You folks are hard to figure.

By “you folks,” I don’t mean “you people,” as in, “There goes the neighborhood.” I mean, “you folks,” as in, regular readers of this blog. You know who you are, and may God have mercy on your souls.

I have the darnedest time figuring you out.

I keep half an eye (not easy; don’t ask) on the traffic stats for this here blog, not so much to stoke my outsize ego, but just to see what chords I’m striking and when I’m just striking out.

I don’t want to overextend my blog welcome (hold your tongue; I know what you’re thinking), and just as soon as my blogs start putting up embarrassing numbers — which is totally unrelated and sometimes inversely proportional to embarrassing content — I’m going to pull the plug on it. But as long as it continues to draw at least double digits, in total page views, mind you, not percentages, by gosh, I’m going to keep crankin’ it out.

So every time I throw up a blog, I check in from time to time to see if I’m writing in a vacuum.

But that’s small-picture thinking.

Since the turn of the year, I had planned all along for my first blog of 2011 to look back on the top blogs of 2010. Novel thinking, I know. Nobody — I mean, NOBODY — does reflective, top-10 stories as the calendar flips.
I haven’t blogged since back in December, and if the vitriolic e-mails and phone calls (no, mom, the blog isn’t dead yet) are any indication, at least a few people wondered whatever happened to Rolling Along.

It just went into hibernation for a couple of weeks as I buried myself in the esoteric world of online traffic analysis. As I pored over bounce rates and unique page views and other Interwebby gobbledygook, I began to see a clear pattern about which blogs were the best-read and which were the most ignored. Simply put, the pattern was … that there was no pattern.

See, I figured the old tried-and-true methods of titillation should hold true and tried when it comes to blogs.

That is, I assumed sordid tales of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll would rule, but the only blog truly about sex I wrote all year (my apologies) ranked 13th among the blogs I wrote in 2010, one spot behind a blog about, of all things, the weather.

My one blog about drugs was a distant 22nd.

Rock ‘n’ roll, I’m sad to say, went totally unrepresented last year, but it’ll never die.

So what topics DO drive hits? I’m not sure.

I didn’t have any keyword gold standards — like Bieber or abortion or Palin — in the headlines or blog bodies to generate off-the-charts mis-clicks, so aside from a, ahem, misleading headline or two — “Confessions of a crackhead,” for instance, on a blog about imperfect pavement — I figure most people reading my blogs are doing so because they want to be there, despite the occasional commenter who takes the time to complain about how much of his/her precious time I’ve wasted.

The top-10 topics of 2010 include blogs about snow, riding on sidewalks and snakes.

No. 2, curiously, was a sentimental bit about getting rid of one bike to get one for my wife and son.

No. 1 — in terms of total traffic, as well as comments — was, strangely enough, about several close encounters I had in slick conditions — WHILE DRIVING MY CAR. Yep, the most viewed, most commented-upon bicycle blog of 2010 was about … driving.

Yeah, I never saw that coming.

“sex”