Use of ‘em dash’ Makes the Top 20 (For Yesterday)

Even after 500 posts and two years of posting I check my site traffic statistics every day and sometimes two or three times a day. And because the SquareSpace site traffic counter rolls off after a month I also go to the section where I can check what the popular postings are each day. Sometimes it is surprising which postings are getting the views.

Generally any postings about girls manage to regularly get in the Top 20 for each day, and my latest posting featuring SCN at Falls Farm has been in the Top 20 (Top 10 even) since it was first posted. But there was a surprising entry in yesterday’s Top 20.

Coming in at 5th, so it even made the Top 10, was my posting about the correct usage of the three types of dash punctuation featuring the use of the misunderstood, and rarely correctly used, ‘em dash’.

This posting, which can be found here, was posted way back on the 26th August 2009.

Who would ever have thought such a posting would still be popular two years later?

I should probably add—for any new readers who might now be thinking that my posting on the use of dashes is getting thousands of hits—that my daily average unique visitor count is typically under 100 and views are averaging 207 per day. Even though this posting is in the daily Top 20 it actually only got 11 views. But in terms relative to my site that makes it ‘popular’.

I can only assume some other site is linking over to it but then that makes one wonder: Who would link over to a posting about how to use dashes? If someone is linking over, and that is the only plausible explanation I can come up with for the sudden popularity of this posting, then please post a comment and let me know where you are linking over from. I am seriously curious to know.