Garden Bloggers and the Wall Street Journal

Yesterday was the day I became famous ... I think. I got home at about midday and checked the blog. There were a few messages to post, and then I thought I'd have a look at my statistics. They were well over what I'd normally expect for the whole day. Odd. Monday's usually a good day, but not that good.

So I had a look at the Referring URLs section, which tells me which other sites people are coming from. And to my surprise, a large number were coming from the online version of the Wall Street Journal. Yes, I know it's April Fool's Day, but I'm serious.

Needless to say, I followed the link and found it led to an article headed Blog Watch, which focused on garden blogging. And that's where the frustration set in, because only the first paragraph of the article was shown. The rest was available only to subscribers.

Frantic E-mails to family and friends didn't turn up anyone who had a subscription, or who had a copy of the print version to see if it appeared there too. But the hits keep growing. I estimate that in the last thirty hours I've had about five to six times the traffic I'd normally expect.

The article featured an interview with a blogger called Billy Goodnick, who's based in California and writes Garden Wise Guy. I'd not heard of him before, but found the blog easily through Google. I've left a message for him, so I hope the mystery will get cleared up.

Did anyone else notice a jump in their stats yesterday? I doubt if it was only my blog that got mentioned. Or did anyone see the article and know what it said and who it focused on?

Andy Warhol famously said that everyone achieves fame for fifteen minutes sometime in their life. Mine seems to have lasted a bit longer. I'm glad I noticed ...

PS. For those of you who read my post about my ailing mandevilla yesterday (which wasn't picked up by Blotanical incidentally - anyone else having the same problem?), here's what it used to look like before the problems set in.

PPS. My strange vegetable of three posts back has been identified by Cory. The usual name is puntarelle. Spigoli ( which means much the same) must be the local name. If anyone wants to find out more or see recipes, just Google it.