Two Month Site Update

Grits began its short existence two months ago tomorrow, and since my 100th post, traffic has increased significantly -- from 87 per day to 149 per day according to Site Meter. I've turned it on to the public setting, so henceforth you can look for yourself if you care about such things.

Inspired by a fellow traveler in the hominist revolution, I also just put up a link to TTLB's Ecosystem at the bottom of the right hand column, which announces Grits to be a "Crawling Amphibian," ranked 5,769 on its evolutionary scale. The Bear gives Grits credit for 14 inbound links, while Technorati seems to find 15, so maybe we'll crawl out of the primal ooze yet. On the other hand, TTLB ranks Grits 1,104 in its blog traffic listings -- the Bear calls the traffic, using whatever metric, at 172 visits per day. I saw somebody announce that measuring blogpower by the number of links should be thought of as the "big dick" method, which sounds about right, so I tend to care more about increasing traffic, anyway. That said, thanks a lot to everybody who linked to Grits -- now use that link and keep coming back!

On the traffic score, as of this writing Grits has had 4,313 visitors since I turned on the site meter October 28, with more than 1,000 of those stopping by in the last week, the most so far. Some of that had to do with Talk Left, Vice Squad, Last One Speaks, Abolish the Death Penalty, and the Sentencing Law and Policy blog kindly linking to Grits and sending me some visitors, but a lot of it came from people searching on the name Frances Newton or other topics I'm writing about. Half a dozen got here searching on "Keith Majors." One person found the site by searching for "Texas worst court." I really like those last two.

What I like even more is that folks are coming here and reading. The average visit length has hovered around two minutes, with an average of 1.5 page views per visit. Not infrequently I'll notice a visitor spent an hour or more, viewing more than a dozen pages. The missus says those are cops, but I'm just glad somebody's reading this stuff.

I should perhaps mention that a few people each day arrive here looking for grits recipes. I recommend the one from Threadgills linked here, and at the bottom of the list titled 'The Places You Go' on the right. (If the call for using Velveeta scares you off, then use better cheese and it's still really good. but somehow, if it's garlicky enough, the Velveeta surprisingly works.)

Finally, somebody somewhere may have noticed that I turned off anonymous comments. If you want to issue bitter screeds in my direction you now at least have to bother coming up with a pseudonym! For all my commenters who've shown up with links, encouragement and additional informaton -- I really appreciate hearing from you. I even liked hearing from the narc, who was polite if a little nervy about posting here.

Thanks to one and all for coming by. Tell your friends: Have some Grits.