Summer Festival Season in Full Swing

The South Lake’s festival season is in full swing. Already concluded is Art on the Lake, Crazy Day, the 4th of July Celebration, and the Fire Hall dance to name a few. The remainder of July and the months of August and September offer plenty additional opportunities to enjoy the area’s events. Among them (this is not a complete list) are:

August 9: Deephaven Days and Triathlon – http://www.cityofdeephaven.org/
August 4: Tour de Tonka Bike Ride: http://www.minnetonka.k12.mn.us/tourdetonka/Pages/default.aspx
September 6: Apple Days: http://www.southlake-excelsiorchamber.com/calendar.html

This is all in addition to regular happenings such as the Excelsior Commons Thursday evening concerts, Farmers Market, and County Fairs (Waconia has one in early August).

Tour de Tonka: August 2, 2008

Here is a link to the Tour de Tonka bike ride. It will be starting from the Minnetonka High School this year due to the growing size of the ride and the need for more parking. Whether you want to ride for 15 miles (only about an hour at a modest pace) or go for the 65-miler, this is your chance to participate in one of the more popular and growing active events in our neighborhood.

www.tourdetonka.org

Fooled by Google Analytics

An excellent (some would say fascinating) service from Google (who happens to own and control the ".blogspot.com" domain) is a feature called Google Analytics. It allows anyone with a website or blog to receive statistics on traffic to their site. Don't worry, it doesn't tell me who is reading my blog, only how many people view it each day, which information they view the most, and if they came via Google, how they got to my blog.

So you can imagine my excitement when I saw a massive spike in traffic on Friday... nearly 3-fold! I immediately began thinking that my blog was catching on, that I must have had exposure on some other popular blog that was routing traffic to the blog, like The Huffington Post pointing out this interesting, local civic blog in the Twin Cities. Or better yet, word of mouth was starting to tell a good story about what we're doing here.

Then, I dug into the numbers. I realized that the spike in traffic could be accounted for exclusively by people looking for last minute info on the Tour de Tonka. Google was able to tell me that my above average numbers were largely due to people typing "Tour de Tonka" in to Google.

Well, maybe I'm not the next Tom Friedman or Garrison Keillor with a loyal following developing, but I guess I'm still thankful that Google routed a few people my way. Maybe a couple of them liked what they saw and will come back again. And if I could at least be a public service to help push the Tour, then I'm pleased.

And for the record, the readership on this blog is actually doing quite well so far. The number of total visits is now into the hundreds, and the number of unique visitors is well into the dozens. All in all, I'm pleased with the traffic on this blog in the first couple weeks of its life.