The first big peak, 6,000 hits per hour, was on 28th March when my relationship break-up post was on the front page of digg. The traffic then tailed off and dropped down to around 130 hits an hour on the 30th.
The second peak, of 500 hits per hour, occurred when a link was posted on The Register and stayed on its front page for a while. This traffic then tailed off on the 31st and dropped to around 90 hits per hour....
Then sometime on the 31st the traffic spiked again, rising back up to over 200 hits per hour, and the referrer graph started to show "direct hits", i.e. no referrer as the most common referrer. Prior to that the referrer graph was clearly showing the digg.com and The Register hits.
This third wave confuses me. It's slowing down now but the referrer graph still shows that almost half of all hits are "direct hits". So, where are you all coming from and why is this blog still of interest?]]>And, of course, they put their own spin on it... However, as I mentioned in a reply to one of the comments on the original posting...
"Actually, I wrote a much longer piece with much more detail and decided that I didn't need to publish it. I just needed to write it. To get it out of my head, in much the same way that I wrote about my sister's tsunami experience. However I did feel the need to say something on my blog as the split has and will affect what I do and that needed context. So I took out the personal stuff and left the techie stuff as this is a techie blog.
Given that my blog usually gets around 300 visits a day and given that up until some bright spark thought that this posting was amusing enough to go on digg.com I'd had just a couple of sympathetic comments I figured the balance was about right. Having 50,000+ geeks using the 439 word entry to analyse and speculate on our lives and priorities wasn't really something that I expected."]]>But I digress; the sniffer provided me with evidence that Michelle had been having an affair since mid January. I confronted her and we decided to try and see if we could "work it out" during our ski trip to Colorado. During the trip I decided that the relationship couldn't continue and so on our return she moved out. We're currently doing the separation of assets thing. We hope to be able to remain friends. Since I don't hate her, I figure that nobody else is allowed to...
Right now I still find it quite difficult to concentrate enough to get any technical work done. I expect technical postings will resume once I get my head sorted out. Not sure when that will be. This morning has been the first time since we returned from Colorado that I've been able to sit down and code... So I guess things are getting better.]]>A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away I used to play an online game called MUD II. This was back when you had to use your modem to dial another modem to get a connection to the world and there was no such thing as "the internet" unless you could connect to a university computer somewhere (like Essex Uni, perhaps). A time of Gopher and FTP and 300/300 and 12/75 modems. I met a lot of very good friends back then. I'm still in touch with lots of them, including Michelle (my other half), a chat room romance (a real woman? online??) back before anyone knew what "the internet" was...
Floyd's "A Momenary Lapse of Reason" took me back to wet Sunday night "resets" in front of my Apricot Xen i386 with Procomm running, sitting in "the land" chatting to the other wizards, drinking beer. One of the guys I used to chat to a lot at the time was Panther, looks like he's still around in Hawaii, he's been blogging since before we knew what blogging was... Shine on you crazy diamond...]]>