An unusual feeling

When I first started writing this blog, I didn’t know where it would take me. I still don’t, to be honest, but the path which I find myself down now is not the one I thought I’d be down.

Popularity is an odd phenomenon. I’ve never sought it, perhaps because I fear it would show me for the social charlatan that I am. Instead I tend to seek obscurity, and in social gatherings I’m the aloof one in the background somewhere.

Some unexpected things have happened to my blog in the last couple of weeks. Firstly, people have started to actually read it. What’s more, they are commenting on what I write. This wasn’t what I expected when I started the blog.

It’s great – and entirely a surprise – that people are reading what I write, and that they are coming back for repeat visits. I had a lot to express when I started the blog – I still do – but I wrote thinking that ultimately the only person that was likely to be interested was me. That didn’t matter one jot – I needed to express things, and writing it all formally gave me a framework within which to work that was comfortable for me. Making it public on the Internet forced me to think about what I was writing, to a degree.

I’ve worked in online retail, have published my own writing on the Internet before, and am familiar with the various methods of tracking site traffic, so when I set up my blog I added Google Analytics tracking to it. I may have had low expectations as to other people visiting, but I still wanted to see the figures. I’ve also done some other tricks, such as trying to optimise my site keywords to help make the entries show up better in search engine results. The first three months went pretty much as I expected. Visitor numbers could be counted on a couple of fingers most days, and page impressions across both hands, often easily. The line was flat – my blog was, predicably, going nowhere fast.

However, I got my first comments really quite early on and was over the moon. Someone had not only read what I had written, but they had empathised too! Fantastic!

Then a couple of weeks ago the slow creep of comments started to speed up, and finally overtook the number of articles I’d written. At about the same time, the page impressions per day were starting to ramp up. On April the 7th, I had my first day where page impressions excluding my own visits and spider traffic went over 100. Add in the pages viewed in RSS, and I hit close to 150 page views. In the last month 132 different people have viewed pages on my site, including visitors from five continents, and places as far apart as New Zealand, Mexico, Poland, India and Russia. Most visitors are from the US, and the UK.

Is my blog popular? Of course not – not in the grand scheme of things. A grand total of 11 people subscribe to my RSS feed, one of those is me (to check it’s not broken), and I suspect most of the others are amongst those who also visit the site itself regularly. Popular blogs will do many tens of thousands of page impressions a day, and will also have thousands of RSS subscribers.

I feel popular, however. And for someone who courts obscurity, that’s an odd thing. I think, perhaps I feel safe hidden behind my false name on a website that can’t easily be traced back to me. I also feel safe because those of you who do read what I have to say understand me, most of the time. You understand because you have Asperger’s or a similar condition. I can’t tell you how unusual that feeling is. I’m usually the one in social settings that feels they don’t fit in, and that they don’t have anything useful to say – hence the aloofness off in the corner. It doesn’t work that way here though, and so to each and every one of you that has read what I have to say, and especially to those who have taken the time to comment, I say thank you. I hope you’ll continue to come back and provide me with interesting comments.

There is of course another reason for writing this article. It demonstrates quite effectively one of my Asperger’s traits. I can chat away in detail for hours about information that I’ve gathered that only has any significance to me. That famous Aspie trait works in writing too!

Why on earth would you want to know how many visitors my site has had? I still felt I had to tell you though…

Related posts:

1. The mechanics of visibility It’s a funny old game, this blogging lark. When I...
2. Feeling the fear If you are on the spectrum, then you probably know...
3. Sitting on the advocacy fence I got a shock last week, and it has made...