Sadly, I'm never as cool as I think I am.

Do you want to hear a story?

You know you do.

This is a funny story. It's also a mortifying story. And it's a little sad too.

Once upon a time I had a blog. I still do, in fact. I installed Google Analytics on said blog, and enjoyed looking at all the lovely numbers trickle in. How many people are visiting from Idaho? How many minutes were spent on my post on poop? What color are most of my visitors wearing? (Kidding, Google is smart, but not that smart.)

Eventually weird things started happening. I was getting an inordinate amount of traffic from a doctor blog and a fashion blog. I wrote a post about it. I ruminated on it for a long freaking time. I couldn't solve the mystery of the referral traffic.

I also noticed that Google Analytics would show posts written by my sister (a doctor) and Shea (a fashionista) as ones read on my site. "Strange," I thought to myself, "People must really like to click to Laura and Shea's blog from mine!"

And a couple of months ago, my traffic started gradually picking up. "Man," I thought, "I must be getting to be a pretty awesome blogger."

WRONG.

A couple weeks ago, Victoria started complaining about traffic from Marie--some of Marie's posts were showing up! This is where I die. So mortified. So embarassed.

I finally realized something. Apparently, I'm not an html wizard. I'm an html muggle.

Victoria and I design blogs using a basic template--and on several occasions we've used our blogs as starting points. Laura's. Shea's. Marie's. Which means the code that Google Analytics uses was reporting the stats for our blogs AND their blogs.

Funny that I've been living a blog lie. Mortifying that it took me so long to figure out. And sad that I'm the awkward kid who thinks she has hundreds of friends, but is wrong. Really, I have tens of friends. Which is still pretty awesome.

Whoops! I'm really glad it got sorted out. My code is removed from Laura and Shea and I can know look at my data in peace--and know that is JUST mine. I guess I can trust Google after all.