Gone Viral

Several months ago, back when I was living in Tasmania and we were having a long, hot summer (hard for you all to imagine now, I'm sure), I wrote a post which featured a poem entitled "Hare In Summer".  Instead of the hare photo you see there now, I had opted for a photo of the blue sky, with a hint of clouds and a bright, glaring sun in the corner.  Well... what I didn't know at the time was that this post would soon go viral.  

It took a bit of time, actually, and was definitely not an instantaneous result, but after some weeks had passed, I noticed its popularity dramatically increase.  I knew this through the statistics feature on blogspot, where you can see how many views each of your post have had over various periods of time.  But I knew somehow that it wasn't my amazingly interesting and witty post that attracted such attention, but alas, it was this rather plain, yet rather sought after image of the sun (I won't post the photo here or we'll have the same problem over again!).  With the stats feature also showing the source of each view, it was clear that google searches such as "sky with sun", "sun sky", "hot sun sky" and "sky images with sun" where indeed the culprit, and that most of the views would not have yielding in anyone actually reading the amazingly brilliant blog post text.

I'm not sure what it was exactly that made this photo so popular.   Perhaps the recent solar eclipse.  Perhaps the northern hemisphere summer.  Perhaps global warming (we can blame that for everything, right?).  But once the stats went up, they did not come back down.  

To give you a little taste of what I have been seeing:

Today - 13 views;

The last week - 208 views;

The last month - 887 views;

All time (since 29th Jan 2012) - 2,606 views.

My total blog views, including this figure, is 5,005.   So in other words, this post got more views that my other 45 posts combined.

So anyway, recently I decided it was time to do something, and today I finally took that photo off my blog. Goodbye popularity.  Goodbye fame.  Goodbye false sense of achievement.

Hello again, my 13 dedicated followers ;)