I always feel like there’s no reason for anyone to be interested in these, but they always end up creating some conversation, and I find myself popping in when others do similar posts, so maybe I just don’t know anything about what people find interesting.

That said, the tl;dr version of this post is “not much has changed lately.”

One thing I really wish WordPress would do is institute some sort of chart to keep track of Followers.  They’re really inconsistent in how they keep track of your numbers (the phenomenon where I hover around a single number for a couple days then suddenly jump by 30 has not abated) and I’d really like to see some sort of trend.  That said, the blog is fifteen months old and has 3800 followers.  I should pass 4000 in the next couple of weeks.  Still only 76 Likes on Facebook, a number that hasn’t budged in forever; most of the readers seem to be coming directly here, but I still see more referrals from Facebook than any other single source other than Google so I’ll keep the page alive.

So how many of those people are coming here?  Let’s look at charts:

Monthly first.  I’m still looking to see if I get that huge spike in readership that happened last winter; while there was a bit of a bulge toward the end of the summer (and an expected drop off once school started) traffic has been pretty steady, especially on readers as opposed to page views, since April.  I generally get between 5-6000 page views a month and around 2000 visitors.  September, I think, is going to end up just barely behind August, mostly due to the several days where I was sick and hardly posted.  It won’t be back by much, though.

Here’s weekly views, where it’s even clearer that not much has changed in the last several months.  Big drop at the start of school and into that week where I was sick, but other than that everything’s been pretty steady.  That week in April where I got 900+ hits in a day for no clear reason at all still stands all by itself.

And, just for the heck of it, here’s Twitter.  See if you can figure out at which points I started, and stopped, actively trying to gain followers:

 

I should probably keep pushing on Twitter until I get above that magic 2k mark, but haven’t had the time and energy for it lately.  We’ll see.

At some point I should probably either put some energy into putting together some sort of long-term strategy for this place or hire Gene’O to write me one, but on the other hand, “write about whatever the hell I want whenever the hell I want” seems to be working okay so far.  We’ll see.

And now, to spend the rest of the day staring at Word files and cursing at Microsoft.  Fun!

(EDIT:  Just noticed this– this is my 850th post.)