… not that I want to write another crappy post, but I just woke up from a nap and now I’m going to bed. It wasn’t a bad week by most measures but God does it feel like it was a long one.
Category: Blogwanking
2025’s first night off
I’m back to work on Monday, and I’m not exactly Sundaying yet, nor do I currently feel like I wasted my entire break, but there is a bit of ennui and just general blech going on right now. So I’m gonna play video games and put the book down for a while and see if I snap out of it.
Hmmm
If anyone would care to explain why my post about The Expanse from three years ago is getting so much attention over the last couple of days, I’d love to know.
Meanwhile, I’m going to turn off the “comments close after two weeks” policy and see how fast I regret it.
Blogwanking 2024
The short version: not a bad year.
This is the second year in a row with traffic going up, and while I’d like to be seeing at least 60K a year again, I can’t complain about thirty-five thousand people coming to look at my stupid little blog. Here’s this year and last year, month-by-month:
So there’s been a drop-off in the last half of the year, but still: with the exception of February, every month in 2024 was better than every month in 2023, which I feel like is a pretty good trend. Here’s the year-by-year:
That huge bump in 2015 is entirely from one post, but what this looks like is a return to normal after a few years of less traffic. I’d love to go massively viral again (or maybe not, I dunno; it can be really annoying) but honestly I’m perfectly happy with the traffic I’m getting. What I’d like to see more of is interaction; my comments and Likes (comments being more important, since I think you have to be a WordPress user to make Like work) have been in a freefall for years and I miss having a bunch of regular commenters. (Not that I don’t love the few of you who still talk to me! But there used to be a lot more of you!)
That’s a total of 1,630,889 words over the life of the blog, by the way. Which is nuts.
And now my favorite part, geography:
If I could get WordPress to do one thing, it would be to let me zoom in on that map. I have had traffic from damn near every country on Earth over the life of the blog:
I’m convinced that Svalbard island ends up getting counted as Norway. I know there aren’t many people living there but I have literally directly asked people from Svalbard to click around a bit and some of them have said they did! The rest of the countries– Western Sahara, Guinea, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Eritrea, Burundi, North Korea, probably still a bunch of tiny island countries and Timor-Leste, which is right at the eastern tip of Indonesia and is barely visible– are not well known for their infrastructure, to put things lightly. There’s also a weird spot on top of Israel that I can’t quite figure out; I have 31 hits from “Palestinian Territories” and 615 from Israel, plus some from Lebanon, so I don’t know what’s going on there. Maybe the West Bank is its own thing and “Palestinian Territories” is Gaza? No idea.
Either way, it’s amazing, even knowing that most of those folks were looking for porn and were only on the site for a few seconds, to realize that this site has been viewed damn near across the entire planet.
Can we keep up the positive momentum through 2025? Will there even still be an internet at the end of the year or will the bird flu have wiped out American society? Stay tuned!
Eh, we’ll try again tomorrow
Today was either going to be the blogwanking post or a full reading round-up for the year, and I am filled with Chinese food and enough sodium to kill an elephant, and as such I’m not terribly interested in producing either of those posts. As such you’re either going to get a shitton of posts tomorrow or I’ll push some of them back into the first couple of days of 2025. Again, it ain’t like I’m on any real deadlines around here.
Still recuperating
I should probably start compiling my end-of-year posts, and the books wrap-up will be sometime in the next couple of days, but mentally I’m not there yet. 2024 was mostly fucking awful and in accordance with prophecy and past experience, 2025 will be much, much worse. Wrapping up this year means I have to admit next year is about to start and I’m not ready for that yet. So let’s call this another night off and try to write something with some substance tomorrow.
Quick request for the WordPress gurus
Do any of you know how to change this image? Is it through my hosting site, maybe, because I can’t figure out how to change it on WordPress? It’s the default image on the card whenever I link a post that doesn’t have an image on it, and I have no idea what to do to change it.
Oops
I’m out of town, and it’s too dark for a View from my Window post, and I damn near forgot to post at all. Who knows what sort of geopolitical nonsense might have ensued if I’d broken my streak!
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 