My most-viewed post?

Something just prompted me to look at my total page-view stats via Google Analytics, which I had never done before. (Just over 1.1 million. Thanks for asking.) I used to look at my traffic reports every week or more, but now it's very rare. I just don't care much.

Anyway, in the process of setting the date range to the entire life of the blog, I noticed a traffic spike that I had never noticed before, occurring on September 14, 2011. It was nearly twice as big as the spike I got when I got backroomed by the security goons at the Cannery in 2009. I was deeply puzzled as to what I might have written that got that much attention. It appears to have been this post about the ethics controversy at the Epic Poker League. I can't tell exactly where the traffic came from, because the main referral source is listed as a link-shortening service, so I'm guessing that somebody with a big Twitter following posted a shortened link to the piece.

Strange what gets attention and what doesn't. Some posts are deeply personal and important to me and get slaved over for hours and hours. Others are just whipped off from the top of my head and involve things on my mind that day, but which I consider of no lasting consequence. The degree of correlation between how important I deem something/how much work I put into writing it and how much attention it gets appears to be pretty close to zero.

Go figure.



Update

Mystery solved. I remembered that my friend Shamus got his biggest blog traffic spike ever when Daniel Negreanu posted a link to something he wrote. Given Negreanu's outspoken disdain for the EPL, it occurred to me that he was a likely source. A little digging, and, sure enough, he tweeted a link to my EPL post using the shortening service I had found on the exact date in question. It was then retweeted by others, including Kathy Liebert, Wicked Chops Poker, and others.