Where are all you people coming from? Not literally, of course, but I have been wondering of late.

Blog City has introduced new statistics tools. Among the other things it does is maintain a list of the top read blog pages since the feature came on line. The list is pretty much what I expected. The poncho write-up is my most popular, fueled in part by the fact that the link has been widely collected by people maintaining pattern indexing sites. My Stupid Stitch Marker Tricks piece and the one on double-edged I-cord strips has also been in mailing list and other blogs' discussions of late - no surprise there. Make your own stitch holders also has had lots of traffic, as had the column on the history of the Kitchener Stitch name.

In fact, all the bits I've marked as "Reference" both on the right hand margin, and in the categories index are things I expect to see visited often. Reference pieces are bits I think might be more broadly useful than the rest of the drivel I usually post. But there are also some surprises on the list.

The piece I did on the baby booties has had a huge readership, with most of the hits coming from Japanese websites. My guess is that the step by step photos have helped Japanese knitters who were struggling with the English instructions. Another page that has had a phenomenal number of hits (almost all of them occurring in the last 10 days) has been the More Knitting Fun piece. That one I just don't understand. I can't find any referrers to it, and the write-up itself is rather plain. It's just an all-prose report on stumbling across a remarkable knitted object - a knit-covered bicycle. Yet in the past week or so it has had over 2,000 visitors. That's more than double the number who looked at the poncho page in the same period.

Go figure...

Of course, the Referring Web Pages tool that shows up on each page of the site should be giving me a clue. I do know from that roughly where people are hopping in from, at least for some of the pages. Thanks go to QueerJoe, the first blogger to send traffic my way; Curmudgeon Marilyn, who's prickly writings I enjoyed for a long time, and whom I've not yet managed to annoy; to Wendy, crossroads of the blogworld; and to all the other leaping off spots that launch people in this general direction.