Cutting out for a while

[post slightly updated, Monday, January 8, 2007, and Wednesday, December 30, 2009] In case you were looking for them, yes, I've deleted my posts (which began on Thursday, July 20, 2006) to this blog about the Appius Claudius Priscus / Joseph Keller affair at Nova Roma, relocating them to this new page on my diskpace at Friendlyfirm. If you haven't seen them, they were a discussion of how we approach the issue of freedom of speech in a real world in which all is not hugs and love, in application to the case of somebody whose racial views didn't please everybody, and an illustration of how the standards of justice we can expect out of our Politically Correct friends aren't changing for the better. This evolved into long enough of a personal segue, that I didn't feel comfortable with the idea of leaving it on Right Wing of the Gods, but for those who want to read it, here it is. I don't know what the plans of the other contributors are, but we haven't heard from them for a while, so I'm guessing that we won't be hearing from them in the near future. I'm going to take a break from the Internet for a while, to enjoy the warm weather the way the gods intended - outdoors. When I get back, I probably won't be posting much. I commented on this on "Jotting it Down" - the amount of traffic one gets doesn't seem to justify the effort. Not complaining, certainly not whining, it's just supply and demand. There's a huge supply of blogs and relatively little potential readership. When seven hits per day makes your blog one of the big boys, you come to realize just how little potential readership there is. Useful information; more of us will redirect our efforts elsewhere. See you later. Note added, January 12, 2007: I got a little clarity a few days ago, when I was transferring the Appius files to my diskspace at Googlepages. A rate of seven visitors per day was definitely not making my day, but it was also raising questions because it seemed so statistically anomalous. Why exactly seven visitors, for so long? OK, maybe because we only had the same seven people visiting us over and over came the discouraging thought, but ... the same seven people who never miss a post? The same seven people who never have a kid's birthday they're too busy planning, who never have their computer go down, who never just plain don't feel like it? In real life, traffic is never that steady. Where was the fluctuation? Even a moving average should fluctuate a little, especially when it's that low. This moving average wasn't doing that. Why? I found a partial answer as I cleared the files. Once I've deleted a post, it's gone, so I was being very careful as I did this, placing each post and its copy up on screen, comparing original and copy paragraph by paragraph before deleting and republishing the blog, in effect revisiting the thing a few times. Near the end of the process, I found that RWOTG stop loading on my screen. It literally could not handle the traffic I was giving it, just going through that series of posts. Guess how many posts I was into the series before I found myself unable to load the next? That would certainly explain the lack of random fluctuation; if and when traffic started to pick up, those who would have lifted the daily average to eight visitors (or dare I dream, to nine or even ten) would have been in for a frustrating experience, one which wouldn't have left them wanting to return. Nobody enjoys having a page hanging on his screen, refusing to load. Attached as this blog was (and still is, at the time of this writing) to a site that, shall we say, sees a few more than seven visitors per day according to site stats, and what we have is the likelihood of more visitors being pumped into this location, than the rather weak system was designed to handle. The average didn't fluctuate because the cap wasn't fluctuating. To anybody who had that experience, if by some remarkable chance you are seeing this, I regret the annoyance and I suspect the others do as well. I honestly didn't know that this was happening, probably because I like to get up very early during the summer and would have been one of the first people clicking on this site. At this point, as far as I'm concerned, the fat lady has sung for both RWOTG and my own personal blog. I'll be happy to leave both in place as they are free and Blogger seems to allow this, but writing a page on which traffic is effectively capped at such a low level seems pointless. Producing a blog post may not take as much work as putting together a webpage, but it still represents a real effort, one not justified by the tiny audience circumstances allow us to have. Whether our own efforts could have attracted a larger crowd in as competitive a field as blogging, I don't know, but wouldn't it have been interesting, to find out? No grand exits for me, as I only blogged for a few months and this moment is really not redefining my life, but this is a shame, I suppose. As before, I can only speak for myself, having not consulted with Dan and the others on this, but as for me, I'm fairly sure that this is my last Blogger post.