Life as a blogger on the TypePad platform includes a daily confrontation with this:
That big bold number is the daily pageviews, since midnight GMT. (It has not occurred to TypePad that perhaps a rolling total of the last 24 hour period might be more useful. Instead, I experience the daily crash to zero at 10 AM Sydney time and then a long, slow climb to some unknown summit.)
But then there’s the line graph. HT has been stable for months now, between 2000 and 3000 pageviews a day except for a weekly trough corresponding to the North American weekend. This regular weekly low is my best signal that many of you are reading this at work.
But yesterday, clearly, some kind of breakthrough! A sudden jump to nearly 4000 pageviews. Was this the well-deserved long-term payoff of weeks of diligent reporting on Frequent Network mapping, and occasional think pieces on big ideas like the perils of average success? Is it about my forays into urban planning topics like pedestrian malls? Does it arise from the long investment this blog has made in trying to clarify technology debates? Does it show the impact of a link from Andrew Sullivan? Does it even have anything to do with my recent US speaking tour and related videos?
No, it was post about new transit-themed toys by Lego, a post that took me less than 10 minutes to prepare as it was mostly a friend’s email.
Am I focusing on the wrong things in life?