But sometimes, on a lark, I look.
Something very odd was happening on Friday, July 7. We had a breaking news story of serious import. The Chester County School Board sent out a meeting notice that mentioned it would discuss school consolidation.
The News & Reporter has talked about that before. It was a major question in our candidate profiles the past two or three school board elections. (We had a regular one, a special one.)
So we figured we'd be hearing from our readers, in letters to the editor as well as in online submissions that are allowed in our stories.
And when I looked, traffic was WAY up that day.
But when I looked a little closer at our Web site from the administrative side, I had one or two comments in the consolidation story. Four were made in one other story.
So, what's going on?
I checked the referrals area of our web monitoring package, and I saw a lot of referrals from Google. It's usually there, but this seemed to be up a little bit. I'm not completely versed in how this works, so I can't today check that other page to see where traffic was coming from.
But I checked Google for that story — it was a big one — to see if it offered a clue to what was going on.
Google is the biggest web search engine out there. OnlineChester.com has a nice spot whenever local news happens. We usually get listed before any other paper or media.
But this was off the charts. We had about 4,339 unique page views that day to our site.
We have had 3,057 page views for that story, since that day, just for one thing.
For Sports Editor Travis Jenkins' column about the almost sad fate of Takeru Kobayashi. The comments he got were not flattering. A few people didn't get that it was a humor column, and replied.
But that's four, five people. Out of thousands.
Later on, after Travis' editor stuck up for him, someone else chimed in with a post saying he thought it very funny.
But that's replies. The pageview stat is the low number in web things. If we listed it hits, it would be huge.
But the pageview is the one you want to brag about when you can. That tracks people who spent the time to read the entire page.
The company that handles our Web site for us has changed our tracking system. I can't go back and compare right now. But from what I recall, offhand, the top DAY we had, we had about 2,800 pageviews. For the entire site.
So what was it about?
Go to Google News. Put in the words "Kobayashi hot dog." There was a lot of attention paid to the Nathan's annual hot dog eating contest this year, because, as Travis wrote, Kobayashi was not going to participate. But in the end, he did.
If you enter that Google search, Travis' column is the fourth item listed on the page, in the top area where the most relevant hits are listed.
Kobayashi hot dog
This is what's there, on Google, at the top.
kobayashi hot dog
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I have reprinted his column here in Chock Full O' Chester as well. It might give it a little bit more life.
Again, we were hoping to stir something up Friday. We had a factual news article about consolidation. But it's a top that is going to stir people up.
But what were they stirred up by, Friday?
A guy who can eat a ton of hot dogs. Wow.
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