Tag: blogging

Blogwanking 2024

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

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!

Taking tonight off

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I actually didn’t really have much lesson planning to do tonight, and fell into Black Myth Wukong for a while instead, and now I’m in “I’ve got nothing” mode, so … just go read that book review from yesterday again. It was a good book! I mean it!

Taking the night off

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I have managed to set it up so that I have no lesson planning to do this week, and no photocopying to do in the morning, which means I came home and died on the couch, and now I want to go die on the couch some more. Go hug somebody.

In which I have been here a long time

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Geek1 Comment

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.

Blogwanking 2023

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Geek1 Comment

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.

A puzzlement

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

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.)

On 10 years of Infinitefreetime

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

10 years ago today, I started a blog.

Since then?

10,545 subscribers.

419,908 unique visitors with 745,292 page views.

4,260 posts, counting this one.

Those utter bastards at WordPress appear to have removed all of my writing-related stats, but I hit a million words in November of 2019, and since that was also the 3,000th post it’s probably not unreasonable to suggest that I’ve written about 1.3 million words or so here.

I’ve had at least one hit from damn near every country on Earth. The only voids on the map big enough to see are North Korea, Western Sahara, Guinea, Gabon, and the Central African Republic.

Not bad, for a site literally named after the idea that I was too fucking busy to have a blog.

In which I think not

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

Missing a day once in a while is no big deal, even if I don’t do it very often. But I refuse to be busy enough to miss two days in a row, even if the post for that second day is a ridiculous two-sentence half-assed excuse for a blog post.

This one is three sentences.