Navel Gazing

Later today, my second book, Spider Dunstan’s Teeth will be released for sale, so in honour of its release, a little omphaloskepsis is in order. Specifically with regard to the blog. The blog’s been running for about seven years and although for much of that time it was inactive, some observations can be made.

It’s a point of some curiosity for me that the blog appears to be rather more popular in recent times than it was in its earlier incarnation, lack of comments notwithstanding. When the blog was most active around 2010/2011, I used to get between 200 and 300 page views per month, but over the last few months, that’s increased to around 300 - 400 per month, not a huge amount, but a noticeable improvement. I tell myself it’s because my writing has improved so much, but you might have your own theory.

For a long time, the most popular blog post was the one about Australia Post featuring the much-loved Amanda. Even now, it is still the second most viewed of my posts, but a few months ago it was overtaken by “Regarding Satan’s Underpants”. My initial theory on the popularity of Satan’s underpants was that it included a video of the bullfrog, but I fear that the real reason might simply be that the heading includes the words “Satan” and “Underpants”, seemingly a clickbait combination to be reckoned with.

Number three on my all time most popular posts is “What Happened” and number four is the very recent “God and Spider Dunstan”. I have great hopes for “God and Spider Dunstan” as I suspect it might overtake “What Happened” which would give me two religiously themed posts in my top three. This in turn would encourage me to write more religiously themed posts and that, I suspect, would please me.

It’s very difficult to judge whether posts are well received or not. Google these days requires my faithful readers to log in before posting a comment, which I guess helps with spam but it has led to the demise of my regular commenter “anonymous”. I miss anonymous and wish that he/she could comment again. So in the absence of comments, page views seems to be my only measure of which posts are better than others.

My personal favourite post was the one about the rabbits. No, it was not the history of my conversations with PQB (tell me again about the rabbits) but was my waxing lyrical on the subject of two co-workers, Sunil and Darius. At the time I judged it to be my best effort, but it seems that my judgement is astray as the rabbits don’t even make it to the top ten.

For the record, the top ten posts by page views are;

Regarding Satan’s Underpants  -  2 April 2016

Australia Post  -  24 June 2010

What Happened  -  28 March 2016

God and Spider Dunstan  -  18 August 2016

What Happened Next  -  28 March 2016

Belgium and Belgians  -  7 April 2016

Updating the Scorecard  -  5 April 2016

The Most Popular Car Park in Japan  -  30 March 2016

God III, The Fisking  -  26 August 2016

First Anniversary  -  28 June 2010

Don’t forget to rush over and order several copies of my book. You’ll need one for each member of the family and a few for Christmas presents too. Detailed instructions can be found here.

Photo courtesy Gregg Tavares - https://www.flickr.com/photos/greggman/4305490456/in/photolist-7ysLj5-a5Vsnw-hGT6T-hGT8v, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34372224