**This post has been updated to correct the spelling of Hilde's name. By the way, Brooklynne totally could have told me I had it wrong, but she didn't read the blog until after I got home. Sorry!**

A little over a year ago, when TWJ had its first anniversary, I announced a prize for the person who left the 1,000th comment on this blog. Well, we're getting pretty close. the total is now in the high 800's. Since we have a few new regular readers, I thought I'd throw that tid bit out again to spice up the experience of commenting here. You can't win if you don't play!

Besides the comments, I've recently started paying more attention to our site stats since, at the end of June, I added a cluster map that tracks the locations of our blog visitors. Although I could get pretty detailed logs from my site already, the map makes it easier and more convenient to track day-to-day activity. On day thirty-two since I added the map to the site, I am proud to point out that we have cracked the 1,000 visit mark. That means TWJ probably averages a little over 30 visits a day or about 12,000 visits per year--an utterly unremarkable number by internet standards, but good enough for a personal blog that's not selling stuff. (By the way, "visits" are completely different than "hits," which is a term internet people use to inflate their stats when talking to the unintiated. Each visit to my site records at least 6-15 hits, and probably many, many more. If you're interested in the mystical aspects of internet stats, you can read a really good summary by a couple of my professors here.)

The most interesting info revealed by the map is the foreign country dots. I would guess that most of these are random people who stumble across my site while looking for other stuff. However, I can't ignor the large dot positioned over Norway, which I'm guessing means that our old friend Hilde (sorry about the bad spelling!) must be lurking on the site every now and then. If so we'd love a comment. Any other lurkers out there? Now's the time to reveal yourselves!

A few other notes about the map....

Forgive me if you are an innocent TWJ reader from India or Isreal, but the dots in those countries mysteriously appeared just before I received a spate of spam comments. Any connection? I'm suspicious.

I know the dot in South Korea is our friends Jamie and Steph, who are returning from a year teaching in that country, but is that a dot in NORTH Korea?!!