how mankind use dessert?" In Shelby, North Carolina, someone seems to agree with the "so bfore you knock it" school advanced by The Kid. And in Miamisburg, Ohio, some poor soul wanted an answer to the question that haunts us all: "what is peroggis?" Having never had access to this kind of information before, and in particular never having had a piece of my own home on the Internet like this one, that motley crew of sad searchers--online vagabonds who roamed by our door, paused at the threshold, and turned away, back into the rainy night--simply breaks my heart. I want to invite them back in, have them pull up a chair and a ticket and warm themselves by the hearth--but they're long gone into the dark, swept up in the click-click, place-to-place, constant, frenzied search for satisfaction and answers. Oh, and nine hits came through on "baconnaise dessert" this week but I'm pretty sure they were all me and ghost. We're the top result! (Trust me. If you go try it, I'll know.)

10 were hits for "dessert tickets bernice". Eight were "dessert tickets blogspot"; four were "bernice dessert tickets." This is an interesting cross-section because it represents people who were looking for us, and usually stay when they find us, but don't know the URL or can't remember it. A lot of these are casual visitors, friends of friends, regulars on computers without bookmarks, fine. But there's a surfer in Denton, Texas, who found us with a search of this kind and visited four times last week, spending more than ten minutes looking around once and only bouncing out once, presumably because there was no new material. I can't make heads or tails of that, but I'd love to know the story. Do we know anyone in Denton? Can we think of any reason a stranger would search "dessert tickets bernice" from Texas without knowing about us? I'm stumped.

Denton, if you ever blow back this way, stick around. We'd love to have you aboard and hear your story.