Two Million!

Sometime in the middle of the night, the magic Google counter on the blog passed the 2 million hit mark.  I have to say I'm surprised, and honored.  I guess.  It's been somewhat over three years since I began the blog, and except for a rare travel day, a hurricane, and Blogger outage, I've managed to find something to say everyday.  

So where do the hits come from?  I know my parents still look at it daily, to see what's going on, without having to pry much.  A few "real life" friends check in now and then.  Charlie emailed to congratulate me this morning on the 2 million.

Most of the hits on a daily basis come from Google searches, and probably most of those come from so called "Rule 5" posts; posts with pictures of girls, named in honor of Stacy McCain's 5th in series of rule on how to get a million hits in your first year.

5. Christina Hendricks

Or Anne Hathaway, or Natalie Portman or Sarah Palin bikini pics. Rule 5 actually combines four separate principles of blogospheric success:

A. Everybody loves a pretty girl -- It's not just guys who enjoy staring at pictures of hotties. If you've ever picked up Cosmo or Glamour, you realize that chicks enjoy looking at pretty girls, too... (NTTAWWT.)...

But more that pretty girls, people will even hit on pictures of not-so pretty girls.  My number one post, with some 64,000 plus hits featured this wannabe zombie:

which seems to have garnered an extraordinary number of hits compared to the weekly Rule 5 posts which traditionally feature relatively classy actresses and models, even if they are even less well covered by fake blood. 



In fact, of my top 10 posts, 9 are "Rule 5 posts", and one is the zombie post above.

The second highest post is an old "Shannon Tweed" post, that was one of my first official Rule 5s.  It got hits for months and months, and still gets a few, every time she and Gene show back up in the news.  The Rule 5 hits are very spotty; some gorgeous girls get all but ignored, others seem to come and go.  Right now, Stana Katik of "Castle" fame is a heavy hitee ; probably due to a new season having started.

I have to give much of the credit for these hits to Wombat-Socho at the other McCain whose weekly compilations of a large number of mine and other Rule 5 posts is a major source of  hits, some 50,000 total.  A lot, but not the majority.  The day or two after one of Wombats Rule 5, I can get a few hundred additional hits, producing a weekly surge of hits on Monday, or Tuesday, and declining to a low for Friday and Saturday.  I've gotten into the habit of trying to have some kind of 6 AM eye opener as the morning post each day, just as a challenge to myself and because positive reinforcement is such a drug. I also get a fair number from other Rule 5ish bloggers, most notably Pirate's Cove, The Daley Gator, and GOODSTUFF.

Daily hits in blue, 7 day running mean in red

However, all totaled, the top ten posts account for some 350,000, leaving the remainder unknown (without a lot of manual work of going through some 6000 posts and adding up the hits; which would have been a good idea to start, maybe oh, 2-3 years ago).
 
About a year ago (in fact, it was the week of the Superbowl), my hit numbers, which had been steadily rising, suddenly dropped off from something on the order of 4500 per day to something more on the order of 2000 per day, where they have remained, with some ups and downs, since then.  I'm not quite sure what happened, but it almost had to be some kind of change in the way Google listed the blog in it's searches.  I can't really complain; Google hosts the blog for free, without any advertising; I pay a little for image storage, but not very much, so they're not getting much out of it.  Every so often I consider adding advertisements (other than the Amazon gizmo on the side that might as well not be there, I don't get anything off it) , but I haven't quite felt poor enough yet.  So, until then, my content is free, and as they say, free is worth what you pay for it, or maybe even a little more.

Of course, I have other favorite topics.  One, of course, has been the beach and Chesapeake Bay.  I try to put out some kind of Chesapeake Bay post daily, although I'm not dogmatic about it.  When it's not a beach walk (I find the beach endlessly entertaining), it's likely to be a news article garnered from the Chesapeake Bay new service that the EPA and other federal agencies pay for.

The beach also leads to other things, including butterflies, fossils, ospreys and eagles.  I even go fishing occasionally and post on those.  Speaking of which, one of my early posts, this one, featuring a picture of an osprey sitting on a drowned backhoe in the Bay from a fishing trip long past, has also been a perennial favorite.  I'm not sure if it's for global warming/rising seas, or just as an odd photo.

I do politics, of course, and my recent "Obamacare Schadenfreude" series seems to be a success, despite the fact that Dad has become bored with it.  Which ironically, might be part of the whole idea of it.

Well, I do seem to be rambling here a bit.  Thanks for stopping by!