Not to step on my own book review, but at some point this month the blog crossed over a million all-time page views.
Amazing. Thanks, everyone.
Tag: blogwanking
700
A quick spot of extra blogwanking before I make it the second day in a row with two posts: yesterday topped out at 22,638 pageviews and 13,898 visitors, meaning that it was my highest-traffic day by about ten thousand views, which is insane. As of 6:08 PM today, we’re at a comparatively sedate 5,043 pageviews, still probably a top-20 day if not better than that.
Also, today marks seven hundred days in a row of posting to this site. I’m not going to pretend every post has been stellar, but I haven’t missed a day in nearly two years.
Who wants to touch me?
Today’s blogwanking WTF moment
Why, yes, I’m writing two posts back-to-back.
Today is, by a wide margin, the highest-traffic day in the history of the blog. Even when In which I tell you how your religion works was blowing up on its way to amassing over 100,000 views, the biggest single day was 12K. To get an idea of how ridiculous those numbers are, I had more pageviews today than all but three months in the twelve and a half years I’ve been writing here. We aren’t halfway through February just yet and it’s the third-highest traffic month in that entire time. February is on pace to beat entire years.
Nearly all of those views (around 17K) are from the US. Another thousand from Australia. None from China, which is where I was getting a lot of my traffic during the last few months of 2025. And they’re spread out— look at the difference between uniques and pageviews. In which the kids are fine, shut up has about 1500 views. How your religion works is adding another 750. The rest of the hits are all over the place.
Three likes and zero comments.
I feel like I ought to be elated— who doesn’t enjoy it when their writing is getting noticed?— but the absence of any clear reason for the spike has me suspecting bots, even though I don’t have any real idea how that would be happening either. Very few referrals are showing up. Google’s telling me I have 378 active users right now, and I’m watching that number climb as I’m typing. I have no idea what’s going on.
If you’re new around here, please let me know what brought you to the site. I mean, I appreciate it, but the curiosity is killing me. I’ve had 400 hits while I’ve been typing this and the active users number is up to 482 now:
Send me some money, damn it. 🙂
I hate to do this two nights in a row
… but guess what I had to buy four of on no notice tonight?
The good news: turns out I can afford a sudden low-four-figure emergency! Which doesn’t mean that I want to spend that kind of money, or that it doesn’t toss me into a shitty mood for the rest of the night, especially when it takes just over an hour to get the new tires installed. And especially especially when I can feel my stomach lining eating itself while I’m waiting, which leads to a 3500-calorie Burger King dinner, and I think I’ve already eaten enough in January and February to last me until March.
And it’s going to end up being three nights in a row, too, because tomorrow after school I have my weird little gay kids club and then after that I have TRIVIA NIGHT for probably longer than I think. I haven’t done TRIVIA NIGHT in a while but feel free to read this and this to find out how the last one went.
Yep, it’s cold
We haven’t gotten any substantial snow yet, but I think the idea is it’s supposed to mostly roll in tomorrow and Sunday, so we’ll see what happens. My classes went fine today; turns out that if you tell kids you’ll give them extra credit if they show their pets (or any nearby object they’re willing to pretend is a pet) on camera, they show up for Meets, and then they even stick around afterwards.
There’s a fairly high risk of school being cancelled Monday as well, depending on how shit the next couple of days go; I’m really hoping if that happens they just cancel school and add a day to the end of the year. Today went well but I feel like two synchronous days on either side of a weekend are not both going to go well. We’ll see, I suppose?
After a big traffic spike for the last few months of 2025, including a lot of traffic from China and Singapore (but also elevated traffic from the US) I’ve been struggling to hit 100 page views lately. I’ve finally got access to Google Analytics– which, weirdly, happened the same day the traffic fell through the floor– and I’m struggling to understand what I’m looking at, to be honest. Like, right now, Google is telling me I’ve had 9 “active users” in the last half hour, but my hits on WordPress Stats haven’t moved? Ultimately I’m aware that none of this matters since the site isn’t monetized at all, but just for my own shits and giggles I’d like to know how these things overlap and intersect, y’know? Analytics isn’t super forthcoming with definitions, unfortunately.
Also, I thought I was supposed to be able to see what search terms were leading people my way, and what referrers, and so far I haven’t been able to dig that information out. I feel like it should be have been simple. Like, what the hell does this mean?
Sixteen thousand “engaged sessions,” of zero seconds of engagement time each, but … less than a hundred “page views”?
Somebody just download this shit into my brain so I don’t have to work to understand it. I’m tired, dammit.
In which I feel a bit better
Apparently the way to get a lot done at work is to be really, really depressed all day on Sunday. I got to school this morning and discovered my usual Monday morning meeting was cancelled, and man, I did not get enough sleep last night to be emotionally or physically capable of sitting alone in my classroom for an hour, staring at the walls. So somehow, instead of falling asleep at my desk, I managed to … turn that into getting a lot of shit done? Sure, I’ll take it, because it is damn near unprecedented for it to be Monday evening and for me to have one class completely planned out for the rest of the week (okay, I haven’t done the photocopying, but that’s not a big deal) and one class planned out through Thursday. That’s not a thing.
Hell, I even did my after-school tutoring today instead of tomorrow at the request of the kids involved, so technically that’s done a day early too.
This must be exactly how Mick Jagger feels every day.
Completely random observation: how is it possible that I have been writing on this blog for over a decade and not only do I 1) not have a “news” category, but 2) it never occurred to me that I didn’t have a “news” category until yesterday? I mean, granted, most of the posts that might get categorized as “news” end up under “politics,” but … damn, that just doesn’t feel right. Also not feeling right: adding a new category this late in the game. I think I’m stuck with my current ones forever.
Fun fact
Since writing this post, I have not had a single page view from China, but I have had a few hundred from Singapore. Your guess is as good as mine.
More later, possibly.