Flashes of Panic

I spent a few minutes this morning trying to figure out why this site has seen a surge in traffic over the past few days. It’s not as though I’ve been posting anything particularly interesting (at least, aside from the generic World Series post, which may have set some kind of all-time record; there’s a nice spike in the traffic graph around that posting.)

It turns out that I’m the top three Google Image Search results for cat face jack o lantern thanks to my original version around the time of the Sox’ last World Series victory. (Since then, I’ve been posting my images on Flickr, so the subsequent versions don’t direct traffic here.) (Anyway, this one is better.)

All of which goes to show how pointless it would be to try writing a personal weblog with the intention of attracting traffic. All my pages which are most-found by searches are ones I never would have predicted as high-traffic pages; the frequently-linked ones puzzle me as well. (There was a big spike last month when this page got cited in a comment—a comment, for pity’s sake—on Metafilter.) What’s more, they’re almost inevitably the older pages on the site.

If I considered traffic a measure of success (I don’t), and this site a success (I do, but by different measures), I’d be writing a book about “how to succeed in weblogging” which recommends throwing a lot of random stuff up and then waiting three years.

Now Playing: The Precience Of Dawn from Reconstruction Site by The Weakerthans

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