Snowed under by figures

No, this isn’t another blogpost commenting on the inclement weather.

It is true, though, that this week on The Other Side of Paris we’ve had another ton of snow dumped on us: sometimes two snowfalls in the same day. But small flakes compared to Washington and other parts of the world.

This is about the number of “hits” my blog gets. When I started, I was thrilled to get 20 "page loads" a day; I now average about 80-100 page loads daily; sometimes it hits a heady 150 plus. This is an amateur blog and I have no professional interest in having lots of people visit my humble domain, but it’s fun sometimes to see how many people have read a post and from which part of the world they turned up.

I use StatCounter to check figures although I also have Feedjit but I never look at it; my wife does though. Anyway, on Sunday I noticed something very strange: my page loads were way over the normal volume – and rising.

My wife pointed out that Feedjit was reloading every few seconds. Hmmmm. Most odd. Why? The page loads continued to increase and when midnight struck on Sunday the final total was, wait for it, 2,093. TWO THOUSAND!? Crikey, that’s about a month’s worth usually. I was puzzled.

Then I remembered that I received a comment on an old post of mine. I wrote about John Betjeman in my Pause for Poetry section in 2007 and a certain Brian Boyd wrote this comment last Sunday:

"I teach some of Betjeman's poems in my college literature course in Rockland, Maine, and I plan to read them your blog post which gives such a delightful snapshot of the man. Thanks!"
7 February 2010 14 :04

He also commented on a post I did about language on Friday last week:

"Anthony Burgess, who I see is one of your favorite writers (and mine), said that English is a creole, in other words, a dialect formed from two or more languages (in the case of English, a mix of Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Latin, French, and a few more) which has developed from an artificial pidgin (the simplified grammar-light mode of communicaiton used, for example, between the Angles of Anglia and the invading Danish vikings) to become a first language. Empires fall and their languages fall with them, but I wonder if the creole nature of English will give it more resistance to extinction?"
7 February 2010 14:42

It turns out that Brian Boyd is co-founder of The Acadia Center for English Immersion in Maine USA, which is decribed as “dedicated to providing the highest quality intensive English courses for adults”.

Mr Boyd must have given his students the links to my pieces on language and Betjeman and, voilà, click, click, click and my StatCounter goes through the roof.

I hope my gentle musings can be of some help to his students. Princess Perfect asked me if I was getting paid for the privilege of students reading my stuff.

“No, of course not!” I replied.

“Pity,” she said, “because if they all paid a dollar for each time they read your blog we’d be rich and we could go to CenterParcs!”

Alas, no. And the page loads have quickly receded. After the Sunday high of 2,093, Monday showed a hefty 1,221 page loads, Tuesday 350 while yesterday was 189. I’m sure I’ll be back to my normal 100 or so by today or tomorrow. Still, it was fun to have my 15 minutes of page-load fame.

BREAKING NEWS

I've just received this comment from Eric Shackle, a retired Australian journalist whose hobby is searching the Internet and writing about it. He's also a copy editor of Anu Garg's Seattle-based A Word A Day newsletter.

He informed me: The reason for the spike in your readership was that wordsmith Anu Garg showed a link to your amusing February story "Watch Your Language" in his AWADmail, a newsletter sent to more than 800,000 wordlovers worldwide. It's posted at:
http://wordsmith.org/awad/awadmail397.html