My blog has visitor stats available and on some days I’ll check it and I’ll see that I have had zero visitors on a particular day. On big days, when I publish something, I might have 20 visitors. One day—I remember it fondly as June 29, 2023—I had 40 visitors, and that was the single day visitor record for my blog.
The most popular post of all time on my blog is surprising to me because it wasn’t all that original or well written, but also unsurprising to me because the title suggested more thrill than the writing provided. “The World Wide Boob Web turns 30” has 269 total views, but only one “like,” which means that people probably came looking for boobs and left disappointed—a story as old as time itself.
That post was about the early days of the internet when I was in high school and relatively new to boobs and searching for them online in the school computer lab. The best line was “Once you found the boobs, you’d hit print and pray no one came into the lab while the printer struggled like an emphysema patient, wheezing out one pained line of heavily pixelated boob at a time, only to stop printing entirely as it was overloaded with too much boob data.”
Still, you have to give people some credit for having depth beyond boob searching, because the second most viewed blog post here is “Gardening, poetry, and the relentless passage of time,” where I talk about coining a word, getting paid $10 for a poem published in a book, and seeing a relatively young guy collapse and seemingly die while I was on a walk.
And so the most viewed post on a single day, with 40 views, was “Back when the fearsome triglycerides roamed the earth.” In that post I wrote about my physical health and upcoming first-ever colonoscopy, which must have resonated in the very bowels of the people, though it also had a photo of a cute dog’s butt, which may have driven most of the traffic.
That one had lots of good lines, I think, but my favorite is probably “My doctor also told me that I am fat—fatter than last year even, when I was also fat.”
I think it’s difficult for anyone’s writing, or whatever your art, to catch on, and count yourself lucky if you have such success. For me, it’s a lifelong quest, and I’ve only just begun in earnest, here now in midlife. But I also recognize that good design matters, and my blog does not have it. It’s just not my thing. I’m probably capable of it, but every time I try to teach myself web design, or Photoshop, my eyes gloss over reading the tutorials and after an hour at most I think, “You know what? It’s good enough as it is.” But I know it’s not.
Which is why I keep thinking that what I need is a partner who supports me in this endeavor, like a girlfriend who is really good at graphic design, and also maybe she has some web development skills. But then I think, that seems like a lot to ask of one person. And so maybe I have two girlfriends, one who is good at graphic design and one who is good at website development. But who am I kidding? I can’t even find one girlfriend, much less two. So what might be ideal would be to adopt a dog that is good at graphic design, and I could easily have two dogs if the second dog is good at web development. And they could eat whatever they want if they did a good job, and maybe even get pictures of their butts on the blog, because that seems to do well.
In any case, I am not quitting the blog. I will write into the abyss if I have to, and when I reach the bottom, I will write my way out of the abyss, because all I want to be able to say is that I tried. If my tombstone someday reads, “He tried,” I think that will be enough.
Leave a comment