Something extraordinary has happened to my stats. I check these about once a week, as a rule of thumb. I don't type very frequently as Real Life has a habit of taking over, dragging me away from the laptop most of the time, so I usually don't have very much to wonder at when I see them, apart from what on earth does anyone make of it if they land on my blog, say, from The People's Republic of China. I always assume most hits are a result of bored flicking. My main readers, such as they are, follow my link from FB and comment under that on my timeline, to avoid squiggle-squinting. They are mostly chums I don't see much of, who have moved to live abroad, etc. I rarely have a comment from a total stranger. Delighted when I do, though!
Meanwhile, I find it a little saddening that the certain-to-be-brief increase in interest in me here on Blogger is most probably because a bunch of people have taken against me, or at least against who they THINK I may be. A rowdy rabble seems to have attracted a minor mob of curious onlookers. Perhaps they think they heard a car crash. They are a strangely silent mob. Comments don't follow whatever reading has been done, not even abusive ones, from any quarters I don't recognise. Maybe I am doing the new clickers a disservice in assuming they are just over here to glower wordlessly at me, arms crossed. They might be intrigued, for micro-second. But the attention span of an average half-attentive Internet user with the other eye on the telly isn't known for its solid and lasting spirit of enquiry.
I know mine isn't. Unless it's a film on YouTube of Verdi's Reqiem conducted by von Karajan, just possibly. That is properly spell-binding.
Ah, well, it'll pass. Looking forward to the middle of next week and the resumption of the calm unfussy flat lining I usually enjoy; Blogger death for some, an enticing wide blue horizon for me.
"Perhaps they think they heard a car crash."
ReplyDelete:-)
Ah, the vagaries of the blogosphere. Up, down, disappearing followers... It's an inexact science.
:-) Pearl
Pearl, sweet of you to pop by. The sound of tinkling glass didn't reach Minneapolis, did it?
DeleteCuriosity is a besetting sin of blog readers as of other humans. Cause a ripple and they will click on your icon and then on your blog. Either that or you've had your first attack of referrer spam. :-)
ReplyDeleteI see a predictable spike when I publish a new post and then it drops back down again until the next one. The background noise comes from Google searches, usually for images, and from non-Blogger followers clicking through to see whether I've posted anything new.
PS Google Stats are notoriously unreliable because of the aforesaid referrer spam and the fact they count your own page-views.I use StatCounter.
Mmmn. Very enlightening, Perpetua. It might also be because I've had ac luster of posts lately, after a prolonged silence when the house was in chaos as we did all the work on it and it was as much as I could do to fix a meal of some sort at the end of the day and collapse.
ReplyDeleteI think it's the curious clickers, as I have had no images in the last three blogs, which are the ones published on the days of most traffic.
3" of snow down here. How is it at Cold Comfort Farm? Sleeping on a mattress in front of the wood-burner yet? What a time to get a suspect CH system...
Haven't been out to measure it yet but I'm guessing 4 to 6 inches lying snow. Heaven knows what the lane's like. It's still snowing....
DeleteWe can't leave the heating to come on automatically, but if we do it manually, making sure the valve's in the right position, it works fine, thanks. Still wearing the layers. :-)
I always ensure I click "Don't count your own page views" when I check my stats, as running what The Husband calls CrapCleaner alters all those kinds of options on any website I am signed up for, annoyingly.
DeleteThe traffic is very concentrated in the UK, and dwindling nicely now, although weekends are always quiter, seeminlgy. Soon I will be forgotten and overlooked again, which is most reassuring. I've never been out to court either popularity or notoriety, and the idea of ubiquity across many social networking or media platforms exhausts me at the very thought. There's no way that isn't spreading a person too thin.
Sadly my experience is that the "Don't count your own page views" function doesn't actually work. There have been so many complaints about it in the Blogger Help forums and nothing seems to have been done about it.
DeleteAccording to Blogger stats I've had close to 60,000 page views since I started. According to StatCounter which really doesn't count my page views or referrer spam, I've has around 36,000. A big difference.
36,000 is still far too many for my taste, I prefer singing in intimate recitals, not packed to the rafters operas! But good for you that ypou have such a world-wide following and have built a proper blogging township around it, es;pecially in such a short time.
ReplyDeleteWhen I blog I have a couple of people in the forefront of mind, dear old chums who now live abroad, one in SW France, the other in Singapore, and a half-dozen other people who retain an interest in my doings and ditherings, including The Daughter. It's the sort of stuff I'd regale them with if we were sitting around a pot of tea or coffee or sharing a bottle of wine. Girl talk. The Husband, as far as I know, hasn't read a single word of what I have typed all these years.
He could, but he hasn't. It's not for him, although most days it is in some way about him. It's for me, and them. US. The Gang.
As soon as you start blogging, you get page views. If you use the embedded comment format you and I have, that means 2 page-views every time someone comments.
DeleteIf you comment on someone else's blog, you get click-throughs from other bloggers, sometimes just to your profile, but sometimes onto your blog itself. If they like what they find and have time on their hands they may look at several posts - more page-views.
If someone puts your blog on their blogroll, you get page-views and quite a few of the page-views I've had today have come that way.
If you use images to illustrate your posts some may turn up in Google image searches and the more often they turn up, the more they rise up the Google ranking. 16 months ago I used a map of the Ypres Salient in my post on Great-Uncle Walter. I reckon I still get at least 3 or 4 hits every week on that image alone and a lot more around Remembrancetide.
Someone quoted the Pam Ayres poem "How can that be my baby" in a comment on my 3rd post 2 years ago, and my post still turns up in Google searches for that poem and gets clicked on.
I could go on, but you get my drift. :-) It's the breadth of the internet and the overarching power of Google search that accounts for a lot of my and other people's page-views and mine is still a small blog in comparison with many.