Take a census of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by their families, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of the names, every male, one by one….
—Numbers 1:2

For a long time, I’ve resisted adding any kind of analytical tools to Cerulean Sanctum. But after some consideration, I’ve added Sitemeter to the site. My reason? I want to see what URLs are referring readers here and I want to track what pages are being read. My hope is to better reach out to other bloggers who put links here and to address the needs of people searching for answers.

After a couple days, though, I’ve come to a few strange realizations:

1. The major search engines don’t help people. I’ve noted the word strings that people are searching for and I’m shocked that people wound up at Cerulean Sanctum; in most cases, the search engines led people astray. For instance, I mentioned the Vineyard churches and music in one post and that came up as a hit for someone searching for “Vineyard worship music.” And a few people looking for info on quantum mechanics got a healthy dose of theology instead when they stumbled into my look at the debate between Arminianism and Calvinism in my post entitled “On the Brink of a Quantum Singularity with Calvin and Arminius.” I’m sure that was a surprise! Yes, the search engines got them here, but the people who followed those results didn’t find what they were looking for.

2. Many more Mac users than is commonly reported. I’m a Mac guy myself. Used to work for Apple, in fact, bashing Wintel. Nice to see the numbers coming up from 2% or whatever it was of total Mac users out there just a couple years ago. I’m getting around 7% last time I checked. Does that mean that more Christians use Macs or that the counter-cultural, visionary crowd likes my blog? 😉

3. Firefox is really gaining ground. More than 25% of the people who came to this site were using Firefox to browse.

Now all this is anonymous info so don’t worry that someone is spying on you! All this is just helpful to me. If you are interested in getting Sitemeter for free for your site or blog, just click on the colorful rotating cube above and you can sign up for nothing. Very helpful and a nice addition for anyone who wants to know how to better position his/her blog to reach the most people in the best way possible.

Blessings!