Friday, June 19, 2015

site-traffic spike

In this blog's heyday, before 2008 (which is when I temporarily abandoned this blog to go on my cross-country walk), my blog enjoyed about 350-400 unique visits per day, according to SiteMeter. I like SiteMeter because it seems to be conservative in how it counts visits; Blogger has its own built-in site-traffic monitoring system, but if I were to trust Blogger, I'd believe I was receiving far more hits—something on the order of 480 unique visits per day.

Ever since I came back to this blog, after Mom's death in early 2010, my traffic has been fairly stillborn. Currently, I'm averaging about 82-90 unique visits per day, which is a fourth of what I used to get. So I've been limping along.

Today, however, I came home from an all-day visit to the Seoul campus of Dongguk University and was shocked to discover that my traffic total was 860 visits and counting. None of this makes sense, and I can only assume it's a quirk—a mistake of some sort. I don't seem to be getting hits from a famous blog that linked to one of my posts; such an acknowledgment would have been nice, but it's a bit much to ask for. (I did once get an Instalanche, and I also once got a halfhearted shout-out from Steven Den Beste. Those miracles happened years ago, however, and are part of this blog's faded and ever-fading glory.)

I think it's safe to assume that the anomaly will peter out and things will revert to normal within the next twelve to eighteen hours.

How I know this is an anomaly: in the few minutes since I began writing this post, my hit count has gone from 860-something to 902. At the same time, the "visits in the last hour" count is registering only three visits. Something's not adding up, and I mean that literally: the hourly hits don't match the rapidly increasing total.

So yeah—this will straighten itself out by the morrow, I'm sure. In the meantime, I'll look at my inflated numbers and dream a little dream of minor fame.



UPDATE: SiteMeter is now more accurately registering the number of visits per hour. I'm going to easily surpass a thousand visits before the clock turns over. Most of my visits are coming through (1) Mike's blog, Naked Villainy; (2) a Google portal in Norway; (3) a Google portal in Sweden; and (4) one other portal whose ID I didn't catch because the hits from Naked Villainy have now buried it.

UPDATE 2: Blogger, for a change, is more conservative in its hit count. This post, for example, has received only three hits, by Blogger's count, since it was published.

UPDATE 3: As of 10:21AM on Saturday morning (6/20/15), I'm up to 1,240 unique visits. According to Blogger, however, this post, the post you're reading, has received only 17 hits. It's weird to think of Blogger as having the more sober site tracker, but there we are.

UPDATE 4: 11:50AM, and up to 1,455 now. I'd love to hit 2,000, but the numbers don't seem to be ratcheting up quite that fast.


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