Friday 13 June 2008

Ten thousand hellos

Well folks, I threatened change and here it is – a new blog and the return of Hermit Guide* all rolled into one glorious package. For all of you who have had an HG-shaped void in your lives since April (quick show of hands please... anyone?), I hope you now consider your desire well and truly sated. Oh, and I apologise if the animated banner has just rocked your face off.

The most important thing about this blog, and the reason I had to start from scratch, is that I no longer plan to talk about the comic. Henceforth this will be a separate pursuit. The failure of the previous blog was largely due to a misunderstanding of its responsibilities and I feel that any Picnic news can be adequately dealt with on the site itself. Another thing I won't be doing is adding StatCounter. I was talked into it for the last blog with promises of great riches but I find it too distracting. For those unfamiliar, StatCounter allows you to monitor the visitors to your website – or blog – in ridiculous detail. It tells you when they came, where they came from, how long they stayed and what their preferred breakfast cereal is. This sounds quite exciting in theory but mostly just reduced me to episodes of paranoia:

Wow! I had a new visitor from Belgium! This is splendid news! Let's see... they viewed the blog for less than a second and never returned. No, no, it was not a mistake! They're obviously just a speed reader who prefers to digest their blog intake in monthly sittings! They’ll be back, they’ll be back!

Then, of course, I become hyper aware that other sites may have StatCounter (or something similar) and convince myself that checking them more than a couple of times a day will result in accusations of cyber stalking followed by restraining orders, ASBOs, dawn raids and court appearances. I'll concede that it's useful to know if your site is popular or not, but it's also nice to leave something to the imagination. I've decided, therefore, that I'm content enough to delude myself with the very impressive (albeit imagined) statistics in my head.

* Seminal, trailblazing and multi-award winning website of mine that ran between 2001-2008

4 comments:

anonemouse said...

for the record, i am not, not ever have been, nor ever will be, from, in or, indeed, have ever or will ever have anything, whatsoever, to do with Belgium (actually, that's not true. i've been to Brussels. twice.)
however, as a trailblazing seminole, how do you feel about the decline of the native american nations?

anonemouse said...

for the other side of the record, for someone who purports to make his living from writing, editing and, even, proofreading, it's a wonder to me i'm still alive...
that second 'not' should have been the first of two 'nors'...
ho hum

Ariane said...

The banner rocked my socks off. Now I have no socks. This does not please me.

Anonymous said...

I found a history/archive of Hermit Guide at the following address. Ahh, such sweet memories!

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php