So . . . I have noticed a strange thing going on with my blog over the past couple of weeks. My hit count has been going through the roof. My previous daily maximum has been almost doubled (on a regular basis!) and now serves as my daily minimum. I exceeded my high for number of hits in a month by about 25% in April simply due to the traffic in the last week of the month. And I wish it was because I was actually, really, developing a following, but I can't convince myself that this is the case.
You see, starting about ten days ago someone or something in Latvia and the Netherlands took a great interest in this blog. Whomever this is accesses the blog every three hours opens seven pages on it. Why is this a problem, you ask? It's the same seven pages every time! And it's not even seven different pages, but instead three of one page (this one), three of another (here), and one of these. Why on earth they would do this, I have no frickin' clue.
And while I like having a (nominally high, at least) hit count, I know it's all a sham. My Latvian and/or Dutch follower either is a) obsessive-compulsive, b) really, really inspired by three of my posts, c) likes the posts as toilet-reading material and eats a lot of fibre, or d) some sort of computer program that access the blog on a regular schedule. I'm thinking it's (d).
There are advantages, of course, to the situation. It gives me something to write about. And it allows me to boast a very high hit count (at least compared to previously) to anyone who asks (though no one does). And, in a sense, it makes me feel good. Just like we don't believe TV ads or political promises, and yet we kinda do, even though I know the hits aren't real I still get a kick out of the numbers. I saw a talk by a professor from UBC (Darren Dahl) where he discussed a situation where people tried on clothes that claimed to be a smaller size but the participants knew the sizes were false (the clothes were bigger than they claimed to be). And even though the people knew they weren't really a 32 waist, wearing jeans that said they were made them feel good.
Would I like this situation to end? I think so. I would like to know how many people are really, truly accessing my blog and not some false hit count. I could do the math and subtract 7 hits every three hours, but I didn't get into blogging to do math. Besides, it's not necessarily every three hours - sometimes the hits don't come, and other times they do but it doesn't seem to be my Dutch-Latvian reader. But if it did stop, I think I would miss the hits, and feel like the new numbers were inferior even if they were real.
The best solution, of course, is for all of you real readers to pass the blog along and recruit your friends as readers. Then I wouldn't need this uninvited fake program/OCD-sufferer to fill up my stats.
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