For reasons that I haven’t quite been able to divine, yesterday this blog got more page views than ever before, by a nontrivial margin (more than the previous two days put together, for instance). Which is a nice thing to see when I look at the stats page, but makes me feel a bit guilty that the content has lately been, and is likely to remain for the next six weeks, a bit anemic. The situation is this: I owe reviews to NYRSF, Foundation and Strange Horizons, I’m in the middle of finalising the content for Vector 250, and I still have an ominously large pile of books to get through before the Clarke shortlist. So while I have some posts I plan to make (I suspect I’ll have something to say about the adaptation of “The Screwfly Solution”, for instance, and there will be stories-of-the-year and books-of-the-year posts) it might also go a bit quiet.
In the meantime, I can at least point you at my review of Blindsight by Peter Watts.
If you have a particularly good memory for trivia, you may recall that I struggled a bit with this review, and re-reading it now there are some parts I’m still not entirely happy with. (It also occurs to me that the information in the second-to-last paragraph might be considered a spoiler, except that for whatever reason it was something I twigged to fairly early on in the book.) But the central point — I hope — comes across, which is that Blindsight is a remarkable novel, powerful both in concept and execution. And you should read it.
vector-bsfa.com 
Well I looked at the Scalzi via the link from here while at work. A little later I clicked through to the sorted books pic. Once at home, I went back to the Heroes links after I’d downloaded and watched it. And finally, I clicked through to the main page to make sure there wasn’t anything I’d missed from earlier. That’s four or five separate occasions from two separate computers.
The one limitation of the wordpress stats is that (unlike, as far as I can tell, typepad and blogger) it only tracks page views, not unique visits. Not that that would have caught your multiple trips, but I’m never sure what factor to apply to adjust “views” into “visits”. Maybe yesterday everyone was just checking back every ten minutes to see if there were any more piles of books …
I usually tell by this.
Google Analytics is excellent and free, you just put a bit of javascript in your template and it takes care of everything. (Can you mess with your template on wordpress.com blogs?)
The wordpress stats are actually pretty good — they tend to pick up more referrers than Technorati do, at least. But there didn’t seem to be any incoming links registered by either that accounted for this week’s traffic blip.