Technical difficulty or lack of interest?

As I should have known, life has indeed intervened and prevented me from posting much content around here this week. We will optimistically look to next week.

Another problems seems to be traffic. Not to be vain or anything, but I do keep an eye on site traffic. I like to see who is linking here and what books, authors, or subject seem to be sending visitors. Alas, last weekend the traffic took a dive and hasn’t recovered. I went from around 250 unique visitors a day to around 130 and then yesterday we only managed 70! I can’t figure out why traffic would just take a dive like that. Site Meter says it isn’t on their end. Are there any techies out there who might have an explanation? If it really is just a lack of clicking on the site then I guess I will have to take my lumps. Odd – and rather lame -how this kind of thing effects you, but somehow it feels personal. Not much of a birthday present . . .

Anyway, look for the Michelle Herman interview and reviews next week. Traffic be damned, we will post even if no one is reading it! Seriously though, I do appreciate those of you who take the time to read and comment here. Thanks.

Kevin Holtsberry
I work in communications and public affairs. I try to squeeze in as much reading as I can while still spending time with my wife and two kids (and cheering on the Pittsburgh Steelers and Michigan Wolverines during football season).

3 Comments

  1. I for one am doing most of blog reading in a newsreader these days. In fact, since I started using NetNewsWire for the Mac, it’s so easy to use, I have little reason to visit a site and therefore less hits on your stats meter.

    You can try Feedburner (www.feedburner.com), which will give you an idea of stats coming from aggregators. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start – feed readers will only become more commonplace in time.

    Bud

  2. Bud has a good thought. More than that, I have seen Brandywine Books syndicated another blog, so people could read the posts there, and I would never know.

    Kevin, when I looked at the Site Meter stats before, I saw many search results in the referrals. I don’t interpret those as regular readers, hence my earlier comment on schools letting out. Perhaps the numbers this week better reflect Collected Misc. regular readership. Regardless, blogging up a storm may help boost the numbers. I’ll try to help, of course.

  3. Thanks Bud and Phil. The more I look at it I think it might be related to our Google ranking. Phil is right we used to get a lot of search referral hits and we are getting less so now. I am of mixed feelings about hits. Hits that are directly realted to posts, like author or book title, seem to me important because people are looking specifically for the content we have. But I agree that random clicks from Google aren’t regular readers.

    It is not really that big of a deal, it just bugged me that I didn’t know what happened. I will get over it . . .

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