Since writing this post, I have not had a single page view from China, but I have had a few hundred from Singapore. Your guess is as good as mine.
More later, possibly.
Tag: site traffic
2025 in Blogwanking, or: WTF, China?
Let’s start with the good news: traffic was up by two-thirds this year, and depending on how the next two days go this was either the second-best or the third-best year in the history of the site:
We’re still not reaching the heights of 2015, and “In which I tell you how your religion works,” the reason for that huge spike, still sits atop all of my other posts at 113,306 views. Most of the rest are from the Creepy Children’s Programming series and, of course, The Fucking Snowpiercer Post.
Here’s the problem: a large proportion of those views are probably Chinese bots. Why does China care so much about my stupid little website? I have no clue. Why did it start this year? Also no clue. But given that none of my site is in Chinese and I’ve never really discussed anything of particular interest to Chinese citizens, I have a hard time making this geographical distribution make sense:
Worth pointing out: even if you subtract all those Chinese hits out, I’m still up from last year, the fourth year in a row of increased site traffic. It’s just not nearly as impressive. 🙂
Here’s the lifetime geographical distribution, which is about as full as it’s ever going to get, I think:
That white island at the top of the map is Svalbard, which belongs to Norway, and beyond that, we’re looking at North Korea and, frankly, a handful of places that either barely or flat-out don’t have governments: Western Sahara, the Central African Republic, Guinea and Eritrea. Any other missing spots are literally too small for me to be able to pick out of the map.
Here’s how much Chinese traffic I had this year: WordPress just started showing us city data in 2025, and eight of the top twenty cities are in China, including Beijing at #1– I got 2 1/2 times more traffic from Beijing than I did from the city I live in. London, Sydney and Toronto are the first three cities outside of China or the US to show up on the list. We’ll see how much this jumps around next year.
This post will mark 653 days in a row of blogging.
Interaction continues to drop, sadly– well, likes are up slightly, but comments are down, and I feel like comments are more important– and my word count was a little bit down from last year. At just over 1.7 million words over the lifetime of the blog, I’m closing in on that two millionth word:
Obviously I’m not going anywhere; I don’t have anything in the way of specific plans for the future around here other than to keep writing, although I’m considering making the jump from WordPress’ Premium hosting, which I’ve been using for more or less the entire time the blog has been active, to their Business tier. I make enough money now that dropping $300 a year on the site doesn’t feel completely stupid, if only for increased access to stats (I love numbers, as you can see) and better control over how the site looks. We’ll see. January’s a three-paycheck month so I might as well blow some of it, right?
Anyway, if you’re seeing the traffic from China too, let me know– I know of one other WordPress person who has mentioned high Chinese traffic on a mostly-defunct blog, but only the one at the moment. It would make so much less sense if it was just me, y’know?
This was almost a politics post
…which I have refrained from, because typing “Fuck Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin” three thousand times, while accurate and fair, is not exactly compelling reading.
Speaking of not compelling, let’s blogwank:
Seriously, what’s going on here? October 31 was the highest traffic day since 2015 until November 1, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until yesterday, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until– goes and looks— oh, basically right now, since I’m 7 views short of yesterday’s numbers. Engagement doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere and I’m not seeing anything weird in what limited data I’m getting from referrals, and while the immediate impulse is to suspect bots, if they are bots, has WordPress suddenly lost the ability to keep them from showing up in our statistics? Or turned it off? A lot of this traffic is from China but the last couple of days it’s been mostly American. Here’s the geography numbers:
The 7200 from the US would nearly be the best month of the year all by itself. October 2025 was the best month in years, and November should pass it tomorrow. It looks like my traditionally big posts are getting the lion’s share of this traffic, but the numbers aren’t adding up, which is weird, and I feel like this also pushes back on the bot theory– would thousands and thousands of bots be indexing the same post over and over again?
Somebody who knows more than me explain what the deal is.
Explain, pls
Anyone have any ideas about why China, and not the US, has been my #1 source of traffic for the last couple of days? And traffic has been up pretty considerably in both viewers and pageviews, so it’s not like a single bot is crawling the site or something.
I feel like this has to be nefarious somehow, and also like my suspicion is maybe at least a little bit racist. But maybe not.
Anyway, I’m bound and determined to get to bed as early as possible tonight, so this blogwanking update was brought to you by the letter Zzzzz.
Public Service Announcement
Just in case you haven’t heard, even by 2025’s standards there was a pretty massive fuck-up by somebody this week, with billions-with-a-b of passwords leaked.(*) And it’s looking like a lot of them were from Apple and Google and Facebook, and places like that where you really want to make sure your password is secure. I changed about twenty passwords today– all of my email addresses except for work, anything connected with money, and this site– and while it was a pretty big pain in the ass, it really needed to be done.
You’re using a password manager, by the way, right? You should be using a password manager. Make your password for that a four-or five-word phrase that you’ll remember, substituting a couple of numbers for letters or maybe doing some strategic misspelling, and let the app worry about everything else.
Anyway, point is, go do that.
Dammit, I had something else for this. Uh … shit, getting old sucks; I’m watching a video on another monitor while I’m writing this and I’ve lost the ability to pay attention to more than one thing at once. Expect a quick post tomorrow; we’re going to my brother’s to celebrate both of his kids’ birthdays; we’ve had to reschedule this a couple of times now because one or both of them keep getting sick, so hopefully nothing other than the heat will be getting in our way tomorrow.
Gaaaah. If I remember the other thing I’ll either throw up another post or just edit this. There was definitely something but it’s gone right now. Sigh.
(*) I’m not actually certain of any of the details of the leak, which looks like it had to have been multiple simultaneous leaks, somehow? I just know I pay attention whenever Apple or Google gets hit by one of these things because those are the accounts I really don’t need compromised.
EDIT: Oh! I remembered! I woke up this morning to discover that I had a couple hundred page views already, which is not normal– usually there will be no more than a couple dozen overnight. The other weird thing? They were all from Hong Kong, and the specific posts that were seeing a bunch of views were all older posts with no clear relationship to one another. We’ll see if it happens tonight. Those couple hundred page views were also spread out over a hundred or so individual visitors, so it’s not like one person went through a big chunk of the site or something. So … yeah, Hong Kong folks, if you come back, can you tell me why? 🙂
Blogwanking 2024
The short version: not a bad year.
This is the second year in a row with traffic going up, and while I’d like to be seeing at least 60K a year again, I can’t complain about thirty-five thousand people coming to look at my stupid little blog. Here’s this year and last year, month-by-month:
So there’s been a drop-off in the last half of the year, but still: with the exception of February, every month in 2024 was better than every month in 2023, which I feel like is a pretty good trend. Here’s the year-by-year:
That huge bump in 2015 is entirely from one post, but what this looks like is a return to normal after a few years of less traffic. I’d love to go massively viral again (or maybe not, I dunno; it can be really annoying) but honestly I’m perfectly happy with the traffic I’m getting. What I’d like to see more of is interaction; my comments and Likes (comments being more important, since I think you have to be a WordPress user to make Like work) have been in a freefall for years and I miss having a bunch of regular commenters. (Not that I don’t love the few of you who still talk to me! But there used to be a lot more of you!)
That’s a total of 1,630,889 words over the life of the blog, by the way. Which is nuts.
And now my favorite part, geography:
If I could get WordPress to do one thing, it would be to let me zoom in on that map. I have had traffic from damn near every country on Earth over the life of the blog:
I’m convinced that Svalbard island ends up getting counted as Norway. I know there aren’t many people living there but I have literally directly asked people from Svalbard to click around a bit and some of them have said they did! The rest of the countries– Western Sahara, Guinea, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Eritrea, Burundi, North Korea, probably still a bunch of tiny island countries and Timor-Leste, which is right at the eastern tip of Indonesia and is barely visible– are not well known for their infrastructure, to put things lightly. There’s also a weird spot on top of Israel that I can’t quite figure out; I have 31 hits from “Palestinian Territories” and 615 from Israel, plus some from Lebanon, so I don’t know what’s going on there. Maybe the West Bank is its own thing and “Palestinian Territories” is Gaza? No idea.
Either way, it’s amazing, even knowing that most of those folks were looking for porn and were only on the site for a few seconds, to realize that this site has been viewed damn near across the entire planet.
Can we keep up the positive momentum through 2025? Will there even still be an internet at the end of the year or will the bird flu have wiped out American society? Stay tuned!
Blogwanking 2023
I was thinking about waiting until tomorrow for this one, but unless someone decides to go through all of my posts between now and midnight (Feel welcome! Please do!) I don’t think the next few hours are going to make all that much of a difference to how my traffic looked in 2023. Interestingly, I like how the data is presented on my phone better than I do on the website, but here’s the main piece of data:
Here’s the last year by month:
And here’s year-over-year for the entire life of the site:
For those of you who are unaware, that huge spike in 2015, as well as a big part of the 2016 traffic, was from one post, and I obviously haven’t been able to reach that level of virality with anything since. Being up 14% over last year feels good, though, especially since I wrote less this year than I have … well, basically almost forever:
Does it entertain me that I sent my traffic up by posting less than any year other than 2017? Yes. yes it does. And even those 2017 posts tended to be longer; I only had one year with shorter average posts than this one. Interaction is way down, too, but blogs in general are way less popular than they were in the early 2010s and I have trouble worrying too much about it; while I enjoy looking at my numbers and pretending I have any idea at all what moves traffic one way or another, it’s not why the site is here, and I’d still be writing even if no one was reading at all. I had nearly thirty thousand people at least glance at my stupid little blog this year. That’s insane.
Even more insane:
I don’t have an easy way to quantify this, but that’s considerably more geographical diversity than I have gotten most years on the site. That’s just 2023. Here’s the whole time:
The very short list of places where I have never had blog traffic from: that blob at the top is Svalbard Island, owned by Norway, and I’m not completely convinced that traffic there doesn’t show up as Norway. Svalbard Island is my white whale, I think. North Korea. And then Western Sahara, which I don’t think is actually a country, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, the Central African Republic, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Gabon. That’s it, other than maybe some tiny islands that you literally can’t see on the map. Nine places. I can’t even say countries.
That’s absolutely fucking nuts, even knowing full well that the wild majority of those hits were probably both accidental and brief.
Back to the site traffic, though, and the undeniable slowing down of how much I’ve been posting here: I hate to admit it, but the main reason I’ve been posting less is that I’ve been happy lately, more or less. And being generally content does not lead to blog posts. I’ll talk more about this tomorrow, I think (this, the third post of the day, represents the final snowflake of your promised flurry) but I’ve been in a pretty good place for most of the last two years, and there are just more days where I don’t happen to feel like I have something I need to hash out or complain about or get off my chest so I don’t inflict it on my family. Plus, hell, y’all got nearly 80K words out of me on a down year, so it’s not like anyone’s going to complain.
So yeah. I’d like to pretend I’ll be asleep by midnight, but I won’t, if only because being on break has shoved me more toward nocturnal than I’ve been lately and I will probably be up and reading at midnight. We aren’t doing anything, though. Too old for that shit. I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning, briefly luxuriate in the thought that I have been asleep for 99% of the year, and then find something to do with myself. Don’t do anything too dumb tonight.
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