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Lunch in the USA

This is a Visualization of traffic on my Wheel of Lunch website. The wheel is often accessed around lunch time in the US, to find local restaurants. It only works in the US because it was easy to get working with ZIP codes, and I’m lazy.

This visualization shows the ZIP Codes that are being searched, over time, over a few days last December.

As each day progresses, the traffic tends to travel from right to left, starting in the eastern seaboard and ending in Hawaii.

You’ll notice a persistent number of hits that appear to be emanating from Fort Walton Beach, Florida. They all come from a single ZIP Code: 32547. This stumped me at first. I thought it might be a bot, but when I looked at the logs, I saw a bunch of frequent hits, from various IP addresses, with no real pattern to them. Searching “Wheel of Lunch 32547” on Google, I discovered that this ZIP Code is associated with the entry for “Wheel of Lunch” on the StumbleUpon service. So those 32547 Florida hits mostly correspond to folks hitting the site from StumbleUpon, which is a significant source of traffic for the Wheel.

Remember: The Wheel knows where you live. Do not taunt the Wheel!

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