Eye-catching

Having had a blog for 15 years, I now have a lot of data about what topics people incidentally land on. To be clear, I don't have many views for individual new posts (most posts will have no more than 10 views) but over my whole body of work I have 287 views per month. There is probably always a level of passive "stumbling" on my ramblings, either through coincidental matches of words in search terms or topics that I have touched on that have been, at a time, well searched. 4 of my over 750 posts have 400 or more views. What are these posts? And is it the actual topic, an eye-catching title or an inadvertently popular search term?

Without wanting to make the popular more popular, the number one post on my blog, ever, is a 2007 post called "Re-addiction". The title itself might have caused it to be found. I can only imagine that many of the over two thousand views were people who went to this post seeking help for a crushing compulsion for crack cocaine, and instead found the comments of a nerdy guy gushing about cracking cryptic crossword clues. It could have been that, but also plausibly because I included the name of a particular compiler, the late, great Kropotkin who did have a weekly crossword in the Herald. At various times it was hard to find online guidance about his clues. I know because I searched for a time at a time. His clues were particular enigmatic to the average cryptic fan and a very possible search term.

With only a third of Re-addiction's view count was 2011's “没有天然的对错，只有必然的因果”  which came in second place. With blogspot inaccessible in China, it's unlikely that the title itself was a reason for it (which was a line for motto of a Cantonese radio host, meaning "There is no inherent right and wrong, only the inevitable cause and effect."). What was the hook? I have written many posts about languages (specifically Cantonese) and language learning. I still don't know what made people stumble on this one. That being said, it was a special post for me. I had stumbled on something that made a breakthrough in my language learning.

Bizarrely, with over 600 views and in third place is an cheeky one liner, "A gentleman will walk but never run.".  It was just one line. Literally, the post was a title: "Saintly Notable Quotable" and that one liner which I said to a friend during a long walk after he dashed across the road. It is initially unfathomable what was found by Google in this post that helped so many people find it. I think that the only thing that would compel incidental people to find it is literally people trying to find the name of the song by searching a line from the lyrics of Englishman in New York by Sting, which is where the line "a gentleman will walk but never run" comes from.

The last one with over 400 views, Forum Rules, from 2009 is another unusual top ranking post. It was one that I wrote prior to going to China. I was trying to expose myself to more Chinese websites at the time and was looking at comments about the US Open where many of the respondents were writing clearly racists comments about Serena Williams. I found and translated the forum rules for the page, which were in line with most of the rules for Chinese sites. It is well known that a political post would be taken down because it endangers "social stability" but these clearly egregious comments remained without any response from the moderators. Were the majority of the accidental readers searching for "forum rules" or perhaps "Serena Williams" (the latter of which there'd be many websites and articles). I don't know.

The next four posts had 125 views, 56 views, 55 views and 52 views respectively, one of which was the one I wish were number one, Never trust a eunuch, which I wrote while I started reading The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Chinese classic.