No, not a late April Fool's joke, but this blog actually set a record for visits today. (well, a record for this blog) The increased traffic resulted from the post Google Changes Name and came from the hoax post at the official Google blog.
Here are screenshots from our Flag Counter widget:
Weekly visitors
The dark blue denotes new visitors (1,303) and the light blue is the total counter views. (1,687). I'm sure most of the total above and beyond the first-time views is from me popping back in here so many times watching the numbers climb on the Feedjit widget. I couldn't keep up with the count, but at one time I estimate there were over a hundred hits in less than a minute.
Here is the graph for monthly visitors:
The previous record for visitors was something on the order of 200+ when a post about the marquee tag was linked to from a Mozilla forum with another post about the Cast Away crossroads following close behind. (and that one wasn't about the movie, but was from an alternative energy thread in a forum and meant to illustrate how flat and suitable this area is for wind generators)
What did I learn from this? Well, if I want to increase hits, all I have to do is link to the Google blog. First, though, I'll need to load this blog up with ads.
Nah, THAT would be a joke, thinking I could make money off of this blog.
UPDATE: As I predicted, yesterday had our second largest number of visitors, with 399 first-time visitors and 515 total.
There also was an increase in hits on the "Cast Away" posts; it must have been showing on TV.
