Awhile ago, I installed this thing on the side of my blog that shows the most popular posts. This was because most of my traffic goes right to the homepage and then disappears. Even though I’m totally comfortable with writing a blog that’s pretty much just for my friends and family, I do put way more time into it than I probably should and it would be nice if people checked out some other stuff. So I figured if I put the most popular posts up, people who may not know me might come to the site and say, “this seems all right. But what’s this? He’s popular, too? I gotta get to know this guy!”

But no one did that, and the same freaking posts have been on that list forever. Partly because the list is self-perpetuating … i.e., if you put up a list of the most popular posts, people will click on those links, thereby ensuring that they remain the most popular posts. Partly because I got a lot of traffic in a one-week span of time a couple of months ago and everything from that week ranked up numbers that can’t be beaten at my normal rate of 10 viewers per day. 

So my new tactic is the randomizer. There is no order to this list. It is completely random. Click on a link, and voila! There’s a whole new list of random posts from my archives for you to read!

If you are bored today, please give it a whirl for a few minutes. And please be warned … I’ll be tracking you …

(Also, the popular posts list hasn’t gone away, it’s just been moved to the bottom of the sidebar. I’m still curious to know what people are reading. We’ll see if this random post thing makes any difference.)