Confessions of a Stat Virgin

I have done something stupid. Yes, that’s right, li’l ol’ me has gone and obtained one of these statcounter things. I don’t have it displayed on the face of this blog, as I think they’re unsightly, and they mock you when they haven’t clicked over to the next number.

So why did I get it? Well, I was curious to know what people searched for when they find my blog. However, it hasn’t been up for very long, so I don’t know, yet… although the one person asking about Big Brother Uncut is definitely looking in the wrong place.

But since starting the thing up a couple days ago, I have noticed how many hits I get, how many are unique and how many people return.

Things that usually are a benchmark for a site’s success.

However, as I’m relatively new to this site stat thingy, this little marvel of technology has planted a seed of paranoia. You know, these people keep returning to my blog, and if I have nothing new for them, I immediately feel guilty… as though I’ve let them down due to my not meeting a daily deadline enforced by my conscience.

Yes, it’s stupid. I don’t need any of you to point that out to me. But I appreciate your steadfast approach to analysing my character. Please fuck off now.

This kind of constant self berating cannot be healthy, though. This statcounter thing must be the tool of Beelzebub, or some other demon that represents the evil side of the moral spectrum. First it tempts you with informing you of your readership’s interests and what part of your site they find most interesting, but after a while you begin to wonder.

F’rinstance, if one blog post got more hits than another… you wonder what you did wrong in that other post. Why was this one post loved more than another? Why dost thou hate it? Why?

And the turmoil goes on.

Each day you try to better yourself, by writing something just that little more insightful, more humorous, or more wacky. Your mind trials over nifty little analogies that you could somehow incorporate into your next post, like a miner chiselling away on a slab of granite.

Never once does it dawn on you that nobody actually cares how good your post is. They just like reading your site.

Of course, if you take slabs of this post and interchange the words “You”, “Your”, and “Yourself” with “I”, “Me” and “my”, you get the point of my post.

In actuality, I had targeted one particular person who reads my blog with this post. They know who they are.