Tag: nerdery

2018 blogwanking

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

Ah, screw it, we’ll do it today. Christmas also falls under the “nobody’s paying attention” rule, right? 🙂 You ought to be able to click on any of these for a larger view, if you’re inclined to do that.

Overall traffic: basically right around the same amount as last year for pageviews, slightly down in everything else. That huge blip in 2015 is from the Syria post, which got over 100,000 pageviews and hugely inflated absolutely everything, and I was also posting twice a day or more most days back then. I haven’t been able to keep that pace up. Hopefully next year we’ll have a visible upward trend.

Writing stats:

I wrote more here than last year, but still not close to the pace I was setting in the early years– which, let’s be fair, was insane. Still, over 100K words isn’t nothing even if it is technically my second least-productive year.

Geography. This is this year:

And this, slightly more filled-in, is all-time:

I still prefer the way they used to do things, where that heatmap was a lot more useful, but basically I’m still looking at traffic from all over the world except for kleptocracies, hardcore Communist countries, bits of Africa, and Svalbard island. Top 10 countries for 2018 are the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, India, Germany, Brazil, Malaysia, Norway and Indonesia. All-time is a little different: the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Germany, Brazil, New Zealand, France and Norway. I’d love to know what caused me to get more popular in Malaysia, which has had 40% of its all-time traffic just in 2018. And this little bit of weirdness still persists:

I have still never gotten a single hit from Kosovo. There has GOT to be something going on with the way WordPress calculates traffic that makes it impossible. I just don’t know what. Have ANY of you ever gotten any traffic from there?

(I do have 28 hits from the “European Union,” which is kinda weird, and I wonder if those are the Kosovo ones and are just tabulated strangely. 28 would be roughly in line with the rest of the countries in the area.)

The top 10 individual posts for 2018 will not surprise anyone who has been around here for a while:

The popularity of the Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews series continues to inexplicably endure; the Mini Force post is the #1 Google result for “Mini Force review” and was, all by itself, responsible for nearly 20% of my site traffic. The Snowpiercer review had a single day this year where it didn’t get any traffic, which is the first time that has ever happened. And I have no idea what the deal is with the “bad student” post. None of these make any sense to me at all.

And, for the record, after the top 10 posts (I’m ignoring the home page,) six of the next seven top posts are also CCPR posts.

Top 10 individual posts actually written in 2018:

  1. Na na naaa na, na na naa na, hey hey hey
  2. In which @amazonhelp doesn’t help
  3. KOKOMO-CON 2018: The Cosplay
  4. Snarf, 2004-2018
  5. Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: THE AMAZING WORLD OF GUMBALL
  6. Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: #SHERA AND THE PRINCESSES OF POWER
  7. Well that escalated quickly
  8. AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR, the spoiler #review
  9. Fuck Mel Hall, part 3 of an endless series
  10. VENTING: In which I’m going to vote for assholes

Nothing I wrote this year really blew up; the difference between #1 and #10 up there is only about 40 pageviews, which isn’t much, and there’s still two CCPR posts up there. I wrote three of them this year; the post for THE DAY MY BUTT WENT PSYCHO doesn’t appear to have benefited from whatever dark sorcery is driving traffic to the rest of them for some reason and is right in the middle, traffic-wise, of posts written this year.

Finally, just for the hell of it, referrers:

All of those Fark referrals are to the Snowpiercer post. I assume the lion’s share of the search engine posts go to the top 10 one way or another, and then there’s the 3000 referrals from Facebook that are keeping me from shutting my Facebook page down for good. Nothing too surprising here, one way or another.

How did you do this year?

Well look at that

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

Screen Shot 2018-08-22 at 7.59.26 PM

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!

Unknown

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.

My next post won’t be about Twitter

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

Screen Shot 2018-04-09 at 9.20.39 PM

…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:

  • Cardi B’s new album ain’t bad;
  • I am now up to two podcasts that I listen to regularly– Lore and Pod Save the People– and two that are very new and on “you need to improve but for now I like you” status– Our Opinions Are Correct, which is Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz’ podcast about science fiction, and Mass for Shut-Ins, which is the guy from Gin and Tacos doing his thing except not quite as insufferable as usual.  Both are on like their third or four episodes and are clearly still ironing out formatting stuff and technical issues, so they’re a bit choppy right now– but check them out.
  • I’m reading Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation, which is post-Civil-War zombie fun.  Check it out.
  • I kinda want to make my own podcast because they seem fun but hell if I know what I’d ever talk about.

That is all, g’night.

#2017 blogwanking

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

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:

Screen Shot 2017-12-24 at 1.50.03 PM

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:

  1. Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: MINI FORCE, 6,413 pageviews.
  2. #REVIEW: SLEEPING BEAUTIES, by Stephen King & Owen King, 276 pageviews.
  3. Betsy DeVos is a fucking worthless hack and so is her scumbag boss, 249 pageviews.
  4. KOKOMO-CON: The Cosplay, 236 pageviews, plus hundreds on the pictures.
  5. RIP, Sonya Craig, 186 pageviews.
  6. On refugees and Christianity, again, 174 pageviews.
  7. On “assassination porn” and stupid, stupid people, 169 pageviews.
  8. #metoo and me, 149 pageviews.
  9. May as well tell the whole world, 123 pageviews.
  10. On letting idiots make decisions for me, 118 pageviews.

…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:

  1. Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: MINI FORCE, 6,413 pageviews, 6,413 pageviews overall.
  2. Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: BOB ZOOM, 5,262 pageviews, 15,799 pageviews overall.
  3. Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: OCTONAUTS, 3,045 pageviews, 9,068 pageviews overall.
  4. SNOWPIERCER: I hated, hated, hated, hated, HATED this movie.,  3,013 pageviews, 27,152 pageviews overall.
  5. Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: SARAH & DUCK, 2,791 pageviews, 3,206 pageviews overall.
  6. In which I tell you how your religion works, 2,118 pageviews, 109,692 pageviews overall.
  7. Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: COLOR CREW, 1,958 pageviews, 6,977 pageviews overall.
  8. Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: CURIOUS GEORGE, 1,423 pageviews, 5,781 pageviews overall.
  9. In which I am still a bad student (pt. 2 of 3), 1,243 pageviews, 2,014 pageviews overall.
  10. Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: Peg + Cat, 958 pageviews, 3,694 pageviews overall.

…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:

Screen Shot 2017-12-24 at 5.09.52 PM

And here is the lifetime-of-the-blog chart.  Both are clickable to make ’em a bit bigger if you care to do so:

Screen Shot 2017-12-24 at 5.10.34 PM

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.

In which I make poor decisions but am somewhat successful anyway

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Work2 Comments

5547000_sd.jpg;maxHeight=550;maxWidth=642.jpegSo 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.

Goddamn

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

Represent, y’all.  Screen Shot 2016-11-15 at 9.10.59 PM.png

Some old-fashioned blogwanking

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

Screen Shot 2016-10-16 at 8.08.47 PM.png

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.

Blogwanking 2015

On 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.