It’s always instructive to examine your referrer logs to see how people reach your sites, especially via search engine queries. Here are a few recent referrers to Chip’s Tips and my thoughts:

Google: Windows API simple application example c

At least one of these words doesn’t belong. Google led them to this post, which they probably found unsatisfying.

Google: tips for cobol programmers

Um, how about “get a life”. They landed here, where I make only a passing back-handed reference to that venerable language that numbed my brain a couple of decades ago.

Google: ruby Win32API shellexecute

I get several queries a day for something like this, specifying either ruby or C#. They always land on a post where I give an example of using ShellExecute in Synergy/DE, so that’s got to be disappointing. I can almost hear them sigh in resignation, so I finally broke down today and wrote an example for Ruby, and linked to another for C#.

Randy Charles Morin sure has been sending a lot of interesting tags to del.icio.us lately (including… moi!? OMG! Thank you, Randy!)

But this isn’t about me. Today Randy linked to a link to ReefeRSS (that name is so smokin’) — a free service that (with a bit of javascript added to your site) collects information about how many hits you get and where they came from. You can then subscribe to that information in an RSS feed, or view it on a web page. It also shows you which page on your site they entered through last. Very nice. The next thing I’d like to do — when I have time — is use a little XSLT magic to generate some organized reports instead of viewing the detail in FeedDemon.

UPDATE (2/19/08):  ReefeRSS has apparently gone offline, and the domain now contains a nice splog.