The pluses and minuses of reading old posts ...

When I first started writing this blog a very wise local West Cumbrian statesman, Honorary Alderman David Gray, told me that it was important to get some traffic counters up so that I could see how many people were reading it and what they are looking at.

When I eventually did get the traffic monitors up the results were quite fascinating and David was right, as he usually is. There have been 3.87 million pageviews since then: sometimes wor a period they will run at a few hundred a day, sometimes the number of daily pageviews is in the thousands, occasionally it is in the tens of thousands.

When I look to see what people are reading, it is most often what I have posted about topical issues, but there are some posts that come up again and again in the traffic statistics many years after I put them up.

For example a post put up in on November 21st 2009 about a visit that day to flood-hit areas of Cumbria by Nick Herbert MP, who was then the shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, has regularly appeared in the list of most-read posts over the subsequent sixteen years. So much so that I have put a note at the top of it to emphasise the date.

I can only hope that search engines such as Bing or Google are sending people who are genuinely researching the 2009 floods to that article and not people who are looking for up-to-date news!

In case anyone who actually is researching the 2009 floods is sent to this post by a reverse quirk of the search engines, you can find the 2009 article at

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria.

At the moment the top slot on my traffic monitors is occupied by my Quote of the day 24th July 2020, in which post I quoted John Donne's famous saying, "Any man's death diminishes me" (see below) in response to a rather nasty tweet in which someone celebrated the fact that another individual who took the opposite view from herself about Brexit had died.

I deliberately did not record, and have long since forgotten, whether the author of the horrible tweet was a Remainer and the deceased a Brexiteer, or the other way round. But the ghastly assassination of Charlie Kirk in the United States, and some of the reaction to it on both sides of the Atlantic, illustrate that the point I was making against ultra-partisan politics is still highly relevant today. 

There are plenty of people of every viewpoint, right and left and all points in between, who get this, but it remains true that politics is far too partisan and filled with hatred for anyone's benefit.

 

 

Also on my current list of most read posts and still relevant today is one called  "The tyranny of misleading averages" from December 2007. about how, if a town, village, electoral ward or constituency is very diverse, average statistics for that area can be very misleading as there may be large numbers of people living in the area whose circumstances are very different from that average.

The principles of that post are still absolutely relevant today. However, electoral boundaries have changed, and some of the wards referred to no longer exist.

I'm going to leave the original post up with another note about the date, but will be putting up later today an updated version which uses more recent examples and only refers to current electoral wards.  

There are often some major benefits in terms of improving one's long term perspective when reading older posts. But it is always important to be aware when you are doing so. A good rule of themp when reading anything on the internet is, always check the time and date!