Tuesday, December 6, 2016

A new tower on my sandcastle


A: just keep showing up every day for 76 months.

Today Waldo Lydecker's Journal cracked a milestone: we reached and passed 400,000 page views by almost 167,00 visitors.

That's no great shakes in the world of blogging: over nine years, that's about 44,000 a year, or 3600 a month. And 3600 a month is what Waldo has been averaging for years. We've only cracked the 10,000 mark three times in the last seven: July 2010, April 25, and last month, when the total peaked at 14,597.

Considering we're at 6068 six days into December, Waldo may end up 2016 with a bang.

What does this mean? I have no idea. Blogger's analytics are both sparse and promiscuous. It counts every indexing spider and Macedonian teen. I used to track Waldo on Google Analytics, where the difference was striking. GA is a depressingly, overwhelmingly robust analytic program. Working with it was like trying to get a sip of water from a firehose.

It's complicated, too. Very steep learning curve. When its link to Waldo broke a year or so ago, I couldn't figure out why, or how to fix it. The user files led me a merry chase in a hall of mirrors, one article always teasing me off to another until I was so far from what I was trying to learn, it felt like R.D. Laing's definition of schizophrenia: wandering through a doorway in your mind, and losing your way trying to get back out.

So I let it slide. It's not as if Waldo makes any waves in the world. We have all of seven followers here. Non-spam reader comments are events.

I guess not drowning Waldo in his bath after all these years, as I'm sure Det. McPherson longed to do, scratches some itch. The internets have pretty much wiped out the market for freelance writing of the sort I used to do, stuff I got paid for. Here I can pretend there's a market for what I believe, and write. As Somerset Maugham advised,
Make people laugh and they will think you a trivial fellow. Bore them in just the right way, and your success is assured.
And it's cheap self-therapy for what we used to call, in my Seattle days, Unresolved Personal Issues.

But it does sound nice, doesn't it?

"Four hundred thousand."








1 comment:

  1. A hearty congratulations, Waldo. If the world were a better-educated, more introspective place, there'd be at least a couple more zeros behind that figure. Keep up the good work.

    ReplyDelete