I was thinking about waiting until tomorrow for this one, but unless someone decides to go through all of my posts between now and midnight (Feel welcome! Please do!) I don’t think the next few hours are going to make all that much of a difference to how my traffic looked in 2023. Interestingly, I like how the data is presented on my phone better than I do on the website, but here’s the main piece of data:

Here’s the last year by month:

And here’s year-over-year for the entire life of the site:

For those of you who are unaware, that huge spike in 2015, as well as a big part of the 2016 traffic, was from one post, and I obviously haven’t been able to reach that level of virality with anything since. Being up 14% over last year feels good, though, especially since I wrote less this year than I have … well, basically almost forever:

Does it entertain me that I sent my traffic up by posting less than any year other than 2017? Yes. yes it does. And even those 2017 posts tended to be longer; I only had one year with shorter average posts than this one. Interaction is way down, too, but blogs in general are way less popular than they were in the early 2010s and I have trouble worrying too much about it; while I enjoy looking at my numbers and pretending I have any idea at all what moves traffic one way or another, it’s not why the site is here, and I’d still be writing even if no one was reading at all. I had nearly thirty thousand people at least glance at my stupid little blog this year. That’s insane. 

Even more insane:

I don’t have an easy way to quantify this, but that’s considerably more geographical diversity than I have gotten most years on the site. That’s just 2023. Here’s the whole time:

The very short list of places where I have never had blog traffic from: that blob at the top is Svalbard Island, owned by Norway, and I’m not completely convinced that traffic there doesn’t show up as Norway. Svalbard Island is my white whale, I think. North Korea. And then Western Sahara, which I don’t think is actually a country, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, the Central African Republic, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Gabon. That’s it, other than maybe some tiny islands that you literally can’t see on the map. Nine places. I can’t even say countries. 

That’s absolutely fucking nuts, even knowing full well that the wild majority of those hits were probably both accidental and brief. 

Back to the site traffic, though, and the undeniable slowing down of how much I’ve been posting here: I hate to admit it, but the main reason I’ve been posting less is that I’ve been happy lately, more or less. And being generally content does not lead to blog posts. I’ll talk more about this tomorrow, I think (this, the third post of the day, represents the final snowflake of your promised flurry) but I’ve been in a pretty good place for most of the last two years, and there are just more days where I don’t happen to feel like I have something I need to hash out or complain about or get off my chest so I don’t inflict it on my family. Plus, hell, y’all got nearly 80K words out of me on a down year, so it’s not like anyone’s going to complain. 

So yeah. I’d like to pretend I’ll be asleep by midnight, but I won’t, if only because being on break has shoved me more toward nocturnal than I’ve been lately and I will probably be up and reading at midnight. We aren’t doing anything, though. Too old for that shit. I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning, briefly luxuriate in the thought that I have been asleep for 99% of the year, and then find something to do with myself. Don’t do anything too dumb tonight.