Sunday, May 28, 2017

Return to Set Point: Normal # of Views

That was odd.
According to Blogger stats, last September my blog-views, normally 25-100 per post, jumped to 100-300 views per post.
Last year I'd celebrated reaching 500,000 views since this blog started in October 2007, and in the past nine months that went up to … [checks stats] 665,531. 

But over this past month, May, views dropped back to the usual 25-100. Huh. Maybe I was a school year project?


I'd looked into installing a better stat-counter (thanks, Michael), one that would show where views came from, but I decided that would make me too self-conscious. 
[Also, there are people who if they are here, I don't want to know.]

It didn't matter, anyway, who was dropping in if they didn't ever comment, which they didn't. That's a main thing that  matters about readers--if they comment or not. If they don't, I feel like I'm just writing to myself and my usual handful of bloggy friends. 
And I like that!

The other thing that matters about readers is if they write too. 
That's what I miss in this time of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.--not readers, but other bloggers, other people who chat in long-form. 

Of course there are still lots of specialized bloggers who write about one thing--politics, craft-making, their fandom, and the like--they're more like journalists.
I miss bloggers who are more like letter writers, writing variously about our lives, what we're thinking about, reading, watching, eating, doing.

So.
Just to note that blip.

Here's a thing that I'm doing:  
I'm house sitting Astro this Memorial Day weekend. I brought along a hand sewing project: I sat in the backyard with the dog  and cut out the pattern from a T-shirt I'd bought in Spain at the end of Camino 2001 (one month before 9/11...), which I'd worn to shreds, and I sewed it onto a new T-shirt. 
I stitched around the pattern with embroidery thread to strengthen and stabilize it---I hope it'll last a few more summers.

Here I am at the coffee shop this Sunday morning--(the laptop camera doesn't really show the stitching)--the old T-shirt design is cartoons of sites along the Camino:

2 comments:

Michael Leddy said...

Yay for creativity in your own backyard, or someone else's.

Comments seem to be a fading form of communication. So many people read in RSS and never click through. And many big-time bloggers have turned off comments to avoid toxic people.

I've had a few e-mails from people who have never commented but who read my blog and just want to say hello. I love that.

Fresca said...

MICHAEL: Yeah, comments on blogs aren't what they used to be--I have several friends, including Marz, I met through comments years ago.
You're the last blogger I've become friends with that way--and that was three years ago, I think.
Ah, well.
I accept that most people prefer to talk in other social media.

E-mail is nice--I don't post my e-mail here, so I never hear that way from strangers, but most of my friends do comment privately in e-mails.