Popular Posts And Other Stuff

It's weird, you know. Browsing through the posts on my blog, I wonder at the ones that are the most popular. Take the H.I.V.E reviews, for example. A couple of them are near the top of the list and I can totally understand that. The books have a well-deserved fandom. But other H.I.V.E reviews have had very few hits and I ask - why? It's the same series, right? You'd think something with "Tolkien" in the tags would get stacks of hits, but no - my birthday toast post has very few. You know what's top of the hits list? A very short post in which I direct readers to my final post on Insideadog, without even remembering to put in a link. I just said I was tired, after a day supervising student fundraising activities, and was going to bed. That post has had more hits than anything else on my blog, including the also-popular post called " Who Washes The Dishes in Rivendell?", a bit of whimsy about the lack of domestication among Tolkien's Elves, who somehow manage to create fabulous feasts. It has had more hits than the great interview my student Thando did with Juliet Marillier back in December 2010. And THAT was read by hundreds! So was the review of the Andy Griffiths book, but poor Andy couldn't compete with the Dog's final post. Maybe I'd better go back and put in a link, though there have been some great Writers In Residence since then. It was a great experience, by the way, and I have been told that the site gets thousands of hits a day. Despite that, writers blogging there wonder if anyone is reading, because the comments section is too hard to reach, you have to know how, and then you have to wait till a moderator reads your comment and - maybe! - publishes it. And it only shows once you click the heading. No wonder I only got three comments that month, two from friends and one from a determined young reader who never did get her gift of bookmarks because I didn't find the comment till my stint was over. I did try, got Michael Pryor, the December WIR, to advertise. I'm told that's on their to-do list, by Heath, a friendly CYL staff member(who is in my good books after his lovely review of Wolfborn.)maybe I should do the same as Stephanie of RIASS, who tweets "vintage" posts well worth a read.