Although I’ve used the Internet extensively for years, this website is my first serious venture into content creation and site maintenance, and it’s been a real learning experience. My webmaster to the stars, Jeff Macaluso, has been very helpful in explaining to me what things do and what they mean. Recently he set up Google Analytics for my site, and I’ve been fascinated by how much this application tells me about who comes to a website, what they do when they get there, and how long they stay, among other things.

I don’t look at Google Analytics every day, because my site does not have any advertising and there’s no income to monitor. But I do enjoy wandering through the data and seeing how my website traffic interacts with other things I’m doing to promote myself. On Monday, I looked at my account and saw a large spike in my site traffic after my last post. Digging further into the report, I saw that a number of visitors were coming to my site from, of all places, Katharine McPhee fan sites.

I think Katharine is an excellent singer, but I suspect that the people most interested in her have little or no knowledge of the music I perform. So why on earth were they coming to my website? What had changed? Then I remembered that I had mentioned her name on my site’s home page in linking to my last blog post. Obviously, hordes of Katharine McPhee fans, madly googling her, had come across an unfamiliar site mentioning her and wanted to see why.

Since, as the post makes clear, I never actually met Katharine, most of them were probably a bit disappointed after reading it, but my vanity was certainly tweaked for a few minutes by the boost to my numbers. Plus I learned something about the Internet: how fast news travels and how far it goes, and what happens when you mention somebody famous on a web page. I was a bit in awe.

Of course, after seeing this spike in my popularity, I must confess that I was tempted to work it a little more. What if my next post includes the name of a currently popular celebrity of Armenian descent with marital difficulties (who I have never met)  in the title? And suppose I then link to that post on my home page? I’d have enough spikes in my report to build a mile of railroad!

But, as a disgraced former American president once said when confronted with temptation, “That would be wrong.” Plus there would probably be a whole new batch of spam that I’d have to filter out of comments. So I compromised by mentioning Katharine’s name in the title of this one, and thanking all of you Katharine fans in advance for your visit. If the episode I worked on goes into reruns, I’ll have an excuse to do it again.