On a year at WordPress

Posted on by Luther M. Siler

I started blogging in… 2004, I think, when a grad school friend of mine suggested that a bunch of us start sites at Xanga.  That blog lasted five years of mostly-daily publishing through the first three or four years and then a slow decline over the last year.  A year and a half or so ago I got dragged back into a new Xanga site at the suggestion of a friend I’d met through the first blog, and then Xanga exploded and I moved operations over here.

In six or so years of blogging at Xanga, I got around a hundred and twenty thousand hits.  Here’s the traffic from my first year at WordPress:

Screen Shot 2014-06-04 at 2.34.35 PM

…so I’m at half the traffic of six years of blogging at another site, in a year.  Traffic’s dropped way off from wintertime but that’s because I’ve invested less time into babysitting the site; it’s starting to climb back up again lately and I’m fine with that.  All said, nearly sixty-five thousand hits in a year is not something that I feel like complaining about.  It’s awesome.

What?  You want more nerd stuff?  Okay:

Screen Shot 2014-06-04 at 2.35.17 PM

 

I am down to mostly third-world countries, Islamist theocracies, and Communist strongholds as far as countries that I haven’t seen traffic from yet.  And Kosovo.  Seriously, Kosovo, what the hell is your deal, what did I do to you?  I’ve had so much traffic from the rest of Europe that I’m starting to wonder if WordPress thinks Kosovo is a country just for this map but actually interprets traffic from there as being from someplace else.  And somebody hitting me up from Svalbard island would be nice, but I think there are only seeds and ice there and I don’t think seeds and ice use the Internet.

One more, while I’m sharing numbers:

Screen Shot 2014-06-04 at 2.35.36 PM

That followers number staggers me, even as I’m convinced that it doesn’t mean much– I had one random couple of days a few months ago where I inexplicably got almost a thousand page views in a day, but there are nowhere near three thousand people coming here even on a monthly basis, so I suspect the majority of those followers are bots or fly-bys.  Still, though, when I look at most of the other blogs I read, three thousand seems like a lot for people who aren’t otherwise celebrities or well-known, and I’m certainly not that.

So, yeah.  I’ve invested a lot of time and effort in this place over the last year but I think it’s been worth it and it’s been a lot of fun.  We’ll see how the next year goes.  Hopefully Kosovo will show up so I can start shooting for Liechtenstein and Vatican City.  🙂

Thanks for reading!

(Actually, let’s not make that a three-word thing:  Seriously.  Thanks for reading.  Y’all are awesome.  I mean it.)

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Luther M. Siler

Teacher, writer of words, and local curmudgeon. Enthusiastically profane. Occasionally hostile.

20 thoughts on “On a year at WordPress”

  4. Svalbard also has polar bears, so maybe if you made a polar Bear friendly post you might get some hits from there….here in Georgia we are reluctant to see Kossovo as a country, seeing it as part of Serbia….

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    1. It depends on how much time and patience you have to babysit your blog. Making sure to write every day– and, let’s be honest, I get in a couple of posts most days– seems to be the most important thing, but it also seems to help to spend some time looking through keywords for other blogs that you’re likely to enjoy and interacting with them. People seem to enjoy following a “like” back to the original blogs and I know I’ve picked up some followers just by looking around for stuff that I thought was interesting.

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  6. ohhh xanga….was on it everyday, then it was ruined by myspace and then facebook…I miss xanga. happy bloggerversary…. ^_^

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    1. I miss it too. I love a lot of things about WordPress but one thing it definitely lacks compared to Xanga is community-building tools. Weird how much better Xanga handled that considering how many years ago I was on it…

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      1. Agreed. I made so many friends on xanga that I’m still friends with today. I started on it in 04 too. Ah…I sound like the old lady in the rocker, “back in my day…” lol

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  8. I’ve only been doing this since last September and I am amazed that I have nearly 100 followers! Here’s hoping you get Kosovo soon. 🙂

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