Another year, another milestone, another period of hapless casting about for something interesting to blog about. When faced with this problem, many of us turn to our stats pages for a little navel-gazing. And what better time than on New Year's Day? Just who are the robots, spiders, and visitors who drop by? Naturally, any good stats page includes information about connections from other sites. This is usually where the spam hits the fan – a lot of the links turn out to be for C-list sleb porn and for hosting services and info-harvesters. Now and then, though, there's an honest link from an honest site, and it's fun to check a new one. Links from sites that blogroll this one show up there, and it's fun to find a link from someone whose site I visited havinng a reciprocal look round. Quite often, a completely new and unfamiliar link leads back to a site someone is trying to publicize; less often, it's a site that's worth a visit. I was happy to find a couple of new links in my stats log today; even better, when I visited them nobody tried to sell me anything. GSM-Bristol Elizabethan Military is a discussion forum for some Bristol Renaissance Faire folks who belong to a weapons and military history group. This next one is probably only for the delusional: Al Gore '08 but at least they're out there giving it a shot. Then there's this one, who've been showing up in the logs for a while: Postami.com They seem to be an aggregator/RSS feed finder. Finally, it's time I looked at the search phrases that bring people here. Some of them are old standbys, some of them are new for the first time. I'm amazed at the fact that people search on the phrase "newton westminster abbey tomb photo" at all, let alone almost every frickin' month. Why? Is it kids doing homework? People with a dead scientist fetish? Next order of business: New Year's resolutions. Rather than post a big-ass meme (the one with 40 questions shows up in my Bloglines feed about 10 times a day, gah) I'll just resolve to excercise 3 times a week and use my nifty new cookware more often. And be nicer. That's it. And now, I may actually finish up the September 2004 trip journal at last.