Tag: blogwanking

On subscriptions and social media

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking5 Comments

I don’t seem to have actually made an announcement when I ditched my Facebook and Instagram accounts, so I’m not actually too sure how long it’s been since they went away, but a month seems reasonable. It might have been more than that, I dunno. And while I’m not going to subject you to a lengthy blogwanking post with, like, any charts or anything like that, April and May’s traffic was … bad. Real bad. If I was the type of guy who was interested in, like, science and testing assumptions and shit I’d turn the account back on and just not interact with it at all and see if traffic goes up at all …

… but then, summer is starting, and traffic always goes up in summer anyway …

… and Facebook is fucking evil …

… and I do actually miss some people who I basically only got to interact with through Facebook, but it’s not like everyone who wants to talk to me doesn’t know exactly where to find me.

Blech.

You might remember me talking about my first Winston Box a couple of months (an actual couple of months, as my frequency for boxes was “every two months”) ago, and deciding that I was going to keep it going for one more box. I have, and it has arrived, and I am now done. First, the second Winston Box was a bag, not a box– the type of plastic packaging that Amazon sends clothes in– and God damn it the unboxing is half the fun, and if you’re called the Winston Box and you’re not sending your clothes in a box something has gone ridiculously wrong. I dunno, it’s probably petty, but it aggravated me.

Anyway, once I opened the bag, I found 1) another bland t-shirt with a graphic on it; it’s fine (I’m wearing it now), 2) a three-button, short-sleeve, collarless burgundy shirt that I was about to declare a win until I saw the weird striped cuffs on the sleeves, which I hated a lot, and 3) a pair of shorts that, from the material, I initially thought was a bathing suit, only it was just a pair of shorts and not a bathing suit, and a pair of shorts without pockets at that. I suppose it’s possible that it’s a bathing suit and just doesn’t have a liner, because I know they do that nowadays? Either way I’m not wearing them, which means this box had one thing I was neutral on and two things I actively dislike, and that’s enough to cause me to bring this experiment to a close.

In which I need more to do

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

WordPress just dropped this on me:

Nice round number, 172.

Okay weird

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

I can’t get the post editor to load on my desktop, but it’s loading on my phone. God forbid that I even risk having a day when I didn’t post.

That said, this isn’t viable for an entire post, so if it behaves later, I’ll write more.

Reader survey!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

IN WHICH WE’LL TRY AGAIN LATER

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

I just wrote a thousand words of a post (I wasn’t done) about how we study and teach history in this country, and about what it means to “exclude” people from “history,” and then I decided that the entire post was wrongheaded and deleted it.

Which means that I’ve been sitting here for an hour for, like, nothing.

I have work to do that I don’t want to do. I’m going to go play video games for a while and hopefully when I’m done I’ll have an idea about something else to blog about today. It’s not often that I spike a post, but I think it was the right call here even if it annoys me.

Well, crap

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

The Snowpiercer post has gotten 200 referrals from Instagram in the last 40 minutes or so, and I can’t see exactly where they’re coming from. Typically when this happens it’s because someone’s calling me an idiot somewhere. If anybody’s come here from there and cares to leave a link in comments just so I can see where this is all coming from, that’d be cool. I don’t plan to engage with it, mind you.

Whoopsie

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

Somebody almost fucked around and forgot to blog today. Not that I actually have anything I want to talk about; I just had a parent come at me about her son’s “alleged” absences and I’m not in the greatest mood.

Well, okay, I’m in that sort of I keep receipts for allllll of this, ma’am, and you’re about to find out what my tone is like when I’m not telling you to fuck yourself but I want you to hear that anyway mood.

Do not, in the same damn email, tell me that you’re not home during the day when your son is supposed to be at school and then use the word “alleged” to refer to his absences. Just don’t. It’s not gonna go well.

Off to watch television.

Blogwanking 2020

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I’m not doing a saleswanking post this year– I had no new releases, and went to no cons, and didn’t really market my books at all or, really, do anything to make people remember I occasionally write fiction other than a handful of haiku and short stories on Patreon, so I’m not even looking up how many books I sold this year. I would be surprised if it ended up being more than a couple dozen.

But the blog?

You’re not going to see these words in this order very often, but: 2020 was a very good year, if only in this one minor respect. The blog, no doubt because everyone was home all the goddamned time, had the best year it’s had since the Great Virality of 2015-16. Check the stats:

68000 page views and 40K visitors are both up from last year, and in fact are both up from any year since 2016, which still benefited from the Syria post; it’s possible that without the big bump from that post this would have been the best year since 2014, which continues to make no mathematical sense. Comments are also up, although Likes are down a bit, which is frankly the least important to me of the various metrics I’m looking at.

Why? Well, to start, I wrote a lot:

Highest total posts since 2016, more than one a day, and there were only a handful of days this year where I didn’t post. More words than any year since 2015, and the second-highest words per post of all time. Ultimately the only gripe I can come up with looking at this is that I’d still like to see a lot more engagement and comments, but I keep hearing about how blogs are dead, so maybe that’s why I don’t get as many comments as I used to, and that 5.8 comments number in 2014 isn’t exactly a hotbed of competing opinions.

Total word count over seven and some change years: 1,181,069, not counting this post. That’s … a lot.

Let’s talk posts next. No secret, because this has been the case for years: a lot of site traffic is driven by my perennial posts, and none of the top 10 posts on the site were written this year. This is just an image, but here’s the overall top 10 posts and the number of hits they got:

None of this makes any sense to me, particularly the fact that the fucking Snowpiercer post is still my second-highest yearly views.

This year’s top 10 posts, in order from highest to lowest traffic, are:

Nothing completely inexplicable in there except maybe for that one Monthly Reads post; I’m not sure why that one post would have done so much better than all the rest of them, and the Christmas Abortion Story post was only written five days ago and is on the list already, which is either a sign that the top 10 posts of this year are really weak or that it’s maybe heading toward blowing up. We’ll see if it keeps showing up next week or not.

Geography? Let’s talk geography. This is this year:

And this is over the life of the blog:

And I gotta be honest, y’all: I look at that and I’m proud of it. My stupid little website isn’t making me any money and it isn’t making me famous, but people from damn near every country on Earth have visited it. I mean, what’s left? North Korea and Turkmenistan, both of which are dictatorships; Svalbard Island, where less than 3,000 people live, and several countries in Africa where I suspect reading Western blogs is not a high priority.

Basically, I feel like I have a chance to land a lucky hit from Svalbard at some point, and the rest of them are probably never happening.

I thought about finishing this post with some goals for next year, and … honestly, I’m dialing back on the entire concept of “goals” right now. My one social media goal is to have more followers on TikTok than on Twitter by the end of next year, and I bet that’ll be the case by the end of this school year. For the blog? I’m going to keep writing; this place has been part of my daily life for over seven years and that’s not changing any time soon. I’d like to see those higher numbers become a trend and not a blip, but I’m not going to break my neck over it.

Seriously, though, if one of you ends up heading to the far north or North Korea at some point, make sure to hit the blog up.