I'm always surprised when I don't write new entries for a while and for some reason check the Popular Blogs at blogs.sun.com and find myself listed. I want to think it is because of my witty views on technology, but I think that is far from reality. Also, all of my attempts to artificially boost page hits have failed.

I think I end up writing about what people want to hear about - and when it comes to a technology blog, that is about facing problems and solving them. Figuring out your target audience is critical. Most people would view my blog entries as not being very interesting. I'm not trying to reach out to them, I'm trying to reach out to myself. Also, since I want this blog to have 1 identity, it is why I'm pushing the Serialized Science Fiction to a static web site and a blog at Behind the Scenes.

I'm not afraid to write an article about some braindead mistake I made in configuring a system. I'll also make sure to write something if I can't find an existing answer on the web. Going back to my earlier statement, I'm reaching out to myself - next time I have this problem, I know where I can find the answer.

I've suspected I had hit a target audience for some time and I think I can confirm this from reading the latest summary of page hits from whatever tool we use to track them. (Okay, I'll confess, it is SiteCatalyst from Omniture http://sitecatalyst.omniture.com).

About 10% of the hits were just to the root of the blog. I guess that means people read the new stuff. But the single most called page was grub: error 17, cannot mount selected partition - type 0xbf. Indeed, if I search on grub error 17 in google, it is the 9th returned page.

That article is from Feb 19th 2007. It has to be something that people are encountering enough. About 5% of my traffic from Fri. 1 Jun. 2007 to Fri. 30 Nov. 2007 was this single page.

So my summary on how to get the page hits would be:

• Don't worry about getting page hits.
• Write about what you would want to read.
• Write about a lot of stuff.

The more interesting content you have, the more page hits. And the more people come back, the more they will reference you in their blogs, or tag you at del.icio.us, or pump you up at Technorati, etc. You may never hit the top tags at Technorati, but you can carve your own niche.