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.