Head Tale

…sometimes you have absolutely nothing to say.  (I've got a fun one lined up for tomorrow though – promise!) 

For some reason, this emptiness of ideas inspired me to check my stats. As I suspected, my number of “unique visitors” are down by about 2/3 from an all-time high right around that “50 Ways To Improve FIMS Entry” earlier this month.  Not sure if it's just a Christmas/New Year's lull or if it will continue at this level (or sink more, the further removed I get from library school.) 

For a guy who's fairly open about sharing information, I have an issue about sharing my stats traffic.  This is partly because I'm not sure how accurate it is (does my hosting company manage to filter out visits by spammers, spiders, and other non-traffic traffic?)  Another issue is how misleading the numbers may be even if they are accurate (my ISP counts daily unique visitors but if somebody visits on a daily basis, they might count as 30 “unique visitors” in the month-end stats.  Or if someone visits from multiple computers and/or using multiple methods – maybe using an RSS reader sometimes while coming directly to the site for articles of interest – that may screw up the stats too.)  Finally, there's simply as issue of numbers for web visitors being meaningless.  I know of one web site owner who's making a living completely from running a very targeted, niche blog/information portal which allows him to run a much larger group of sites that (as I understand it) aren't nearly as lucrative. 

I'm not making any money off this site but what I'm saying is I'd rather have 100 readers who get a lot out of my scribbling than 1000 people who come here randomly because I happen to use words like “Lindsay Lohans” and “sex tape” in one my entries (just as an example.)  And at least my site didn't go down due to the traffic for the third month in a running which is a nice change. 

Anyhow, for having nothing to say that was…well, a lot of nothing (a skill that also came in useful while writing library school essays!)