The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
You knew there was no way I was going to be able to resist trying to figure out how many words I’d written over the lifetime of the blog. Turns out WordPress did it for me, and I don’t have to figure it out!
The answer is that sometime in the next day or so I will cross over 850,000 words written here, since I only need about 700 more to hit that milestone. That’s a lot of words.
Also, I miss 2014.
…but still. Five and a half million people. That’s ridiculous. It has slowed down considerably; I suspect that it’ll eventually top six million but it will probably take quite a while to do it.
In the meantime, I’m going to sleep soon, because the last several days have been exhausting and work has been ridiculous lately. Before I go, some random facts:
That is all, g’night.
It’s that time of year again, where I pretend that people care about my site metrics even the teeniest little bit and waste time posting about them anyway! You’re excited, right?
Okay, there’s a reason I’m posting this on Christmas Eve, nobody’s on the blog today anyway. 🙂 Onward!
Here’s overall traffic for the blog, organized by year:
That’s… not super encouraging, obviously, and I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t written a monster post at the end of 2015 (more on that later) we’d be seeing a steady decline since 2014. Now, a lot of this year is my fault– I’ve not been engaging with other bloggers and I haven’t been posting as often, so traffic was bound to be down. That 575 comments number is definitely something I’d like to see go up in the future; that’s not even two a day. But hey! Sixty-one thousand pageviews ain’t bad. It’s not like I’m a celebrity or anything; I’m an idiot with a website.
The top ten posts written in 2017 were:
…so, yeah. Nothing that really set the world on fire, other than that MINI FORCE piece, and… well, prepare for a pattern on that. I have no idea who the hell is reading the Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews series, but holy shit are those posts popular, except when they’re not. The one on Pokémon that I wrote this year got nowhere, the one on Mini Force got six thousand pageviews. Hell if I know.
The top ten posts of the year, regardless of when they were written, are:
…I assume you may have noticed a theme. Be aware that the next six highest posts for the year are also CCPR posts. I don’t understand any of this, really; that Goddamn Snowpiercer post should not be still getting views but still does every single day (and remains the #1 Google result for the words “Snowpiercer stupid,”) and I’ve never understood the popularity of specifically #2 in that “Bad Student” series. For comparative purposes, part one got 59 views this year, and part 3 got 67. I think it has something to do with being a high Google result for searches that include the image at the top of the page, but why the hell that led to twelve hundred pageviews? I dunno.
Clearly I need to just review kids’ shows all the time. That’s obviously my niche.
OH I ALMOST FORGOT EDIT: Geography! Geography is fun. Here are countries that have visited my blog this year:
And here is the lifetime-of-the-blog chart. Both are clickable to make ’em a bit bigger if you care to do so:
Still missing: North Korea, Cuba, Turkmenistan, Western Sahara, Guinea, Liberia, Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Gabon, Svalbard Island, and… Kosovo. I have always suspected that for some unclear technological reason whatever software WordPress is using interprets hits from Kosovo as being from the neighboring countries, as they’re fairly well-represented, and none of the rest are especially surprising, as they’re either Communist dictatorships, tremendously poor, have essentially no people, or some combination of the three.
It is very cool to say that my stupid little blog has had visits from damn near every country on Earth, guys.
So I caved and got an Apple Watch. It was an accident, I swear; I went into the store intending to just go on a fact-finding mission, secure in the knowledge that even if I were able to pick out one I liked there was no chance of there being any Series 2 watches in stock, and I wanted to physically put my hands on the watches to see how they felt and how they wore and pick one out based on that.
Well. Uh. Oops. Turns out they had exactly two of the exact one I was thinking I wanted– I’ve ordered a knockoff Milanese loop band (don’t tell anyone) that is literally like a seventh of the price that Apple wants, but the fluoroelastomer will do in a pinch, especially since I like to say “fluoroelastomer.”
Right now I’m a trifle underwhelmed, but the UI is largely responsible for that and it’s gonna take me a bit to learn. We’ll see how the battery life works out. I’ll report back in a few days.
I’d heard from my co-workers that the last week of December was going to be insane, but the same people who said that had been telling me that December in general was better than November. I have sold more furniture in the last two and a half days (I left at 2:30 today, as I usually do on Wednesdays) than I did in the entire rest of the month, and this week is already my second highest week of sales ever, with the weekend left to go, which is utter fucking madness. And that’s without any really big sales; I’ve just had a bunch in the 2-3000 range. Yesterday and Monday I was so busy that I could barely keep up with the customers; it was bloody insane.
I can put up with a little bit more of this, though, if the universe would like to keep sending it my way. It’s a problem I’m willing to put up with.
Represent, y’all. 
That number, 9928. It bothers me. It is close to 10,000, and yet it is not 10,000. In fact, a fair observer might rightly claim that it is less than 10,000.
I assume that you know what to do.
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:
That’s with 636 posts published. Here’s 2014’s details:
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:
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:
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:
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.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 96,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.
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