It’s been an eventful week in regards to traffic to my blog. Some of my articles hit the Digg homepage and resulted in thousands of visitors hitting my home page. (Digg is a user voted site with over 20k website submissions a day all hoping to hit the main page and receive massive attention)
But for me there is a downside to hitting the front page of Digg, besides the fact that the flood of visitors crashed my site (yep it did and I’m a little gutted about the thought of all the people who could not reach my site whilst it was down). The downside is the realisation that I seem to be addicted to Website visitor statistic on my site.
It almost like I feel the vistors will only come to my site if I physically see the counter moving. The statistics screen will say 3,500 new vistors today, then 20 seconds later I will manually refresh and it will say 3,503 visitors. WOW, a massive increase of 3 visitors, I better wait 20 seconds and hit refresh again to see how many more people come to my site!
It’s a strange feeling, akin to winning the lottery (disclaimer: I do not actually know what it feels like to win the lottery, I can only imagine it is rather like the exaggerated feeling I get after every 20 second click on my website visitor statistics page)
It’s like I get sucked into another dimension. Time seems to speed up and after only about 5 clicks and watching maybe what you believe is 5 minutes of updates, you glance up at the clock and the whole day has passed you by. I’m such an outgoing person but put me in front of moving statistic, especially one’s that concern me, and I’m addicted.
It is probably the very same reason I got addicted to that silly statistics based Facebook game Mafia Wars. What a waste of my life that game was, until I was able to acknowledge that I was addicted and then preened myself away. It was tough, there were days when I just wanted to check out who had attacked me or how many points I needed for the next level but I used every bit of distraction to help me move away from the game.
Yep, your right I moved to spending all my time on Farmville instead.
Thankfully, Farmville required too much work and left me bored of it rather quickly and so I was able to give up Facebook gaming quite easily.
It is time for me to admit I am a statistics whore. Yep, I know that’s obscene but it is the truth. For some bizarre reason I’m like any regular, normal person in public but leave me alone and I’m in statistics whore mode.
I’m a statistic whore. There it is I said it. I’m a statistic whore. Wow that feels good! I’m a statistics whore. Great, now everyone knows.
So now I have no excuse to stop being a statistics whore and to claim my valuable time back. Right, I promise I’ll start just after I check how many new visitors I had overnight…
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I guess the bottom line is that statistics are good if they are a tool, not a master. In terms of productivity, I usually estimate how long something will take, then see how long it really takes. That can be an embarrassing statistic at times. :-0
PS I don’t know why more people aren’t replying here. I find your challenge and posts really interesting. You could do with posting more specifics about progress with The Challenge and what what the big plan is though. There are plenty of interested souls with their RSS ears open.
Hi Gregg, nice to hear from you again and I’m glad you find my posts interesting.
You are right about my lack of posts about my progress, I was struggling to find a way to describe my method without creating undue competition, which happened very near the start of my challenge but I will work something out and post shortly. Thanks for the feedback, it is always welcome.