It has occured to me that I should probably state what information this site gathers about you. I for one have absolutely nothing anywhere in this webpage that logs who you are or anything else. However, I think it is neccessary to inform you what all webservers ANYWHERE on the net will gather about you, and what my hosting company gathers from you, and how that information is used.

Every webserver out there will log what IP address you come from (this is a numeric address, an example would be 68.25.106.xxx, (the Xs are representing numerical values, I see these in the logs, but I do not want to post them on my website) and that is just and address I pulled out of the air), and what pages that address views. A webserver has to know your IP address in order for it to send you the page, it cannot very well broadcast the page to everyone on the internet. It knows what pictures you have pulled up and what videos you have played (once again, for the purpose of delivering information to your computer).

My website hosting company will also do an IP address lookup, and reports this to me, if I so coose to view it. For example, if it was to look up 68.231.13x.x, it would look it up and tell me ip68-231-13x-x.tc.ph.cox.net All this really tells me here is that it is a person using Cox Cable Internet, is located in Tucson, Arizona, and their traffic gets routed through a main hub in Phoenix. I may get adsl-xx-xx-xxx-xxx.dsl.lsan03.pacbell.net which means that it is a DSL user using PacificBell (I think they are now ran by SBC), or something along the lines of 102.196.18x.xxx.cust.bluewin.ch which basically means that a person in Switzerland (country code CH) is using a service called Bluewin. That is as much as I ever know about you. I could not find out your name or where you live or anything unless I had a court order and presented it to your Internet company to tell me who had that address at that time.

My webhosting provider then takes that information and tells me what country you are in. I can usually figure this out without that help, but it also tallys it up for me, telling me that people with a .net internet company have hit my website 687 times, people from a .com internet comapny have hit me 399 times (these two are usually USA Internet companies), I have had 12 hits from Switzerland, 26 from the UK, so many from Canada, Belgium, and on and on. There is really not much I could do with this, except maybe offer pages in different translations, but it is fun to see when I get a hit from someplace in Africa or in the Middle East or something.

The webhosting company also tells me what times and days I get the most hits, and how much data was transfered. This is necessary because I get charged based on the amout of traffic I get. I pay $5 a month for up to 10 gig of traffic a month, and if I go over that, I pay more. Luckely, I have not had enough traffic yet to push me over thsi limit.

It also monitors which search engines crawl my page. The search engines do this so that when you do a search in Google or Yahoo, it will return the results. If the spiders did not crawl, then search engines would not be possible. For example, today is May 7, and already this month, Google has searched my site 176 times and used up 826k of my bandwidth.

It also tells me how long a visitor will stay on my site. I really do not know why it does that, except that I see that most people have stayed here less than 30 seconds, so I know that if they came from a search engine, my site was probably not what they were looking for.

It tells me what files were pulled up, that is, it has served up so many jpegs, so many HTML pages, so many videos, etc. What does this tell me? Well, not much, since it does not tell me which JPEGS or Videos were pulled up, although it does tell me which pages were pulled up. Basically, that helps me cater my website more to what people are interested in.

It tells me whether you are using Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, Solaris, WebTV, and so forth. All webbrowsers send that information. I could use that to have it automatically generate a different page depending on what you are using, in case I have some wierd program that only works on windows, and needed a different page for everyone else. I did that before, way back in like 97, but I really saw no reason to use it on a personal website. Also, I know what browser you are using. This is EXTREAMELY helpful, as I know if 30% of my visitors are using Mozilla instead of IE (Internet Explorer), that I would not want to do some code that Mozilla would choke on. My home church webpage is horrible about cattering only to Internet Explorer, and would always cause me problems as I am a Mozilla user. However, I would like to point out that I have not put any code on williamhenley.com that any browser cannot display.

It also tells me if you found this site by clicking on a link from another site or search engine. This is only possible if the site links to me and you click on it, it does not work if you type in the url into your address bar, so I do not know what other sites you have been visiting. If I wanted that information, though, it would not be difficult to get, but I have no reason for it.

Lastly, it will tell me that if you did stumble upon this page by clicking on a link in a search engine, what you were searching for. This helps me to write more stuff that people are interested in. I get some wierd stuff too. Like, I had someone come here after doing a search on gummi bears. What does my site have to do with Gummi Bears? In my pictures from Europe, there is a picture of a few Gummi Bears that we took on a train. In the text somewhere I mentioned gummi bears, so I sometimes get hits when people do a search for that, although it has got to be way down on the search engine list, maybe like site 112,00 out of 136,000 or something, I could not imagine that I would be high up on that list.

I do not sell your information to anybody. I do not use it to send you spam messages. My hosting company does not sell it to anyone. It is just something that probably 85% of all webservers out there collect about you. If you do not like it, then do not get on the web, do not use any P2P programs (they collect information about you) do not use e-mail (all e-mail messages list who its from, the e-mail address, and what servers it had to go through to get from you to me, unless you are a hacker and know how to spoof that information), do not even use Instant Messanger, as your buddy list is stored on a server at AOL or Microsoft. In fact, just cancel your internet service all together. Then you can be sure that this information can never be revealed to anyone. :-)