This weblog passed a threshold recently. The majority of traffic has shifted from friends and family to random people coming in from search engines.
My graph maker source has been the most popular search. I hope some fraction of those several dozen visitors found it useful. My brief entry about Eric's animated Facebook picture has also brought in quite a few visitors from the .edu domain. I updated the post with an IM conversation in which I helped one such visitor get his or her animation working. There has always been a constant trickle of people looking for Purdue particle accelerator pictures. That trickle was rapidly matched by people looking for tips on how to draw using Illustrator. I even got an email saying I stole someone's Googlewhack:
I dunno if you've ever heard of a googlewhack. It's a pair of dictionary words that, when entered into the google search engine, produce one unique result instead of, say, 2 billion. Anyway, I had found one, with the glorious phrase "extrasolar shenanigan", and just as I'd started showing this off to my fellow sad people with too much time to kill in front of computers, your weblog has appeared. If you have used the word "extrasolar" or "shenanigan" in the past few days, congratulations; you just stole my googlewhack.
No hard feelings. Just thought I'd let you know.
Dave
Ironically, I am nowhere near the top in a search for my own name.
How do I feel about this different audience? I am especially pleased that people are finding my graph maker useful. That is why I released it to the public domain; I was hoping people would find it, and I wanted them to feel free to use it. It would have made no sense to post such a simple script and say, "This is mine! Hands off!" I like thinking that perhaps I made the internet a tiny bit more useful for someone. I feel the same way about the Facebook and Illustrator posts. I hope to write more how-to and informative posts in the future.