I am occasionally stunned by how many hits I got on a single day. It happens intermittently, usually when this season’s premier episode of Criminal Minds is being shown as a rerun here or in some other English-speaking country. This little post about a bunch of FBI profilers shows up at the top of a specifically worded Google search. Whenever that episode plays somewhere and people go looking for combination of words, bingo. There’s my site, at the top of the search and I get a little flood of hits.

I used to wonder what caused that sudden burst of interest in my site. Now I know  immediately that somewhere, that episode is playing and once again I’ve been discovered … but only for about an hour. These one-time visitors don’t become (usually) followers. They come, they read. Then they leave and forget me.

When I look at my statistics, those individual bars of hits loom far above the other bars representing numbers of hits for a day.

This could have been my 15 minutes of fame, except that no one knows who I am unless they already know me, in which case, they probably are not looking for me via a Google search. I thus succeeded in being secretly famous.

I pondered this conundrum for a while, mulling over how I ended up an anonymous writer. I never wanted anonymity. I post my picture and I sign my name to emails from readers when they write to me. It just sort of happened.

The search that did it.

Some years ago, I began using “Teepee12” as my Internet “handle” because it reminds me that I wrote and published a booked entitled “The 12-Foot Teepee.” Virtually no one is buying the book these days — not that it was ever a best-seller — so using this is a way of keeping in touch with an important piece of my personal history. My book is obscure. Really obscure. No one who isn’t a close friend or one of the few hundred other souls who read the book would associate Teepee12 with me. It never crossed my mind that this would ever make a difference in my life. No one gives you advice on this when you are choosing your online or website name.

So I figured I should add my name to my website. I don’t want to change the site name: I like it. Serendipity is so appropriate. I write with extreme serendipity. Not only can you not predict what I’ll write about, but I have no idea what I’m going to write about. I may not know what I’m going to say until it falls out of my fingers into the keyboard.

I’ve been “Teepee12” for years. I felt odd naming the blog after myself. It’s wasn’t humility, more like bashfulness. Or just ignorance. It was an accident. I tried to fix the problem by putting my real name on my blog. It’s on the masthead, or whatever we call the top of our first page in the blogosphere. It doesn’t matter. I remain Teepee12 and expect always will be.

I guess I blew it. I missed my fifteen minutes. If you know me, you are laughing. I’m laughing too. It’s just how my life goes. I should have guessed it would be this way.

– – –

Related articles

• Old Church on the Commons (teepee12.com)
• The Hollow Men – T S Eliot (teepee12.com)
• The Library (teepee12.com)
• Wild Daisies (teepee12.com)
• Daily Prompt: Do Not Disturb – A Private Place (teepee12.com)
• June’s Garden (teepee12.com)
• The Mumford in Uxbridge (teepee12.com)
• When you absolutely positively can’t find it anywhere else … (teepee12.com)

Categories: #Blogging, #Writing, Humor, Life, Media

Tags: #Blogging, Google, google search, Popular music, Search engine optimization, Search Engines, Searching, technology, Vocus