Things are not always as they appear. Back in January of 2019, my blog page visits mysteriously dropped off ... and continued to fall month after month through the time of Covid. I assumed this marked the death of blogs, and was probably affected by the disease ... though of course, one might expect numbers to improve when people are stuck at home all day.
Then recently, I began getting reports from people that they could no longer access my blog through their RSS feed. I tried to fix the problem, could not, and to date that problem continues.
However, a curious result has come out of that:
Apparently, my blog numbers never did fall off. Rather, they were stolen.
Blogs are not dead.
Just for the record, curiously, you feed stopped working for me around two week ago.
ReplyDeleteWhether your RSS feed is working or not, we still need our “fix” of the Tao!
ReplyDelete; )
A corporate-related friend told me today that in fact many publishing companies block the use of their sites against RSS feeds, because it plays havoc with measuring who is looking at the site - and thus makes it impossible to gauge the effect of site content on readership. So, I suppose, I absolutely shouldn't fix this "problem."
ReplyDelete~2 weeks here for me, too.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't read you in a while and for a second legitimately thought you had nuked your blog and given the whole affair up for good.
That this coincided with the sub-header change turned the situation from gasping to somewhat humourous.
Yeah I just realized I hadn't checked your blog in awhile either. Got some catching up to do
ReplyDeleteAre those individuals or just pages viewed though? My guess is the same number of people have just clicked more times while navigating the site.
ReplyDeleteAfter your feed has stopped working I find myself not remembering to go here that often, though when I do it usually takes me 2-4 page clicks to navigate to the post to read. Also, when I put my phone down and pick up the reading later it reloads the page (sometimes I end up doing that multiple times). Compared to RSS every article is just loaded a single time, period.
So after the feed has stopped working I read less posts but count for maybe 5 times the amount of views every time I read one.
Haven't heard from you in an age, Sebastian.
ReplyDeleteI had considered that possibility, and I'm sure your experience accounts for a significant number of page views. But RSS is a relatively recent phenomenon, and I also have numbers before it became widespread ... and my numbers are much better now than they were then.