Stats…Just Say No.

My reason for blogging has changed almost completely over the past few years.

When I first started almost five years ago, my 'objective' was the same as anyone's. I was going to write awesome posts and everyone was going to read them and tell me how awesome I was. Then I was going to get a book deal, get rich and famous and hire a 19 year old Swedish au pair despite the fact I don't have any kids.

Today, in all honesty, I don't care if I get any new readers or keep my old ones. Blogging has become something I do purely for fun and for a little bit of therapy. In fact, I regularly write blog posts that I have absolutely no intention of posting and never do. I just like writing.

However, I'm not saying I wasn't absolutely thrilled when Wil Wheaton linked to my review of his audio book and I got almost ten thousand hits in an hour, or when someone submitted my review of the new Indy movie to Stumbleupon and I went from a few hundred hits per day to over six thousand a day for a few weeks.

My point is, I can write about the stuff I like, or I can write about the stuff I know will be popular. I always choose the former…which is why this blog is filled with so many gargantuan posts with no comments.

However, I am a massive geek, which means I love looking at my stats…and that's a massive time sink that pretty much takes over my life when I check them once every month or so.

You see, if you sign up for Google analytics, you get a day by day graph of your visitors, where they came from, what search engine they used, what they searched for to arrive on your site…a massive amount of data.

With my last stat tracker, all I really got was how many hits I got that day. Google is just too much info.

I know it's not important, I know I don't actually care how many people read this crap…but the geek in me just won't let me rest until I discover why I suddenly got 500 hits in a couple of hours last Friday, when the overall average for that day is around 100 for the whole day.

Basically, don't check your stats, kids…just say no.