The Decline & Fall Of Baboonville

"I'm Melting!! What A World, What A World!!"

This blog has been chugging along for the better part of 5 and a half years now. In the first few months, Man, was I obsessed about my visitor stats...

I'd check them several times a day, just to see who dropped by, from where, and most of all, how many.

After the first couple of years, it became pretty obvious that I was never going to slide past Instapundit in the blog rankings, but I'd gained a pretty regular readership and met a lot of great people as a result, and eventually quit worrying about it.

Oh, I'd still look at the Sitemeter stats every so often, but mostly I relied on the weekly visitor report they emailed me.

So, just got the report for last week, and nearly shit myself... No, not an Instalanche, or even a Jimbolanche... More like the blog equivalent of a ghost town.

I'd been noticing a gradual dropoff, but this week's average was half of what it used to be a couple of years back. You learn to recognize the cyclic quirks. Every semester, you get a new crop of kids with a shiny new University account, and hits jump a bit. Every time Google tweaks their search algorithm, hits drop a bit...

I suppose I can blame part of the drop on Facebook. I know there's quite a few former bloggers that have succumbed to the charms of Farmville and the "Like" button. There's a number of bloggers who have hung up their spurs, and either quit completely or post erratically.

I'm not at the point where I'm ready to quit, but I'm not so self-absorbed that I don't realize that the frequency of my posting has gotten a bit erratic, and the relative quality of my posts have fallen off as well. I say "relative", 'cause there was never any lack of dick & fart jokes on Baboon Pirates. There also hasn't been any serious introspection or detailed stories of youthful shenanigans in a while, either.

Sigh. Change happens, whether we like it or not. Maybe Baboon Pirates was a way to keep me moving forward in a down cycle of my life, and now that I'm dropping pounds and gaining back my ability to go out and face the world, it'll become less of a necessity.

We shall see...