Finding out how many people read my story, that is, rather than simply clicking on it, giving it a cursory examination, and then going onto something else. When I last posted a blog on this, I was surprised how many responded with a closed answer that, "It was impossible."

Well, I always enjoy a challenge, so with my last two stories, I decided to separate out the ending of the story and post it in a separate file accessed by clicking on a "Final Chapter" link at the end. The only way of accessing that link was either by going to the end of the posted part of the story, or to My Stories page.

To head off issues that some browsers pre-fetch all hyper-linked pages before the user even asks for them, I hid a link to a blank page behind a full stop (period in American). From that I discovered only about 1% of hits cause the blank page to be accessed, so pre-fetching is a negligible factor.

About one third of total hits resulted in a link to the Final Chapter in the first story, and a quarter in the second story. About 3% of all hits, or 10% of all reads resulted in someone clicking on the Good Story button.

So, I feel reasonably satisfied that I have a broad measure of the number of reads, and that the difference between the two stories demonstrates that one story was more readable than the other.

The two stories were both in the Decade of Big Busts series - No 3 A Bun in the Oven and No 4 Waiting for Godo