mystifying

I’ve been amused recently looking at the stats of visits to the blogs. It’s really quite curious.

I can write something I think is really great, and not many people go to see it. Just a handful, maybe one or two comments. Those days I reason, well, they’d have to come to the blog first, just to discover there’s something interesting posted. It’s not because there’s something interesting that new people come. To get them here before they can be sure there’s a treat in store, that’s a slow process of hooking random passers-by and keeping the regulars coming back.

Following that line, a core of regulars come by regularly, regardless of the quality of any particular post, and when a post has had one or two dozen hits, that’s it.

But there’s a strange thing going on. Sometimes one post will just take off. One I wrote about taking the tram from one end of town to the other has scored a whopping 646 hits*. The heck?? How are people finding it? And the one on improving a manuscript by sprinkling it with tabasco sauce has scored 154, a good ten times the average traffic for that blog. One about watering the garden has been visited 411 times. I think the watering post is just kind of ‘eh’, while one about the dinosaurs getting into the chocolates is better, but seen by only 7 people.

So you never know. Must be somebody posted a link somewhere. But who? Where? And why that particular post and not some better one?

One time I posted about putting the rats into the tissue-lyser at the lab, and that one came up when you googled ‘tissue lyser’. But otherwise the wild popularity (and I use that term relatively – my top score would be a slow day for some other blog) of certain posts is a mystery.


*plus 60 more since writing this 4 days ago. And I know it's not you clicking on the link!