So today I check the website for traffic, just like I always do when I log on the desktop. Usually there isn’t much. In fact, sometimes there is no traffic at all. There are various tools you can install that will track all kinds of website metrics, most of them wasted on a guy who runs a public diary and really doesn’t have anything to sell. WordPress has their own native set of tools, and there are plugins that will duplicate what WordPress does and then some.
You can track articles being read, who goes to the homepage, even the search strings that had hits for your website. Like I said though, usually not much to see. Today was no exception. Pretty low traffic. An astronomical number of attempts to break into the website, like most sites suffer from, but not a lot of readers.
Then I look at search strings that sent people to the website. It is a pretty puzzle sometimes to figure out how a particular string gets you hits on your website. People looking for all kinds of obscure stuff show up as getting hits on the blog articles. Lately there have been a lot of hits for the Die Hard Christmas articles. Well, it is that time of year again. Our Lord John McClain will be gracing the television screens in our home very soon.
Then I notice this character string:
айзек азимов автобиография
Isaac Asimov autobiography? I’ve barely even mentioned Asimov on the blog. He was one of my favorite writers when I first discovered speculative fiction. After I had read all the Hardy Boys pulp that there was to be found back in 1974, I ran across Asimov’s mystery The Caves of Steel. I then went on to read some of his other works like I, Robot and his Foundation series. I’m currently watching the series on Apple TV. I think that the most impactful of his stories though is the short story Nightfall which was later adapted into a novel. I’ve never read his autobiography.
Having run across the search string I just had to look up his autobiographies. It is a three volume set. He wrote the first one at the age of 34. 34? I have some catching up to do. The second one was titled It’s Been a Good Life. The last volume was published near the end of his life and is titled simply I, Asimov. I think that title is fitting, a nice tongue in cheek reference to his most famous (if wholly misunderstood by filmmakers) book. I have some reading to do as well.
