2018 blogwanking

On December 25, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

Ah, screw it, we’ll do it today. Christmas also falls under the “nobody’s paying attention” rule, right? 🙂 You ought to be able to click on any of these for a larger view, if you’re inclined to do that.

Overall traffic: basically right around the same amount as last year for pageviews, slightly down in everything else. That huge blip in 2015 is from the Syria post, which got over 100,000 pageviews and hugely inflated absolutely everything, and I was also posting twice a day or more most days back then. I haven’t been able to keep that pace up. Hopefully next year we’ll have a visible upward trend.

Writing stats:

I wrote more here than last year, but still not close to the pace I was setting in the early years– which, let’s be fair, was insane. Still, over 100K words isn’t nothing even if it is technically my second least-productive year.

Geography. This is this year:

And this, slightly more filled-in, is all-time:

I still prefer the way they used to do things, where that heatmap was a lot more useful, but basically I’m still looking at traffic from all over the world except for kleptocracies, hardcore Communist countries, bits of Africa, and Svalbard island. Top 10 countries for 2018 are the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, India, Germany, Brazil, Malaysia, Norway and Indonesia. All-time is a little different: the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Germany, Brazil, New Zealand, France and Norway. I’d love to know what caused me to get more popular in Malaysia, which has had 40% of its all-time traffic just in 2018. And this little bit of weirdness still persists:

I have still never gotten a single hit from Kosovo. There has GOT to be something going on with the way WordPress calculates traffic that makes it impossible. I just don’t know what. Have ANY of you ever gotten any traffic from there?

(I do have 28 hits from the “European Union,” which is kinda weird, and I wonder if those are the Kosovo ones and are just tabulated strangely. 28 would be roughly in line with the rest of the countries in the area.)

The top 10 individual posts for 2018 will not surprise anyone who has been around here for a while:

The popularity of the Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews series continues to inexplicably endure; the Mini Force post is the #1 Google result for “Mini Force review” and was, all by itself, responsible for nearly 20% of my site traffic. The Snowpiercer review had a single day this year where it didn’t get any traffic, which is the first time that has ever happened. And I have no idea what the deal is with the “bad student” post. None of these make any sense to me at all.

And, for the record, after the top 10 posts (I’m ignoring the home page,) six of the next seven top posts are also CCPR posts.

Top 10 individual posts actually written in 2018:

Nothing I wrote this year really blew up; the difference between #1 and #10 up there is only about 40 pageviews, which isn’t much, and there’s still two CCPR posts up there. I wrote three of them this year; the post for THE DAY MY BUTT WENT PSYCHO doesn’t appear to have benefited from whatever dark sorcery is driving traffic to the rest of them for some reason and is right in the middle, traffic-wise, of posts written this year.

Finally, just for the hell of it, referrers:

All of those Fark referrals are to the Snowpiercer post. I assume the lion’s share of the search engine posts go to the top 10 one way or another, and then there’s the 3000 referrals from Facebook that are keeping me from shutting my Facebook page down for good. Nothing too surprising here, one way or another.

How did you do this year?

In which I discover a new WordPress feature that I probably won’t use very often

On December 24, 2018December 24, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, life2 Comments

Wait, I can put words here?

Several times in the last five or six years I’ve done the year-end blogwanking roundup on Christmas Eve, with the justification that no one is on the internets today so it’s a great day to write a completely irrelevant damn post. The problem is that right now I’m about 1750 pageviews away from passing last year’s traffic, which would be the first traffic gain in several years. I’m a few thousand back on individual visitors, but views have a chance of being up. And I kinda don’t want to write that post until I know?

What I need for Christmas is for one or two of you to take an hour and go through the archives.(*) 1750 pageviews in 7 days is an unlikely week under the best of circumstances, and the week of Christmas and New Year’s? I may as well go ahead and write the blogwanking post. But it’s possible. Highly unlikely. But possible.

In other news: I took the boy to get a much-needed haircut today, which marks the last time that I ought to need to leave the house between now and going to the comic shop on Wednesday, which suits me right down to the ground. We’ll have family in tomorrow, and I’m pretty sure we have every single thing we could possibly need here, and the shopping’s all done, so barring some sort of surprise I ought to have a couple of days where I don’t technically need to wear pants if I don’t want to. Which, hey, that’s what the Christmas season is all about, right? Jesus didn’t wear pants. That’s in the Bible somewhere. I have an MA in Biblical studies, I know these things.

Anyway. I hope you’re happy and with family for the next couple of days, unless your family makes you unhappy, in which case I hope you’re happy and literally anywhere else.

(* ETA: I just remembered I actually did this once. Randomly came across a WordPress blog at OtherJob back when I still worked at OtherJob, and the guy needed X number of hits to reach some amount of traffic for the year. I was alone and at work and bored and I literally went through every post on his blog twice just for the sheer hell of it to put him over the top. I’m mostly not serious when I suggest someone do this, for the record, but I HAVE actually done it once. 🙂 )

I give up; don’t read this

On December 11, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking4 Comments

I have about 60 pages left of Michelle Obama’s book, which I’m enjoying more than I thought I would, and which I think is probably going to generate a review here once I’m done with it. I’ve been fucking around on Twitter for like an hour because I’m Going to Write A Blog Post Tonight and fucking around on Twitter is what I do when I’m waiting for my thoughts to gel enough to figure out what I’m writing about on any given evening.

I need to get the blog post written before I can read, because otherwise Not Blogging hangs over my head and distracts me.

Now, at some point, mentally healthy people realize “oh, blogging isn’t happening tonight,” and stop fucking around on Twitter and go do something that they’d rather be doing– like, say, reading a book I’d like to finish tonight, or playing Red Dead Redemption 2.

But apparently yr esteemed host is unable to do that tonight, so he’s just going to fuck around on Twitter until the blog post happens.

Even if the blog post is about fucking around on Twitter.

So maybe I can pick the book back up now. Hey, I told you not to read this. 🙂

Well look at that

On August 22, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

Screen Shot 2018-08-22 at 7.59.26 PM

You knew there was no way I was going to be able to resist trying to figure out how many words I’d written over the lifetime of the blog. Turns out WordPress did it for me, and I don’t have to figure it out!

Unknown

The answer is that sometime in the next day or so I will cross over 850,000 words written here, since I only need about 700 more to hit that milestone. That’s a lot of words.

Also, I miss 2014.

On milestones

On June 4, 2018June 3, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Writing3 Comments

shutterstock_79583536-800x445

This is the fifth anniversary of the beginning of this blog. Starting tomorrow, it will be my longest-lived Web presence. My very last post at my original blog site at Xanga, of blessed memory, was also a fifth anniversary post, but by that point the blog was all but abandoned anyway and I just happened to notice and post on the right day.

Amazingly, this is also a milestone for the number of posts I have made on the blog. It is, believe it or not, post number two thousand and five hundred. I have somehow averaged five hundred posts a year over the last five years, a number that I don’t even believe, except that I’ve checked it half a dozen ways and WordPress is insisting that it’s true.

I did have a two-year run of posting every day at one point, and I had over 700 posts in 2014. It’s ridiculous, but it’s true.

It is rather difficult to express just how important writing for this site has been for me over the past five years. I can’t really say that it’s brought me fame or fortune, but seeing as how this is the site that has launched my writing career (such as it is) it has genuinely changed my life. I’ve written six books during that five years, started a company, and started going to conventions to promote my books. With the help of my new Patreon site, I’m going to be experimenting with new ways to promote the site and my work, so the remainder of 2018 has a chance to be really big for me. If I ever do gain fame and fortune– and, to be honest, I’ll gladly settle for “moderately well known” and “don’t have to worry about my bills”– the work I’ve done here will be the foundation for it.

Genuinely, to everyone who has ever commented, linked, Liked, shared, forwarded, followed, anything around here: thank you. Thank you so very, very much.

Onward.

My next post won’t be about Twitter

On April 9, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

…but still. Five and a half million people. That’s ridiculous. It has slowed down considerably; I suspect that it’ll eventually top six million but it will probably take quite a while to do it.

In the meantime, I’m going to sleep soon, because the last several days have been exhausting and work has been ridiculous lately. Before I go, some random facts:

Cardi B’s new album ain’t bad;
I am now up to two podcasts that I listen to regularly– Lore and Pod Save the People– and two that are very new and on “you need to improve but for now I like you” status– Our Opinions Are Correct, which is Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz’ podcast about science fiction, and Mass for Shut-Ins, which is the guy from Gin and Tacos doing his thing except not quite as insufferable as usual. Both are on like their third or four episodes and are clearly still ironing out formatting stuff and technical issues, so they’re a bit choppy right now– but check them out.
I’m reading Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation, which is post-Civil-War zombie fun. Check it out.
I kinda want to make my own podcast because they seem fun but hell if I know what I’d ever talk about.

That is all, g’night.

Still going (update)

On April 6, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

…so, about nine hours later, another 1.6 million impressions, or nearly two hundred thousand views per hour. Completely ridiculous.

Oh, and a couple of people alerted me to this bit of nonsense, which also happened:

That’s on Instagram, and I’ve been told it was cross-posted to Facebook as well, both with a goddamn “people for Bernie” watermark smacked next to my name and Grond’s face. I do not approve. I am very much not a Person for Bernie. I’m not gonna do anything about it (I thought about posting “I voted for Hillary” in the comments and didn’t) and at this point I’m more entertained by it than anything else, but they could at least have put that asshole’s name next to the first tweet and not mine.

25,000 impressions while I was typing this short post, by the way. This thing isn’t going away for a bit, yet.