This week, with the primaries over here and things having calmed down a bit, traffic on this blog cooled a bit, but remained respectable (by my standards, anyway). After 4,236 page views Sunday, we dropped to 2,765 Monday and so on through 2,434 on Thursday.
Then I came in to work this morning, checked my stats, and WHOA! About 3,800 not long after 9 a.m. Things cooled down some, but continued at a pretty good clip considering that I had only put up one very modest post all day (Fridays being so busy for me and all).
I dug into the analytics provided by Typepad, and there didn’t seem to be any one post drawing more traffic than any other. Nor did I find the sort of telltale that would usually account for such an uptick — a link from Drudge or Huffington or something like that.
Then, at the behest of some folks who know more about this stuff than I do, I actually paid attention to a pattern I had been ignoring because it had looked meaningless. I saw I was getting quite a few hits from something with the pathway "search.live.com/images," which was linking not to a post, but to "/2005/07/index.html."
To save you from clicking in circles, I’ll just tell you that "search.live.com/images" gives you a bunch of thumbnails of nearly-nude babes at Carnival in Rio. And while I haven’t clicked on all of them, I can tell you that if you click on the fourth one from the left on the top row — yeah, the one in red — you get, instead of an eyeful, my entire month’s worth of posts from July 2005.
And there you find, on a post from July 27 about a Brazilian aircraft manufacturer, a link to that very picture (which I’m not going to link to again, on account of that would be a cheap trick), in a reference to Carnival. I had totally forgotten it. Why, indeed, would I have remembered one inconsequential link among thousands? But why would it suddenly generate all that traffic now? Sure, it’s about that time of year, but it didn’t happen last year this time, or the year before.
So now I know how Will does it — sort of. But at least I did it the old-fashioned way — by accident.
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It’s almost funny how obsessed you are with Will’s site hits.
Thanks. Let me know when I get all the way there.
Forget about page views. It’s unique visitors that count. Page views usually include crawls by search engine robots and spiders, unless your analytics can filter those out. … And if you’re really competing with Will — who always counters your posts on this topic — you’ll have to start using more of the Rio pictures. That’s his bread and butter. Without those sexy pics his traffic would evaporate.
Whoa, Brad, where to start?
Let me be as delicate, yet as direct as I can:
Willy envy does not become you.
Yeah, that’s what I meant, Gordon.
Trouble is, Typepad doesn’t give me a “unique visitors” stat.
And Mike: Har-de-har.
Dang. I just tried setting up a Unique Hits counter, but I screwed it up. You can see it WAY at the bottom in the rail on the left.
Try Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics/
It’s free and will tell you everything you need to know about site traffic.
Willy envy? Hmmm. Don’t want to mention where my mind went with that one. I do however consider myself to be quite a unique visitor, for whatever it’s worth. David
This may not fit the content here, but it does concern unique visitors, so here goes.
Sometimes I wonder why human beings ignore the facts they don’t want to believe and wholeheartedly latch onto whatever stretch of the truth makes them comfortable.
The Dogon tribe of Mali, without ever having had the use of a telescope, has believed for centuries that Sirius has a companion star that orbits it once every 50 years.
Astronomers discovered in 1915 that Sirius actually has a companion star that orbits it, according to more recent calculations, once every 49.9 years.
Who told the Dogon? According to their mythology, visitors from the Sirius system who mated with their ancestors and thus bred homo sapiens from something that must have been a bit more apish.
That may not fit the Huckabee value system or triangulate for Hillary, but the knowledge of the Dogon about Sirius has to mean something.
Yes, it sounds a bit like the movie “KPax.”
Somebody had to have told the Dogon about Sirius.
Who?
Wow, weldon. That’s a pretty big leap from the topic at hand, but I like it.
Who told the Dogons?
According to Carl Sagan and others who doubt the Dogon myths, the Dogon people were not an isolated culture. Cultural contaminaton from European, Egyptian, Greek, Arab or other traders who were in contact with Dogons could have shared the news about Sirius and Saturn. One theory is that researchers themselves spilled the beans in 1920, early in their 20-year stay with the Dogons, then “discovered” it again later.
I like your version better, but it’s been debunked pretty well over the years.
Some folks have used the Dogon Sirius story to support the notion that extraterrestrial aliens visited Earth in the distant past and left universal truths with humans at various points around the globe, the so-called “ancient astronauts” theme.
There are several prosaic explanations, as Gordon points out. I take another tack: how likely is it that a people who received the wisdom of the universe from little green men would also practice female circumcision, a//k/a female genital mutilation, as the Dogons do? To make matters even worse, they have the stinking blacksmith do it! Picture this:
Greetings! We come from another planet and are here to tell you wonderful things.
Gotta run off now to another part of your planet and let others know these secrets too.
I’ll go for the prosaic.
You know, I’m sorry I brought this up, but I do find it more interesting than Brad’s hit count, Dogon it.
Actually, their visitors weren’t little green men at all, but shining fellows about seven feet tall with overly large eyes and four digits on each hand, lacking opposable thumbs.
Once in a while, they’d come over to Momma’s house to eat chicken, but they had trouble holding the drumsticks, so they eventually quit showing up.
For some reason, they listened only to keyboard music.
weldon VII –
Nice recovery.
Too bad about the opposable thumbs: no tennis, no darts, no bowling. What do they usually eat? They must be relegated to a liquid diet, probably used straws, no? Even chopsticks require a thumb, but I gotta admit that when eating at an Oriental restaurant I start off with chopsticks but move on to a spoon after the hunger pangs become unbearable.
As for Brad, he’s jut looking for more traffic. During the primaries he got lots of calls and simply wants the heightened interest to show up on the blog. It’s not just an ego thing, although there’s some of that. He wants to see if he’s bogging about the stuff folks in and around Columbia care about.
I think that he is, that there’s potential for growth, and that folks would pay more attention were they not too busy doing the things that the Internet was designed for: paying bills, pornography, and gambling.
Let me close with a tip: I’ve found that one indicator of a really good Oriental restaurant is this sign in the men’s restroom:
Maybe it’s just me, but I find that reassuring.
What happened to the hits counter, Brad?
Apparently, the big fellows mated with the Dogon women so their species could develop opposable thumbs with which to mutilate their women.
Come to think of it, Mike, I never saw any of their women. You’ve got me wondering why they came to see Momma.
All they ever ate around me was chicken and sourweed. They’d grab the sourweed between any two adjacent fingers.
They drank water straight out of the spigot.
You’re all ‘flicted.
“Thanks. Let me know when I get all the way there.”
I’m thinking one more post dedicated to the subject ought to do it.
Incidentally, I think the comments on this thread should receive an award for best subject divergence ever.