The Global Impact of Curmudgeon-Alley

Okay, please be so kind as to pick yourself off the floor from laughing so uproariously at the title of this posting: The Global Impact of Curmudgeon-Alley.  It is not seemly to make such a display of yourself.

What Does It Signify

The above is a global hit map of the various places a page of my blog has been opened.  I did not add this little app to my website until I had been blogging for a few years, so many hits from my “early period” are lacking.  I did find what it says about the Internet interesting. That we are all interconnected and it is indeed a small world after all…cue the bluebirds Sneezy.   Or perhaps – more likely – it is an indication of folks having way too much free time and easy access to technology.

A Dark Side

There is a dark side, however.  Hits from Russia, Eastern Europe and China are always questionable.  A few years ago I was getting a lot of brute force attacks from Russia and eastern Europe attempting to log into the administrative back end of my site .  The hope of these bad actors being that once they  had forced their way on the hosting server they would have “opportunities”, the scope of which are way above my limited skill set.  I actually changed hosting companies for one that had better safeguards in place.  I just want to write my silly little articles and not spend my time fighting cyber-villains. Do I look like Batman? Or even Flash as a former girlfriend used to call me?  Although I suppose Flash was better than the appellation of Stud Bunny once pinned on me.  But I stray…

But Am I Read

Obviously I am getting hits from all over the world, but especially from the USA, Europe, and other areas where English is widely spoken. But there is a caveat  to all this, and that is the bounce rate. What is a bounce rate?  Very basically an interaction is considered bounced if an Internet user only engages with a website briefly. One SEO site gave the definition as : Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page. We all do it.  We put in search parameters into a search engine.  Links come up and you choose one, only to find that it was not what you were looking for.  So off to another site we go.  Or a link somewhere leads you to page that is of little interest to you.  Blogs generally have the highest bounce rates, somewhere between 65% and 90%.  My blog has a bounce rate that bounces around, but normally is around 80%, certainly in line with the other nut cases on the Internet.

Why So High for Bloggers

Likely, the most important factor is that most of us do not hold the opinions of others as close to our heart as our own. Another factor is the almost universal use of WordPress  as a blogging tool.  One site claims that 97% of bloggers employ this open source software. With the way WordPress works, the most current postings  are on the landing page (the first page you see when you go to a website).  Thus invoking the single page algorithm in the computation of the bounce rate. So unless the reader clicks on the Continue Reading link that I use on longer articles or a Related article link at the bottom of an article, it is one page and out.

My Epiphany

My bounce rate  used to bother me mildly, but two things changed. First, I now understand  better what a bounce rate is. The second being that I had the epiphany a few years back that I am writing mainly for my own amusement.  That really is good enough, even if it is only a rationalization.

Still Interesting

Still, it is interesting to see where folks have come from to my site.  The other morning after posting an article I noticed that I had visitors from Oklahoma City (probably my brother), someone in Ohio, someone in Sweden, and a fourth place that I am not remembering right now.  No, I cannot tell if a specific person is reading my blog, although I can guess sometimes. The app only flags where their ISP is located. On individual articles I only get summary counts of the hits, not who or where.

Conclusion

While it is nice to believe that folks from the four corners of the globe are reading my scribblings, there is no real way to know.  But I do know I enjoy writing them, and that it is as pleasant a past-time as many others, being, for the most part, harmless.

What is that trite old saying, a legend in his own mind… Home of the Little Known Blogger indeed.

Neigh, Neigh

Since I cannot hear this horse neighing any longer, it must mean it is time  I should stop.

And so it goes.

Subscribe to Curmudgeon Alley