The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I discovered a rogue bit of autocorrect had changed “Baldree” to “Balder” in the previous post and went to fix it, only to discover this little bit of blogwankery. My review of Bookstall & Bonedust was the four thousand, four hundred and forty-fourth post on the site, and this one is number four thousand, four hundred and forty-five.
Whew. That’s … that’s a whole lotta words, right there.
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.
Uh, WordPress? Maybe consider putting the “Recommended Tags” feature back into the oven for a little while, it’s not done yet. This was what they suggested after my last post; note that “Christmas,” the only one that is remotely appropriate, was already a tag.
I have rediscovered my previous blog theme, or something close enough to it that it doesn’t matter, and I welcome you to Lovecraft II: The Lovecraftening, only with different colors and I’m probably going to spend some more time this weekend continuing to tweak things until I’m fully satisfied. I was looking for something earth-toned and everything is coming out too saturated, along with other bits of fiddling I want to do, so we’re not quite there yet. I also don’t like how this theme handles Featured Photos, which I never used before, so I need to go back through my last several posts and turn all of those off if I’m going to keep with a recolored Lovecraft.
The funny thing is that if I’d been able to figure out how to make that “trending” section at the bottom of the previous theme into something that was actually highlighting popular posts, I’d probably have ended up keeping it.
So, yeah, the other thing, and if you’re thinking about telling me that the previous two paragraphs don’t count as an anecdote you are both 1) right and 2) in need of shutting up. One way or another I’m using it as a lead-in to two things that happened this week: one, that there was a SWAT action in the town I teach in now where the cops stormed a house, filling it with tear gas and doing a ton of damage in the process, killing the owner of the house in the process.
The owner? Grandfather of one of my students, who was in the house at the time and has not been seen at school since. He may have to change schools now, since Grandpa’s house is no longer suitable for habitation and Mom does not live in our district.
Second, I have reached the absolute shit worst of milestones as an urban public school teacher, as I found out yesterday that yet another former student was murdered earlier this year– I have to be up to double digits for dead former students this year– and that, for the first time, it was another former student who murdered him. I have a handful of convicted murderers among my former students, and more who have died to gun violence, but this was the first incident where both the victim and the murderer were former students, and while my memory doesn’t retain this level of detail it’s entirely possible that they were in the same class.
Great week.
It’s kind of astonishing just how ugly some of these damn WordPress templates are, and I used to think I was a smart person, but figuring out what to do to edit said templates is just miles beyond my abilities. That and I’ve been in a bad mood for at least two days straight so thinking clearly and rationally isn’t exactly a strong suit at the moment.
Will keep fiddling.
Oh, and I don’t seem to be able to go back to the old template, because I can’t remember the name and it doesn’t appear to be available any longer anyway. Whee!
Edit: In fact, I hated that one so much I went back to Tenku, which I also hate. Sigh.
I kind of hate this, except for the parts I like? Let’s see if we can fix them.
Hold off on comments for the time being; I’ll let you know once I’m done futzing and then you can tell me I’ve wrecked everything if you want to.
It has been pointed out to me that, since October 22nd, when you click through to read an individual post off of the front page, the text all becomes black and it is very hard to read against the dark background. I cannot for the life of me figure out what has caused this change, nor can I see anywhere where I even have the option to change the font color in this theme absent changing the colors of virtually everything, much less make a change that only effects clickthrough pages or direct links rather than the front page.
Anybody have any idea what might be going on?
(ETA: I’m convinced that despite the black color going back to the 22nd, this phenomenon only started within the last couple of days. I look at posts through direct links all the time, and I didn’t see this until reading the comment about it this morning.)
I think at this point it’s safe to say that I have rid myself of Twitter. The blog is still cross posting there and I check in once a day but I’m not posting there any longer.
What, do you think, will it take to be quit of TikTok?
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