Statue in the gardens of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Holland

Image credit - Drinksmachine

For over a year there’s been a link to my blog from the Online Stopwatch site which is designed and run by my friend Aaron. This has been lovely as his site is insanely popular and it has generated a vast amount of traffic to this blog.

Last week I was getting about 600 hits a day which looked great in Statcounter. I’ve had 135,000 hits since I started counting in September ’08.

Trouble is, of those between 80-90% of my visitors stayed for less than 5 seconds and the vast majority never make it off the home page so it’s all a bit of an illusion.

I’m really not that interested in having a popular site. As this blog has progressed it has become more of a CPD tool for me and a way of keeping track of thoughts. Most of my contact with the rest of the ed tech community happens on Twitter now rather than through comments on the blog.

So, a few days ago I asked Aaron the remove the link.

Unsurprisingly, visitor numbers have plummeted from 629 pages views last Tuesday to 30 this Tuesday.

…and it feels very liberating!

If you’re reading this it is more likely that you came here for a reason other than accidentally clicking on a link and that for me is much more valuable than a huge visitor number vanity figure.

So, thanks for visiting. Happy St Patrick’s Day.