Half a million

In the backstage of this blog, among the many pieces of information available to me, there is a listing for my total number of pageviews. This, allegedly, is an updated accounting of the total number of times anyone, anywhere, has viewed my blog.

I have hit a number there that I feel is strangely irresistible: 500,000.

Half a million.

Half a million people have read my blog.

This is exciting!

But alas our excitement must be tempered. For the Internet is run by robots, and the counter intuitive thing about robots is... they are not very smart.

So we are going to have to pound out the math on this ourselves.

Subtract 300,000: 

for all the bots and programs and Internet devices out there that pretend to look at my blog so I will say " I wonder why the website amazingpickleforks.com is coming to look so much at my blog?" and then get so flattered and curious that I go look at their site and buy some pickle forks.

Subtract 100,000:

for Stumbleupon and Reddit and suchlike sites that I or someone else has cajoled into linking to my site, causing a random person to land here, count as a pageview, but decidedly not resulting in them reading anything when they do.


Subtract 50,000:

for various mistaken landings on one of my blog pages, either by other people looking for something else, like a library clerk job, or entertainment, which is really not my thing, or even by myself, just checking to see that everything looks just...so.


Subtract 25,000:

for Bob Dylan, who understands how much page counts mean to me so spends 20 minutes every day (when on tour) randomly clicking on various of my pages to make me feel happy.


Subtract 20,000:

for all the people who came here, read, and said. "Huh." And never came here again. 

I refuse to count them or consider them "people".


Subtract 4,500:

for all the people who came here in good faith, but were called away by the phone ringing, or a sudden stabbing pain in their earlobe, or had to dash off before they got a chance to read anything.


Subtract 400:

for people who bow out of posts because they feel there is too much math in them.


Subtract 99:

for technical miscounts and glitches, like where one pageview is counted as two.



So let's add that all up:

300,000
100,000
  50,000
  25,000
  20,000
    4,500
       400
         99
________

499,999

So:

500,000 - 499,999 = 1

Well, look at that! I guess that just leaves you. You, alone, right here, right now. 

What can I say? I am overwhelmed. 

Thank you for reading my blog half a million times.