Another traffic spike
It’s kinda funny, I was just talking to somebody the other day about being a successful blogger, where “successful” was defined as some nebulous melange of peer respect, audience loyalty and overall popularity. I remarked that I really didn’t give that much of a shit whether I was successful or not because I’m doing this strictly for my own purposes. It’s not like I’m selling ads or trying to retire on that sweet, sweet blog money or anything. So I just write what I want to write, and if folks like it, great.
But, I allowed, I do feel fairly happy about my audience’s response to what I produce here. I get a fairly steady stream of fan mail, as well as a fairly steady stream of hate mail which is itself just another kind of fan mail. I get a pretty reliable 1,500–2,000 visitors per day, with a couple of big traffic spikes per month. What’s not to like about that?
It’s interesting that I was just talking about that the other day, and along comes another big traffic spike today. The article I stayed up late last night writing about implementing 0° drop shadows entirely with Web code (meaning with HTML and CSS, for the acronym-savvy readers out there) has gotten linked around the Web by a bunch of sites frequented by other Web nerds like myself. Notable traffic spike today, running somewhere around 16,000 visitors before lunch.
What’s interesting about this to me is that the things I’ve written over the past few years that have gotten the most linky attention have been wildly diverse. There’s a travelogue-style article on Pyongyang’s Ryugyong Hotel that even today, more than a year after I wrote it, gets a couple thousand visits a week. There’s this series I wrote about H.264 video compression; that got many thousands of visits when I first published it last spring. And of course there was this article on vintage mechanical typography that gave me my first 65,000-reader day. Now this, an in-depth technical article on an obscure point of Web design.
I guess you could say I’m unpredictable.
Anyway, I just thought that was kind of interesting.