I haven't looked at my traffic stats for awhile so imagine my surprise when I log in today and see that I'm really close to my bandwidth limit. I had an issue with this shutting down the blog back in November and December but had my bandwidth limit doubled, figuring that would suffice until I was out of library school and presumably my traffic would drop off.
Instead, while it took me nine months to reach my initial bandwidth limit, it only took three months to double it to the new limit.
I think a lot of people who read the blog before still do since I'm still writing about library related issues a lot (even if I'm not writing as directly about my experiences at library school.) Plus I've gained a lot of new readers – joining the Sask Blogs aggregator got me a lot of new visitors. Plus there's the simple fact that the Long Tail is a reality – the more I post, the bigger of a “back catalogue” of posts I have to attract hits which builds my traffic faster.
If you're a regular reader, try to guess which post of mine gets the most hits? One of the papers I've uploaded? My “50 Ways To Improve FIMS” master rant? Nope, it's a throwaway post from April 2006 (literally, the title is “Sometimes I Post Just To Say I've Posted That Day“) I've even gone back and added a disclaimer in the hopes that somebody hitting that page explains how they found it. My best guess is that it's because I've got a couple rare pop culture references on it – one to Eminem and one to Darth Vader.
Anyhow, every word I type is taking up more bandwidth so I'll stop now. I've got a call in to the support of my blog hosting company and hopefully this can be addressed before the site goes down. But if not, it should be back up on Monday. (I use a Canadian company but am still surprised they don't apparently have tech support on Sunday. What is the world coming too?)
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