Most hits ever? The day a Japanese website linked to my review of a Russian ballet company’s Giselle. Why they picked me, I don’t know.

Most popular article? “Top 12 ways to get cheap theatre tickets in London.” This one was written to drive traffic to my site and the topic was suggested by my husband, who does SEO stuff for a living and felt sorry for me. I wouldn’t have written it unless I found the topic interesting, though.

Finally: a guy who writes for the Guardian wrote a hysterical article called “Online POKER marketing could spell the NAKED end of VIAGRA journalism as we LOHAN know it,” which basically says that inserting juicier keywords and, perhaps, writing about stuff like Twin Towers conspiracy would be just the trick to jack up your stats. But …. fuggedabout it. I’m having too much fun doing what I want, cultivating my writing style and saying what I think to want to futz with things like that. It’s shocking, though, to think that the effects of inserting keywords like this is actually causing the writers at the junkier rags to change what they say just to drive traffic.

Anyway, thanks for the article, and I’m sorry to say I linked back to your bacon cat post instead of this one on my other blog – it made three people burst out laughing simultaneously so it obviously still deserves pimping.

So I was going to comment on the racism that’s flying fast and furious at the Obama’s this week. But then John Scalzi went off for me. So since I don’t have anything to say that can top this beautiful beatiful rant I’m just going to share the joy with you. Try not to read it anyplace where you cannot lay in the floor and laugh like a hyena.

After reading your post, I bookmarked you right then and there, and even put you in my elite “Daily” blog file. I’ve seen some lovely photos here, and even though I’m no scifi geek I did have fun learning about the term “Nerdgassing”. I’m definitely sticking around to find out the winning caption on the bath toys photo contest. Too many cutsie cat photo posts may get you demoted from my prized “Daily” group, but in any event, you’re probably bookmarked for good.

Oh, and thank you for that wonderful Fox/Baby Mama post.

I am kidding, of course, but I happened to post something about the freakish nature of Carrot Top’s appearance about week ago, and it’s still drawing about 60% of my traffic. The guy’s s a force of unnature.

Unlike your experience, however, my daily hits seems to drop back to the average range, though it’s usually a week or two later. What I notice, however, is an increase in the number of subscribers getting the daily e-mail with the headlines and excerpts. (Gotta ask Al about the number of RSS subscribers.)

There’ve been times when I’ve said to myself “I gotta come up with a Big Post,” and others when I’ve said “This is going to be a Big Post.” Usually, I have no luck with either. The Big Posts come when completely unexpected. It’s a source of frustration with my partner (he’s the back-end of the site; I’m the content): he asks me to tell him about a big article coming up a day or two before-hand, so he can do an advertising push on it (however he does that), but I honestly have no idea which will be the big ones. Frustration. I am, however, open to suggestions.

PS – Do RSS readers count toward ‘unique visits’? I ask because I generally don’t click through to sites that provide full-post feeds unless I feel the need to read comments.

Not unless John is using a very different traffic counter than I’ve ever seen. I’m pretty sure that feed readers pull the content into the user’s reader, and that whether or not the user scrolls through the items is not reported back to the source. You’d only get a traffic hit if you click through. It’s a frustration — I have no idea how many of my feed readers are actually reading.

I’m trying to decide if this is a self-fulfilling prophecy or simply a ratio of BaconCat to Scalzi fame, meaning, BaconCat fame is an exponent of Scalzi fame.