Celebrating 1000+ hits! Who needs validation


Excitement in a museum stemmed from peeing on this water-washed wall!

I know, stats are boring.  It must be the continual manipulation of numbers into percentages that always seem to favor whatever argument the stats are used for.  A 50% shooting percentage is just that, but doesn’t tell you that over the course of 50 games, only 2 shots were taken and one happened to bounce off someone’s ass and into the net.  Today was a slow day, with another visit to a renowned gallery, the Uffizi Galleria, containing busts and paintings… no pictures allowed and my water confiscated.  Nothing much new to write about there, unless you count the waterfall wall in the men’s can intended for group urination.  How often do you get to pee on a well lit marble wall?

Which leads to today’s topic…the exciting world of blog website traffic. Ooooo….considering this site was started up only 8 weeks ago, and contains relatively little content of informative value, it’s surprising there are this many page views.  Even more surprising now that I know any Facebook updating that was supposed to happen hasn’t really kept anyone in the loop due to changes in privacy settings.  That magical number of 1000 simply means that in addition to the regular 1-20 daily readers, a few trigger-happy browsers found the site and decided to start clicking through each article.  It surely couldn’t have been due to content.  I am guessing it’s the lack of censorship and excessive, and improper, use of commas and the dreaded ellipsis.

Guess which days Facebook was actually driving traffic?

I have noticed occasional search strings that have bought users to the site.  Not surprisingly, “stoner abroad” does seem to flood the search results with the numerous posts from this blog.  Also noted for searching is “stoner modern art”, “museum no touching”, and “german pork knee”.  I will need to look into a content writing course, because I know there has been some mention of combinations of the above noted terms…but by no means is the material I have put together near optimized for such focused results.  Now I bet ‘permissible wall peeing’ will lead people directly to this article and the picture above.

I did mention a number of posts ago that the whole point of writing this was keep those few readers from any real news stories.  Maybe give a bit of a glimpse into the world of being on the road for a few months with laptop and idle internet connection at hand.  Yes, my time could be better used for porn surfing or youtube viewing…but I have made it a minor goal to continue writing at least 500 words per day for the duration of this trip.  72 days, with 72 posts of 500+ words should make for quite the volume of material.  For those of you calculator friendly, that’s 36000 words minimum, translating to at least 144 pages of material for a not so exciting ebook.  Add some filler picture content and if printed it might fill that tiny niche in your bookshelf between those university textbooks you’re still hanging onto and the wall.  Hey, if the contents of this effort remained buried in the fodder of much internet writing…so be it.  For me, a minor miracle to maintain a daily focus for more than two months, and is very therapeutic for breaking up any monotony related to culture overexposure.

Beer fuelled blogs may not be as interesting as those powered by mezzo litros of house wine.

Right, monotony and numbers…focus people…focus.  Daily updates on pageviews show two days with near 80 views, and many others with less than 5.  Significant spikes in readership on rainy Vancouver weekend days…and Mondays, which make me wonder if readers are bored or wishing they were anywhere but in the rainy miserableness.  The dedicated readers, and commenters, provide that extra little bit of motivation to keep writing on a daily basis, even if it’s about simply numbers.  Accountants could at least get excited about the fact they are looking at the ebb and flow of dollars.

So I have covered the number of pages that Christmas ebook will contain.  Look for it in the spam folder of your inbox next month.  That 1000 view milestone may not be much, but seems significant at this point since we don’t have much else to aim for.  The 4.8% alcohol in the 66cl beer fuelling this daily blurb is likely more interesting than this blog, and here’s hoping tomorrow has something a bit more exciting to sum up the day.  Cheers!


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