A Little Bit of Meta for the Weekend

When I started this blog I wanted to write regularly, and I wanted to make friends, and I did both those things. Of course, I noticed that other people were doing more than that: getting their name out there, doing professional networking, even making real money. I've actually done a very small tiny bit of that, under my real name [and if you don't know about my other sites and want to, email me & I'll send you the links], and a couple of years ago, in anticipation of moving and maybe having more writing time and less regular income, I put up a BlogHerAds link on this site (over to the left, there).

The ad's still there, and the BlogHerAds money, in the low two digits and mostly donated back out to whatever cause seems to need it, comes in a couple times a year. But this personal blog has never really hit the big time (partly due to my own lack of focused attention), and over the years it's become a quiet little backwater populated--as far as I can tell--by my friends and family and maybe a few serendipitous lurkers.

Actually I'm not entirely sure who reads, unless they tell me, because until last week I hadn't checked my statcounter for months.

Then, last Monday, a couple of major players linked to a post I wrote on this site, just as I was dusting off the keyboard to post every day in November for NoBloPoMo, and at a time when virtually everyone in the blogosphere was reading and surfing around online even more than usual. And in one day, more people viewed this site than in all of September and October added up together, maybe longer. The most readers I've ever had in one day, by a long ways.

I know because I couldn't resist checking my stats after the comments started coming in (and after I'd remembered my statcounter password). And while readership has dropped way off from the level of that one staggering day, some people have been coming back to check in, and new readers are still trickling in from the Daily Dish and Cosmic Variance.

So, this post is all by way of a very long-winded prologue to my own one-site De-Lurking Day request: Who are you, and where did you come from?

You can be anonymous if you want, and I've turned off comment verification captchas for today so as to minimize the hassle. But I'd love it if you'd comment and let me know.