In a way, starting a blog is like fishing, but your lake is the comment section of popular blogs and the bait is attempted witty or insightful comments with links to your own posts \u2014 because, even if you tell yourself that it\u2019s not about how many readers you have but about developing your writing skills and thinking through issues of the day, you do end up checking the \u201cpageviews\u201d counter and eagerly looking to see if you\u2019ve got any new comments.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019ve been mystified and annoyed at the various engines which seemingly view my blog and drive up the pageviews for no particular reason that I can tell, based on the \u201ctraffic sources\u201d statistics blogger provides.\u00a0 I googled one of these URLs and the information that came up was that these sites are aimed at the novice blogger, with the intention that the blogger clicks on the URL that shows up as a \u201ctraffic source,\u201d which leads to a site with malware of some kind or a scam.\u00a0 I also found that the option to tell the system not to track your own pageviews, by using a cookie, didn\u2019t seem to work for me, and it also seems that any time someone, having made his way to my blog, clicks on a particular post to see the comment(s), it counts as a separate pageview.\u00a0 So all in all, it\u2019s very difficult to know how many pageviews I\u2019ve actually gotten.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve also realized that I have a very small number of blogs that I follow and that are suitable for the\u00a0project of comment-fishing \u2014 the largest blogs\/news sites\u00a0have so many comments that it\u2019s improbable that people actually read existing comments, and many other blogs\/news sites use facebook for comments, which doesn\u2019t work, since I\u2019ve taken the approach of blogging anonymously.\u00a0 (I\u2019ve considered setting up a separate facebook account wholly for this purpose, but I\u2019d need an additional e-mail address, which \u2014 using gmail, at least \u2014 would require setting up a wholly different google account just for my Jane alter ego, and\u00a0switching between\u00a0them, which would be a lot of work.)\u00a0 So mostly I comment on sites which use Disqus or a generic commenting system.<\/p>\n
(So, dear reader(s), any suggestions of blogs I might find interesting, based on what I\u2019ve written in this blog?) <\/p>\n
I also still have a long to-do list: putting tags on the posts, improving the layout\/formatting, maybe adding some pictures just for visual interest, plus adding posts on various topics that I haven\u2019t even talked about yet (especially retirement). I\u2019m also not sure how wide-ranging I want the blog to be \u2014 focus on economic issues, wander over to social issues, add my latest recipe?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a way, starting a blog is like fishing, but your lake is the comment section of popular blogs and the bait is attempted witty or insightful comments with links to your own posts \u2014 because, even if you tell yourself that it\u2019s not about how many readers you have but about developing your writing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n