Monday, June 25, 2007

Darned Discouraging

To my Polish visitors...Witac.

Dubbahdee, who comments here, asked a blog question to which the answer was "I have a stats counter at the bottom of my sidebar." It's called freestats, and it gives you a few things free in the hopes that you will buy their more sophisticated products. When I first got it months ago it was a fun toy, but I don't use it much anymore. I have been just assuming my stable 40 unique visitors per day then was pretty much what's happening now. As comments have been down, I wondered if I may have dropped to 30 or something.

Lo and behold, my login today tells me I was getting 80 unique visitors a day last week. Well gee. I didn't think I'd been writing anything better than usual, but perhaps, I thought, I am being discovered. I checked to see where my traffic was coming from. "No referrer" is the top preference, meaning that most of my traffic comes from you regulars who have me bookmarked. A strong second, however was a google search for people looking up pictures of ABBA, one of which I posted last December. No, I am not going to repost the picture. In the number 4 position was a google search in Polish for pictures of ABBA and #5 was Spanish googling for pictures of ABBA.

Grasping at straws, I saw that Maggie's Farm, an interesting multiplayer blog that does both commentary and linking was in the 3-spot. Ah, bless them, I thought. I don't go over and comment there enough. Nice people. I should put them on my sidebar and spend more time there. I dropped by, read a half-dozen posts but didn't see anything about my site, so I used the quicksearch option for "village." They had linked last week to my update on Melanie, Donovan, and Gilbert O'Sullivan.

This is discouraging. Here I try to run a nice middlebrow site, but what I am known for internationally is running pictures from the 70's of Bjorn Ulvaeus and pals. All the acts above are not even performers I liked at the time they were big, let alone now.

OTOH, there may be a way to manipulate the system. People looking for such pictures may be fuzzy-headed boomers reminiscing about scoring some dynamite weed - excuse me, visiting Mary Jane - and ending up with me. This may be exactly the audience I want to influence to stop voting for the closest equivalent to George McGovern every election, and inform them that no churches will force them to wear a clip-on tie if they visit. I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this, but watch this space for retro bands that I actually liked at the time, like the Loving' Spoonful or the Blues Magoos. Plus earlier pictures of Bjorn, who I guess is big in Poland or something. I will add in religio-socio-political commentary to draw the last hippies in.

5 comments:

Larry Sheldon said...

You worry too much

Jerub-Baal said...

If you want to go back a little farther, you could try Jethro Tull.

Nothing like some good ol' fashion flute-rock!


Of course, I have no idea how big they are in Poland....

bs king said...

If it makes you feel any better, I got 10-15 hits a day for about 6 months from people searching for images of a muffin.

Unknown said...

At least it isn't a someone who is certifiably crazy in North Carolina... :-)

terri said...

Just think of all the traffic you could generate from being all ABBA, all the time!!!

MY latest search referrer was "april Gilmore Girls atheistic agnostic"...I'm not really sure what that person was looking for