The Little Red Dot from Brussels

My blog doesn’t drive the most traffic in the world. In fact, it’s pretty sad in comparison to some of my friends, but I write, not because I enjoy it, but because I have to write. It’s in my blood, it always has, and it slave drives me like an obsessive compulsive scrubbing permanent marker off his hands.

Still, it is nice to be read. So I like to watch my blogtraffic, despite the way wordpress’ blog stats leave me wanting for details. Over at what I now refer to as ideonexus beta, my former blog life, I took a glimpse at my stats on statcounter and saw this single spike of activity:

Ideonexus Beta Traffic Spike

So there were 96 page hits in one day, but only six unique visitors. I immediately drilled down on my web stats to learn more about who was taking so much interest in my blog that day. It began at 6:06 AM Eastern Time, when google.be referred this user to my Science Fiction VS Fantasy article, which led them to read Things are Getting Better and Legalize Prostitution at 6:27AM my time. They then meandered about the site for a bit, glancing at, but not reading, my Anthropogenic Global Warming article, until they found an extensive essay I’d written in May 2004 on Fascism in Film at 7:08AM. From this point they continued on, reading more than 16 articles from the site (These were from back in the days when my articles were New Yorker in length.).

Finally, at 10:50AM, they’d finished browsing this old blog for the day, having spent almost five hours reading my old writings. What an incredible ego boost this person has given me, and who I only know as this little red dot in Brussels:

Visitor from Brussels

This has happened on my old blog maybe a few dozen times in about four years of writing for it. Not much at all, but knowing that a few dozen people enjoyed my writing so much that they burned the better part of day immersed in it makes this obsessive behavior of mine almost worth it. : )