My Spike was Smaller than Darren's!

Regular readers will know that this site had a strange traffic "spike" yesterday, which I found out about shortly before bedtime, and which I couldn't explain at the time. Google Analytics gave me the answer this morning and I'm about to reveal all, but first......

It's quite funny that this should have happened on the same day that Darren Rowse posted about a real traffic spike at Problogger - his, at 250,000 visitors was a little higher than my own, but you should read his post, which tells a fabulous story.

So, back to my own. Will Carling is quite a celebrity in the UK, was England's most successful rugby captain, and is very active on Twitter. As an ex rugby player myself, I followed Will, he followed me, and we started a dialog. His new venture is a website called Rucku - it's a kind of virtual rugby clubhouse, and it's excellent. Anyway, Will and I exchanged various Tweets and emails, and I gave him a little advice and posted a piece on my blog about Rucku. This was some time ago, but it was what led to my traffic spike, because Will now has his own blog, and he was good enough to post a thank you, with a link to this site, on a page of his blog! That in turn, brought me a load of new traffic, and so far, we seem to be continuing to ride along on a bit of a wave. So many thanks Will!

The other piece of great news I had today is that David Risley is going to run with a guest post I submitted to him yesterday - the post should appear sometime next week, and I'll be sure to write all about it on here - covering how I selected the topic, how I approached David and how I handled the comments.

So, it has been a great couple of days, and I'm going to have a night off from blogging and enjoy a few glasses of wine, some fantastic food and the company of the person I most love in the world.