stats

My friend told me when we were hanging out this week (at Trad'r Sam's in the Richmond, sipping from a gigantic cocktail in a Salad Bowl with cocktail umbrellas and straws) that he has so much free time at work, his friends can't post blog entries fast enough to keep him entertained, and he keeps up with every single Valleywag post.
That's impossible! I said. That's like 80 posts a day!
It got me wondering who, besides him and my few friends who comment, is still reading my blog, which hasn't really been getting much love from me.

I finally got around to getting the statcounter back up yesterday - it had become inactive when Blogger forced me to upgrade, and I wasn't able to figure out how to get it back up until they redid part of their UI, and then I just forgot for a while as my postings have dropped in frequency and quality. Obviously for personal blogs de-listed from the Blogger directory and as unpromoted as mine, the statcounter is mostly to satisfy my curiosity - because there's only a few dozen unique visits, and I can usually figure out who most of them are by their location.
I have to say I'm flattered with the results so far.

I'm sure most of these are friends reading from multiple computers, or who have me on their RSS reader and maybe can't be bothered to keep up, especially when I'm probably not working hard enough to deserve their regular readership, but I hadn't posted in a day so it couldn't all be RSS hits - anyway it's totally flattering that this many people are still reading my blog, when it could still really improve in quality.
It's like when I get comments on postings from friends of friends like Nato's roomie Joel and find out they're still reading my blog - that's so nice!
I've definitely sometimes given thought to taking down some of my old blog entries, like the more embarrassing or inappropriate ones or just the really stupid ones, but I figure so few people are reading this let alone digging through archives, and they're basically all in my social circle, and nothing in it is that bad. Also, even though this is really flawed logic, I feel like if someone is going to go to so much trouble to find my blog, they kind of deserve to see it. It's hard to imagine it happening, except in pre-dating due diligence background checks (what potential employer would really go to the trouble?), and really - I never had anything to hide, because it's no real secret what a huge nerd I am.