Difficult Simple

After nine months in this location, it’s time to close up shop. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago. Nothing’s changed in the interim.

For those who’ve been with me from the beginning, thank you for your readership. For those just tuning in, I appreciate your stopping by. I won’t say I’ll never write in this space again, but the chances are pretty slim; I have somewhere else to be and plenty to say when I get there.

This is me, signing off.

So it’s been quiet here for a while. Why? There are a couple of reasons, actually: 1) I’m working on the tail end of a new manuscript, and 2) this blog is in gear-down mode.

I started writing online in this space to rekindle my enthusiasm for blogging in the wake of some extremely serious and (at times) highly scary cyberstalking incidents. One particular douchebag, whose wildly irresponsible blogging sparked and fed the problem, suggested that if I had my internet access disconnected I wouldn’t have any problems. As if any person being stalked brings it upon him- or herself. I’d love to hear this guy’s thoughts on rape victims, but then again probably not.

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Judging from the hit numbers, my brief celebrity at Salon is done. It would have been nice if some of these folks had come for Joan Walsh and stayed for the writing.

This blog isn’t exactly a magnet for internet traffic. That’s something I have mixed feelings about, since on the one hand I’d like for my random scribbling here to reach a broader audience than MA and myself, while on the other I know that the potential for attracting douchebags rises with every new reader. So yesterday was an interesting experience.

Twenty or so hits in a single day are what I’d call unusually high. I tend to languish somewhere in the high single digits unless the mutant-rape fans looking for dirty videos suddenly come out in force. My stat-tracker renders up a real-time graph of hits, so it was more than a little surprising yesterday when traffic spiked. And I mean spiked. I got 110 hits, which is significantly greater than my usual level of traffic.

So what were people reading? “Joan Walsh: Concern troll,” a post about how Salon’s editor-in-chief abuses her position to make dishonest semi-news about the Democratic nomination process with her blog. More than half of those 110 hits went straight to Joan, but the real question for me was: where were these readers coming from?

My stat-tracker tells me a lot of things, some more useful than others. One thing it does well is make a record of incoming links. For the most part I use this feature to strangle scrapers trying to steal my content. Don’t get me wrong: I love links, but my stuff is my stuff and there’s no discussion to be had on that account.

Anyway, as far as my stat-tracker was concerned, this sudden uptick in traffic came from nowhere. Maybe two or three hits resulted from searches for joan walsh and racist — hey, if the shoe fits — but for the most part these heretofore unseen readers were a total mystery.

As of this writing my post, “Joan Walsh: Concern troll,” has garnered nearly 50 hits. Where are these readers coming from, I wonder?