December 22, 2007
Saturday

Come February it will be twelve years since I first established an online presence with a classroom site, nine years that I have been a member of the online journaling community with these personal essays. At first, those of us who were members of the two journaling discussion lists mostly just read each other, although there were some who had a huge following, and still do. With the development of blogging software and easy-to-use scripted sites such as Live Journal and Blogger, many more people are using this form of communication for myriad reasons, some with large followings of readers who are not themselves writers, only readers.

I really don’t remember how I developed a readership. I’ve never been a “hit slut,” someone who keeps track of the numbers of visitors and who adopts strategies to attract readers. My readership stays steady at about fifty hits a day. I have 35 names on my official notify list (the one you sign up for), another half dozen or so people who never actually joined but to whom I send my “a new one is up” message anyway, and various others I notify when I think the subject might interest them (such as when I actually write about them).

Readership spikes during November and December when I post notifications to the NaBl0PoMo and Holidailies portals. Currently I’m averaging seventy hits a day. Most are directly to the latest post, so I know that came from one of the portals or from someone who got the link from me. But some come from search strings, mostly on Google and Yahoo, that my host reports.

A lot of the searches are on Christmas-themed strings: “Dragnet Christmas episode,” “I’ll be home for Christmas soldiers Bing Crosby,” “Christmas card for the bereaved,” “povitica origin,” “St. Lucia Day.” I get a lot of hits from “tent design,” “tent repairs,” or “silken tents,” some of which are from desert climes where people really do live in silken tents. I can sometimes track the progression of the school year through the authors of American literature by the hits I get for Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, E.E. Cummings, and other authors I mention or quote from frequently.

And some I just wonder about. “Garden State Parkway toll collector envelope” (sends the visitor to a piece about how I had to drive through an unmanned toll booth on the Garden State Parkway one night in January of 2000 because I didn’t know it was a toll road and I had no money with me — I’m still afraid to drive into New Jersey), “cool whip fridge life,” “one less mouth to feed beau bridges” (to a piece I wrote about a movie Beau Bridges made about the problem of hunger in America).

Lately there have been a lot of hits from people looking for information about Mabel Loomis Todd, the woman who had an affair with Emily Dickinson’s brother and then quarreled with the brother’s widow over how best to publish the the poet’s work, a quarrel so bitter (and why wouldn’t it be?) that it compromised the way scholars and ordinary lovers of poetry received the work for nearly half a century.

I’m just wondering why so many people are sitting at their computers on a Saturday night three days before Christmas looking for information about Mabel Loomis Todd.

But I welcome all my readers, the ones who read everything, the ones who read as they are able, the ones who look and leave when they find out I’m not going to be able to repair their tent, or find that the link from the search on “pantyhose stories” gets them the eulogy for my mother and not, well, something else.

Thank you for reading so much, so often.

To be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)