Whoa

On January 3, 2016January 3, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Uncategorized2 Comments

Okay, I know some of these are duplicates and others are ghost or spam accounts, but…

Wow.

#Weekendcoffeeshare: 2016 edition

On January 3, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories12 Comments

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If we were having coffee, we’d be talking about the same thing everybody else is talking about: it’s 2016! What have you been doing with your life for the last couple of weeks? What do you want to do with your life next year?

I’m not super interested right now in looking back at 2015. I blogged every single day last year, most days more than once; feel free to start with January 1 and work your way through. The year had high points and low points much like any other and was, I think, on balance more high than low despite the chaos of the last few months while I’ve been on medical leave.

I don’t do resolutions. Resolutions happen in January and are abandoned by February. However, if you ask me what my current goals are in life and I don’t have any, it means I’m probably deeply depressed. I always have a couple of goals that I’m working on; right now is no exception. Most of them are related to my writing and I’ve already discussed. The rest, right now, are job-related.

I want a new job. Preferably soon. Real soon. I’ve put a hold on stressing out about it over the holidays; there was no point, as the holidays are a deeply bad time to be unemployed. You have to be unemployed through the whole several weeks; all the folks with job openings, on the other hand, are looking at piles of resumes and going “Yeah, we’ll deal with that when we get back.”

(The exception that proves the rule: my brother recently moved to Illinois to be with his fiancee, and has had some trouble finding work too. He had a series of interviews last week in rapid succession, and when the third interview in three days was “go downtown, talk to this person, and then do the paperwork for your background check” I told him he had the job and to not worry about it. Why? Because they pulled in teachers over winter break to interview him, and they did three interviews in three days, and that means they’re in a huge damn hurry to get the job filled. I was right. Most of the jobs I’m applying for are not jobs that are going to lead to death or dishonor if they’re not filled this week.)

Well, at any rate, tomorrow’s Monday, so everybody will be back. My suspicion is that every office on Earth will start with a horrible three-hour meeting and then 80% of the people at work will spend the rest of the day looking around their desks, bleary-eyed, and trying to remember their passwords, and that therefore the earliest any “Hey, come interview with us!” phone calls could possibly happen will be Tuesday.

I am desperately hoping to get a phone call on Tuesday, especially for one particular job that I applied for the week of Thanksgiving and was explicitly told not to hold my breath about until after New Year’s. We’ll see, I guess.

At any rate, I’m going insane over here and I need a new job. So that’s goal one, even before any writing stuff happens: get a damn job.

I kinda feel like that’s enough for right now. How about you? What are you working on right now?

WordPress Year in Blogging

On December 29, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

…not a whole lot that I didn’t say earlier today, but it’s right here. Have you gotten yours yet?

Blogwanking 2015

On December 29, 2015December 29, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking8 Comments

Fun thing about Macs that I didn’t realize until a few days ago: most of us know about using control-shift-3 to take a screenshot. Did you know that if you use control-shift-4 you can then draw a rectangle on the screen and it just screencaps that part? No need to crop!

Anyway, here’s how this year went:

Screen Shot 2015-12-29 at 8.06.24 AM.png

That’s with 636 posts published. Here’s 2014’s details:

Screen Shot 2015-12-29 at 8.09.03 AM.png

Now, that’s all skewed to hell by the Syria post, which, again, got over 100,000 pageviews and who knows how many viewers; it’s currently sitting at 38,000 FB shares, so… a lot? What I find interesting: I didn’t miss a single day of posting in 2015, and I’ll be damned if I miss tomorrow or Thursday. But I had fewer posts, since 2014 had 779 of them, and a lot less engagement– 1000 fewer comments and 3000 fewer Likes. I would not have expected that. Tons more unique viewers, though; I was way up on that (nearly double) before the Syria thing hit. In other words: I reached a lot more people this year, even before the viral post, but they aren’t spending as much time on the blog or talking/communicating nearly as much as the 2014 people did. My ratio of views to visitors in 2014 was insane. That went away in 2015.

Geography! Here’s my top 10 countries:

Screen Shot 2015-12-29 at 8.14.21 AM.png

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that with maybe a bit of fiddling toward the bottom these are probably just about everyone’s top countries. I see no reason why my blog would be more popular in, say, France than anyone else’s. Maybe I’m wrong.

Full global reach, 2015:

Screen Shot 2015-12-29 at 8.16.24 AM.png

Just about everywhere, basically. Here’s the lifetime of the blog:

…oh, god damn it, they’re screwing with this again. Well: Greenland fills in, and all of South America, and another country or two in Africa, and a few tiny islands. I’ll upload the image if I can find it. Shit. I NEED MY LIFETIME GEOGRAPHY, WORDPRESS.

Grrrrrrr.

Referrers? Sure, why not, although this is skewed by the Syria post again:

Screen Shot 2015-12-29 at 8.26.03 AM.png

Not much to say here, I guess, other than to wonder what exactly is causing the 127.0.0.1 referrals. I tend to get a handful a week but not many more than that; if they ever spike I’ll look into them more closely.

So, that’s my 2015. How was yours? Saleswanking tomorrow or the day after.

Site redesign question

On December 27, 2015December 28, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking6 Comments

(NOTE: If you’re one of the “visits the site directly” people, this is pinned for a couple of days. Scroll down for new stuff.)

If you’re a regular reader (I’ll leave the definition of “regular” up to you; if you think you’re regular, you are) I’d really, really appreciate an answer here:

#Weekendcoffeeshare: At least I think it’s the weekend edition

On December 26, 2015December 26, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories14 Comments

I think it’s Saturday. It may not be, and if it turns out that I’m wrong and it’s not Saturday, I won’t be surprised at all, because as bad as my ability to tell what day it is has been damaged by my prolonged period of not going to work, this weird thing where now the boy is on vacation too and my wife is having random four-day weekends is just completely screwing with me.

That cup up there is my coffee cup. There are others like it, but this one is mine. The crayon is included for scale. That coffee cup is so large that it’s actually difficult to hold one-handed; it needs a second handle. It holds an enormous volume of coffee. Sugar is added to it via multiple scoops of the largest spoon we have.

I have lost track of the amount of coffee I’ve consumed this morning and I still do not feel remotely human. I think at some point in the last couple of days, maybe more than one of them, Christmas was celebrated in the homes of various relatives, but most of it is a blur. There is only The Couch for me today, or at least there will be once I decide there has been enough coffee.

So, yeah. If we were having coffee, I doubt I’d be fully cognizant that you were in the room. That kind of morning.

It’s 1:00 PM.

Whatever.