First things first: Agent Carrie is running her monthly Query Critique today–with bonus 1st page–so if you want to see what an agent thinks of a submitted query and first page, and if you want to help a fellow author potentially win a critique of her first hundred pages, hie on over to Carrie’s blog and leave a comment. Some day, maybe it will be you on the receiving end!
Some time last week I logged on to Blogger as I regularly do and noticed one of those funny spikes on the heartbeat monitor stat line snippet that shows up on the main page. Curious, I clicked the stat bar and was shocked to see that I was in the midst of one of those days: the day of the unexpected explosion of blog visitors:
Yes, that was 180 page views, apparently instantaneously. Now even more curious, I clicked on the “Audience” bar–where were all these people coming from?
Okay, then. To blatantly rip off borrow from John Oliver: “Mauritius. A country you think about so little, you didn’t even realize it’s not on Blogger’s map.”
Mauritius is an island nation of 1.2 million people located some seven hundred miles from Madagascar.It’s arguably most famous for being home to the dodo, a bird which was driven to extinction within a century of the island’s settlement.
I honestly don’t know what to say. No, really. In the past, I found handy phrases for welcoming a rush of visitors from Romania (“Bună zuia!”) and Latvia (“Laipni ludzam!”). But Mauritian? According to that great source of information for the modern age (i.e., Wikipedia), there is no official language. The Official Site for Mauritius states that French and Creole are the most frequently spoken languages, but just about everyone also speaks English. So, “Bonjour,” I guess. Welcome to my little blog!
On a slightly more alarming note, the ridiculous number of hits and page views continued through the week. Rather than a continued onslaught of Mauritians, I was overwhelmed by Russians. As of now? 695 page views originating in Russia. This week. “Dobro požalovat’! Welcome! (Psst: I think you’re looking for the DNC–that’s over here)”
That’s it for me. Hope you all had a nice weekend and are having a good start to your week!
4 Responses
I beat you! I got over 900 hits from Russia. Nice to see big numbers. Disappointing to know they mean NOTHING! Ugh.
Jamaica is very likely me. Nice to see a variety of visitors coming to your blog Jeff.
So funny! (Well, the Russians/DNC joke is funny coming from you, not Trump.) I can't imagine why all of a sudden Mauritius peeps are so interested. I get weird spikes sometimes. There's a thing called Stumble Upon that seems to point people to places. It's nice you're making an effort to welcome them. I just ignore the quirks and oddities of page view spikes. Have a great weekend! 🙂
-Stacy: it means SOMEthing–just not sure that it's anything relevant!
-Sheena-kay–Considering the Jamaica numbers, yes, I'm pretty sure Jamaica is you. Thank you!
-Lexa–I doubt that it's actually people from Mauritius; more likely some crawler based out of a server in Mauritius. Then again, maybe I've got one Mauritian out there who went and read through most of my posts!