I suppose everyone wonders, when they start a blog, if anyone will actually read it. I told family and friends about it, so I knew I had at least a few readers from the beginning. Some of these friends were already blogging or about to begin, so I also had a few referrals from the beginning as well. Still, the first time I heard from a stranger was a kick, as was the first time I heard from a fellow blogger who’d added me to his blogroll. (That would be Brian Linse, by the way.)
My traffic has increased more or less steadily over the year. I can point to a few discrete events that helped. First was a referral from Matt Welch to this post. (Welch had in turn spotted a link to that post on Matthew Yglesias‘s old Blogspot blog.) I had just installed a hit counter a few days before, and was amazed to see over 200 visits on the day that Welch cited me. It was a long time before I had a day that good again.
I got another boost, both in terms of traffic and getting onto blogrolls, from Tony Adragna back when he and Will Vehrs ran a popular BlogWatch. (It’s kinda funny to me that blogwatching was a big deal back the days when I had a 20-link blogroll and plenty of time to read everything I wanted to in a given day. Ah, well.) Tony and Will did a nice job of highlighting new voices, and I considered it an honor to be in their rotation.
The next big traffic day I had was in early May when I criticized a post by Alex Rubalcava that claimed to show an embarrassing chain of emails involving Alex Michel of The Bachelor. InstaPundit had pointed to Rubalcava’s post, so when Rubalcava in turn pointed to my dissent, I got a second-degree Instalanche, which was about as much traffic as I’d gotten from Matt Welch in February. This remains the closest I’ve ever come to a cite from Glenn Reynolds, for what it’s worth. In the end, I was right to doubt this “scandal”, albeit for the wrong reasons.
In July I got my own domain and migrated from Blogger/Blogspot to Movable Type. (Note to all you Blogspot users who think you might want to migrate some day: Don’t wait until you have over six months’ worth of archives to import.) Here’s my monthly traffic stats before and after the move.
Since the move, I’ve gotten boosts from The Lefty Directory, from TAPPED, which was kind enough to put me on their blogroll when they went Movable Typing, from The Daily Kos and MyDD in the runup to the election, and of course from Atrios for pointing to my silly little poll about his Secret Identity. As noted before, that not only gave me my biggest day ever, it helped push me over 6000 visitors for December, making this my biggest month ever.
As things stand now, I’ve had about 45,000 visitors. I should get number 50,000 sometime in January, a bit before the one-year mark of my stat-tracking. An average weekday sees 220-270 hits. It’s a bit humbling to realize that. I’m very grateful to everyone who’s read my words, and especially to those who’ve made it a habit. I thank you all and I hope to continue to be worthy of your time in 2003 and beyond.