So that’s going well

On November 19, 2015November 19, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking3 Comments

rusnrd6jsjs4njnofrit That little post about Christianity and the Syrian refugees yesterday got 636 pageviews, a single-day record for any post not involving Freshly Pressed. The site in general had 890, with 620 unique visitors. As of this exact second, 6:33 in the AM, we’re looking at the fourth most popular post written in 2015 (total 733 views) and absolutely the fastest-moving thing I’ve ever written for this space– remember, this is still in less than a day— because even the Snowpiercer post took a minute to get moving.

Also as of right now: 347 shares on Facebook, a number that has changed while I’ve been writing this and is close enough to half the total number that Snowpiercer has amassed that it’ll probably be there by the time my son wakes up in a few minutes. (EDIT: It got six more before I hit “post,” so it’s there.) It’s already at nearly 100 views today, and it is, again, 6:36 in the morning. I can’t quite call it “viral” yet, but it’s definitely doing quite well.

Also amazing: I haven’t had to slap any trolls around yet, although I don’t expect that to last.

Maybe I’ll get my 100K pageviews for the year after all.

Now all I gotta do is get these folks to buy some books. Good morning, Internet.

Sunday blogwanking

On September 28, 2014September 28, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking10 Comments

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.)

Blogwankery, etc.

On November 16, 2013November 16, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, idiocy2 Comments

photo-2 First things first: These text messages? Just happened. To me. And that’s how I reacted. Like a goddamn adult with a soul. I want karma points, universe.

Second thing second: My Fitbit just emailed me (it does that) to congratulate me on climbing ten flights of stairs today. It helpfully added that that was a hundred feet up.

Actual number of stairs climbed: 0. I did, however, mow the lawn– which gets me wondering about what it’s actually doing when it “counts stairs.”

Third thing third: I should apparently write about my grandmother more often, because today set records in 1) Likes on posts, 2) Follows (twenty, which means that the number of followers this blog has increased by 10% in a single day) 3) visitors and 4) overall page views. I’m fully aware that this all means exactly nothing but I have to confess that I’m a tiny bit disappointed that I didn’t also set a record in number of countries I had page views from, which is another metric I enjoy wasting time paying attention to.

Whee!