diamond geezer

 Thursday, May 14, 2015

Yesterday, somewhat unexpectedly, this blog had more visitors than it's ever had in one day since it started thirteen years ago. Visitor numbers reached a five-digit total, the first time I've ever breached that ceiling, indeed only the twentieth time I've topped 3000. You might think this blog was popular, and for a blog relatively speaking it is. But my average readership is fairly lowly, a couple of trainfuls a day, apart from on days when something special happens. So I thought I'd look back through those something specials, which are generally times that someone more important has noticed one thing I've written, and then drawn in curious folk to see what's what. Here's a Top Twenty.

1) 13th May 2015 (10265 visitors)
Monday's post about the election results, based on a tweet, has proven to be the most widely-shared thing I've ever written. People have been surprised/shocked/annoyed by the revelation that a mere 901 electors decided the outcome of the election, and felt the need to share this observation with their friends. It's the kind of statistic that anybody else could have come up with, but it seems nobody else did until I cobbled together the numbers from a newspaper supplement on the tube heading to the Boring Conference. Interest continued to bubble away over the weekend so I wrote up a a proper post, and was chuffed when the Daily Mirror noticed it on Tuesday, but it was a late tweet from a New Statesman journalist yesterday lunchtime that really gained traction. This reverberated around Twitter like a pinball, including mentions from Armando Iannucci and Billy Bragg, and has currently accumulated more than 600 retweets. It won't change the political system, and the thousands of one-off visitors who surfed in yesterday won't be back, but it's nice to have fed the political zeitgeist just this once.

2) 6th July 2011 (8363 visitors)
This one shows the power of delayed reaction. Three years earlier I'd written a post entitled "109 journeys between Central London Tube stations that are quicker by foot than Tube", based on a map in a TfL publication, and thought it would be interesting to turn the map into a list. Roll forward to 2011 and the QI Elves linked to my list as proof that "There are 109 journeys between London’s Tube stations that are quicker to walk", and in the visitors flooded. It turned out that there actually many more than 109, and that to attempt to give a precise figure is doomed to fail, but never let the truth get in the way of a top tube statistic.

3) 3rd September 2011 (6220 visitors)
A few days after TfL silently launched its bus countdown scheme online, I had lots of nice things to say about it. I also appeared to be the only blogger who'd noticed, so the BBC News website grabbed a quote from my review and linked to me. Sometimes it pays to be transparently positive, rather than critically negative.

4/5/6) 11th - 13th February 2006 (5538/5614/5029 visitors)
Back in the day, when Blogger was a burgeoning force to be reckoned with, they featured a different blogspot blog on their homepage each day. I got my turn on 11th February 2006, after a shortlisting in the Bloggies (remember them?). I'm not sure what middle America made of my report on a day trip to Dover, but several new readers actually chose to keep coming back.

7) 28th July 2008 (4610 visitors)
Ah yes, the day that Diamond Geezer (the jewellery company) appeared on Dragon's Den. A significant proportion of their pitch referred to its website, so thousands of TV viewers on laptops tried to Google their way in and ended up on my blog instead. I got 2500 accidental visitors in 15 minutes, but the diamond merchants got far more because their website promptly collapsed under the strain. Even years later, I could still tell when Dave was repeating this particular episode on TV by the sudden concentrated spike in visitor numbers.

8) 9th April 2013 (4467 visitors)
Like all the best media outlets, I had a Margaret Thatcher obituary ready to publish the day she pegged it. Unlike theirs, mine was three obituaries in one, so appealed to whatever bias you were looking for. Twitter gold, it turned out.

9) 15th November 2012 (4259 visitors)
The good folk at Reddit sometimes get very excited about things I've written, especially if they involve the Underground. They got terribly excited to discover that a Circle line train runs from Barking through Bow Road before dawn, and that I'd taken a ride on it.

10/11/12) 15th August/30th July/31st July 2012 (3689/3539/4242 visitors)
Yes, obviously the Olympics make an appearance in this chart. By an accident of geography I was the local blogger on the spot, and August 2012 remains the busiest month my blog has ever had. Oddly the top day was after the Closing Ceremony, when Reddit picked up on the magenta Rio de Janeiro sign TfL had hung for a laugh at Stratford station. My July peak came amid all the advice I posted for potential datrippers, with the BBC's Tom Edwards linking to my analysis of which gate was the best way in, or best way out. Thanks Tom.

13) 18th May 2012 (3523 visitors)
Back to Reddit again, this time when Redditors came to read a post on trains but got sidetracked by my blog's ghastly template design. "What a terrible looking site" said one, and "not very readable" said another, topped off by "why bother publishing it online at all?" When I then blogged about their comments they came back in even greater numbers, but blimey they were well ahead of the curve with all their comments on "responsive design", which three years later has pretty much taken over how we view the web. Except here, that is, where the ghastly template lingers on.

14) 27th October 2011 (3485 visitors)
Remember when the Olympics was going to be the event that ground our city to a screaming halt? At the height of the pre-hysteria, precisely nine months before the Opening Ceremony, I posted a spoof press release warning couples not to conceive their baby today. And I got the tone almost spot on, so an insider within 2012 Towers later told me.

15) 25th February 2013 (3423 visitors)
I assembled all the facts I could find about London's postcodes, how they came about and why they're numbered like they are. And that went down well.

16) 6th July 2014 (3418 visitors)
On the day of introduction I wrote a factual but relentlessly snarky piece about TfL's transition to cashless operation on London's buses. By exposing some of the potential iniquities of the new system in an amusing way, and hitting a nerve, the post got shared a lot. And now almost a year later obviously all those worries about passengers not being able to cope have been borne out... oh.

17) 22nd February 2015 (3339 visitors)
A weekend post about the seven and a half metre difference between central London's highest and lowest tides, with pictures, brought those Redditors back again. A travelogue with a good dose of geeky science usually goes down well.

18) 29th July 2008 (3117 visitors)
The day after the Dragon's Den Diamond Geezer debacle, fresh visitors were still pouring in. The same phenomenon'll probably happen today, with late fallout from that election tweet sufficient to propel 14th May 2015 somewhere into the Top Twenty too.

19) 13th January 2010 (3097 visitors)
The day after we buried my Mum, a New York uber-blog quite liked the poem read out at her funeral.

20) 6th August 2012 (3084 visitors)
And finally, perhaps unsurprisingly, back to the Olympics again. This was the day of the marathon that didn't come to Bow, and the day after I'd offered some advice to visitors in a useful Q&A. Numbers 21 and 22 in my Most Popular list are also from this one-off Games-time period, when East London ruled.

I hope that my Top 20 hasn't come across as over-smug, that wasn't the intention. What the list does appear to prove is that you can't control popularity, it simply sometimes happens, or more likely doesn't. But if you can write interesting, original, relevant and accessible stuff, your chances of an externally-focused visitor bonanza are occasionally greatly increased. I shall keep trying.


<< click for Newer posts

click for Older Posts >>


click to return to the main page


...or read more in my monthly archives
Jan24  Feb24  Mar24
Jan23  Feb23  Mar23  Apr23  May23  Jun23  Jul23  Aug23  Sep23  Oct23  Nov23  Dec23
Jan22  Feb22  Mar22  Apr22  May22  Jun22  Jul22  Aug22  Sep22  Oct22  Nov22  Dec22
Jan21  Feb21  Mar21  Apr21  May21  Jun21  Jul21  Aug21  Sep21  Oct21  Nov21  Dec21
Jan20  Feb20  Mar20  Apr20  May20  Jun20  Jul20  Aug20  Sep20  Oct20  Nov20  Dec20
Jan19  Feb19  Mar19  Apr19  May19  Jun19  Jul19  Aug19  Sep19  Oct19  Nov19  Dec19
Jan18  Feb18  Mar18  Apr18  May18  Jun18  Jul18  Aug18  Sep18  Oct18  Nov18  Dec18
Jan17  Feb17  Mar17  Apr17  May17  Jun17  Jul17  Aug17  Sep17  Oct17  Nov17  Dec17
Jan16  Feb16  Mar16  Apr16  May16  Jun16  Jul16  Aug16  Sep16  Oct16  Nov16  Dec16
Jan15  Feb15  Mar15  Apr15  May15  Jun15  Jul15  Aug15  Sep15  Oct15  Nov15  Dec15
Jan14  Feb14  Mar14  Apr14  May14  Jun14  Jul14  Aug14  Sep14  Oct14  Nov14  Dec14
Jan13  Feb13  Mar13  Apr13  May13  Jun13  Jul13  Aug13  Sep13  Oct13  Nov13  Dec13
Jan12  Feb12  Mar12  Apr12  May12  Jun12  Jul12  Aug12  Sep12  Oct12  Nov12  Dec12
Jan11  Feb11  Mar11  Apr11  May11  Jun11  Jul11  Aug11  Sep11  Oct11  Nov11  Dec11
Jan10  Feb10  Mar10  Apr10  May10  Jun10  Jul10  Aug10  Sep10  Oct10  Nov10  Dec10 
Jan09  Feb09  Mar09  Apr09  May09  Jun09  Jul09  Aug09  Sep09  Oct09  Nov09  Dec09
Jan08  Feb08  Mar08  Apr08  May08  Jun08  Jul08  Aug08  Sep08  Oct08  Nov08  Dec08
Jan07  Feb07  Mar07  Apr07  May07  Jun07  Jul07  Aug07  Sep07  Oct07  Nov07  Dec07
Jan06  Feb06  Mar06  Apr06  May06  Jun06  Jul06  Aug06  Sep06  Oct06  Nov06  Dec06
Jan05  Feb05  Mar05  Apr05  May05  Jun05  Jul05  Aug05  Sep05  Oct05  Nov05  Dec05
Jan04  Feb04  Mar04  Apr04  May04  Jun04  Jul04  Aug04  Sep04  Oct04  Nov04  Dec04
Jan03  Feb03  Mar03  Apr03  May03  Jun03  Jul03  Aug03  Sep03  Oct03  Nov03  Dec03
 Jan02  Feb02  Mar02  Apr02  May02  Jun02  Jul02 Aug02  Sep02  Oct02  Nov02  Dec02 

jack of diamonds
Life viewed from London E3

» email me
» follow me on twitter
» follow the blog on Twitter
» follow the blog on RSS

» my flickr photostream

twenty blogs
our bow
arseblog
ian visits
londonist
broken tv
blue witch
on london
the great wen
edith's streets
spitalfields life
linkmachinego
round the island
wanstead meteo
christopher fowler
the greenwich wire
bus and train user
ruth's coastal walk
round the rails we go
london reconnections
from the murky depths

quick reference features
Things to do in Outer London
Things to do outside London
Inner London toilet map
20 years of blog series
The DG Tour of Britain
London's most...

read the archive
Mar24  Feb24  Jan24
Dec23  Nov23  Oct23  Sep23
Aug23  Jul23  Jun23  May23
Apr23  Mar23  Feb23  Jan23
Dec22  Nov22  Oct22  Sep22
Aug22  Jul22  Jun22  May22
Apr22  Mar22  Feb22  Jan22
Dec21  Nov21  Oct21  Sep21
Aug21  Jul21  Jun21  May21
Apr21  Mar21  Feb21  Jan21
Dec20  Nov20  Oct20  Sep20
Aug20  Jul20  Jun20  May20
Apr20  Mar20  Feb20  Jan20
Dec19  Nov19  Oct19  Sep19
Aug19  Jul19  Jun19  May19
Apr19  Mar19  Feb19  Jan19
Dec18  Nov18  Oct18  Sep18
Aug18  Jul18  Jun18  May18
Apr18  Mar18  Feb18  Jan18
Dec17  Nov17  Oct17  Sep17
Aug17  Jul17  Jun17  May17
Apr17  Mar17  Feb17  Jan17
Dec16  Nov16  Oct16  Sep16
Aug16  Jul16  Jun16  May16
Apr16  Mar16  Feb16  Jan16
Dec15  Nov15  Oct15  Sep15
Aug15  Jul15  Jun15  May15
Apr15  Mar15  Feb15  Jan15
Dec14  Nov14  Oct14  Sep14
Aug14  Jul14  Jun14  May14
Apr14  Mar14  Feb14  Jan14
Dec13  Nov13  Oct13  Sep13
Aug13  Jul13  Jun13  May13
Apr13  Mar13  Feb13  Jan13
Dec12  Nov12  Oct12  Sep12
Aug12  Jul12  Jun12  May12
Apr12  Mar12  Feb12  Jan12
Dec11  Nov11  Oct11  Sep11
Aug11  Jul11  Jun11  May11
Apr11  Mar11  Feb11  Jan11
Dec10  Nov10  Oct10  Sep10
Aug10  Jul10  Jun10  May10
Apr10  Mar10  Feb10  Jan10
Dec09  Nov09  Oct09  Sep09
Aug09  Jul09  Jun09  May09
Apr09  Mar09  Feb09  Jan09
Dec08  Nov08  Oct08  Sep08
Aug08  Jul08  Jun08  May08
Apr08  Mar08  Feb08  Jan08
Dec07  Nov07  Oct07  Sep07
Aug07  Jul07  Jun07  May07
Apr07  Mar07  Feb07  Jan07
Dec06  Nov06  Oct06  Sep06
Aug06  Jul06  Jun06  May06
Apr06  Mar06  Feb06  Jan06
Dec05  Nov05  Oct05  Sep05
Aug05  Jul05  Jun05  May05
Apr05  Mar05  Feb05  Jan05
Dec04  Nov04  Oct04  Sep04
Aug04  Jul04  Jun04  May04
Apr04  Mar04  Feb04  Jan04
Dec03  Nov03  Oct03  Sep03
Aug03  Jul03  Jun03  May03
Apr03  Mar03  Feb03  Jan03
Dec02  Nov02  Oct02  Sep02
back to main page

the diamond geezer index
2023 2022
2021 2020 2019 2018 2017
2016 2015 2014 2013 2012
2011 2010 2009 2008 2007
2006 2005 2004 2003 2002

my special London features
a-z of london museums
E3 - local history month
greenwich meridian (N)
greenwich meridian (S)
the real eastenders
london's lost rivers
olympic park 2007
great british roads
oranges & lemons
random boroughs
bow road station
high street 2012
river westbourne
trafalgar square
capital numbers
east london line
lea valley walk
olympics 2005
regent's canal
square routes
silver jubilee
unlost rivers
cube routes
Herbert Dip
metro-land
capital ring
river fleet
piccadilly
bakerloo

ten of my favourite posts
the seven ages of blog
my new Z470xi mobile
five equations of blog
the dome of doom
chemical attraction
quality & risk
london 2102
single life
boredom
april fool

ten sets of lovely photos
my "most interesting" photos
london 2012 olympic zone
harris and the hebrides
betjeman's metro-land
marking the meridian
tracing the river fleet
london's lost rivers
inside the gherkin
seven sisters
iceland

just surfed in?
here's where to find...
diamond geezers
flash mob #1  #2  #3  #4
ben schott's miscellany
london underground
watch with mother
cigarette warnings
digital time delay
wheelie suitcases
war of the worlds
transit of venus
top of the pops
old buckenham
ladybird books
acorn antiques
digital watches
outer hebrides
olympics 2012
school dinners
pet shop boys
west wycombe
bletchley park
george orwell
big breakfast
clapton pond
san francisco
thunderbirds
routemaster
children's tv
east enders
trunk roads
amsterdam
little britain
credit cards
jury service
big brother
jubilee line
number 1s
titan arum
typewriters
doctor who
coronation
comments
blue peter
matchgirls
hurricanes
buzzwords
brookside
monopoly
peter pan
starbucks
feng shui
leap year
manbags
bbc three
vision on
piccadilly
meridian
concorde
wembley
islington
ID cards
bedtime
freeview
beckton
blogads
eclipses
letraset
arsenal
sitcoms
gherkin
calories
everest
muffins
sudoku
camilla
london
ceefax
robbie
becks
dome
BBC2
paris
lotto
118
itv