If you’re a blogger, one of the best ways to know how nice the weather is is taking a look at your daily site visit logs. In the middle of winter, when the nights are long, your number of views goes up. Same thing at the height of summer. Everyone is inside hiding from the heat. In the spring and fall, though, those are the doldrums. That’s when the floor really drops out and people have better things to do that putz around the interwebs checking out what people are bitching and complaining about that. All of that might not be strictly true of course, but that’s the pattern I’ve noticed over three years of watching these things. Maybe you don’t notice it on big sites that get millions of hits a day, but around here we pay attention to things like that.

Now if I were an unscrupulous web denizen, I could fill my tag cloud with phrases like “hot lesbian cheerleaders” and probably bost my numbers a bit, but realistically I’d rather keep bringing in people who are interested and interesting. I’m not always concerned about quality over quantity, but that’s how things are here at least. I wonder, though, how much of spring and fall doldrums are caused by readers having better things to do and how much it’s caused by bloggers who are just as interested in doing something that doesn’t involve sitting in front of a monitor. Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.

But now that it’s cold again, I’m expecting your jerks to check in more often, mkay?