Blogwanking, 2019

On December 30, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking4 Comments

The short version of this entire post: basically everything is down slightly from last year, but not shockingly so; I’m still getting far more eyeballs on this site than actually makes any sense to me at all, so I can’t really complain about it, because Jesus, people are actually paying attention to my nonsense?

Yeah, turns out they are.

Posting frequency was up from last year, which was up from the year before it, but engagement is continuing to drop. I’d like to find a way to drive more comments, definitely, and more likes would always be nice, but I’m not sure what the best way to do that is. I keep hearing that blogs are dead; needless to say, this one ain’t going anywhere; while I’d like to more engagement, I’m not gonna shut up or anything if my numbers keep falling.

Geography’s always fun. This is 2019 specifically:

And this is the entire life of the blog:

Basically at this point I only have a few types of countries left: totalitarian dictatorships (North Korea), a few tiny islands, and places where there is either very little infrastructure or very few people or both. I keep hoping to get a hit from Svalbard Island and so far it hasn’t happened yet. That little hole in Europe is still Kosovo; I refuse to believe I have never had traffic from Kosovo in six years and am blaming something wonky about the way WordPress handles geography.

The overall top 10 posts are the same ones they always are, basically; I’m at the point where my “back catalogue,” so to speak, is definitely driving most of the site’s traffic. This is an image, and isn’t clickable:

The Snowpiercer post just refuses to die, although it did have one (1) day this year where it got zero hits, which very well might be the first time that has ever happened. Supposedly the TV show is launching soon, so this will never, ever end. I feel bad about the weird popularity of that Tana French post, too; it’s literally the only thing she ever wrote that I didn’t like and I reviewed a bunch of her other books, so it sort of feels unfair to me. I love you, Tana! I swear!

Top 10 posts written in 2019, and these are clickable if you like:

Most of those make some sense, I suppose; the “dress for success” post is a bit inexplicable but the rest of them are either all hashtagged, of inherent interest to a substantial group of other people, promoted by outside sources (the two book reviews were both posts where publicists sent me the book) or, well, kind of important (the last post).

How did your blog do last year? (If you don’t have one, start, dammit!)

Damn

On August 11, 2019August 11, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

At 968,927 total words, I am closing in on a million words written on this site since it started in 2013:

There will probably be a real post later, assuming I shake off this ass-poor mood I’m in, but I just decided to check on my word count and felt like it ought to be noted.

2018 blogwanking

On December 25, 2018 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:

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?

In which I discover a new WordPress feature that I probably won’t use very often

On December 24, 2018December 24, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, life2 Comments

Wait, I can put words here?

Several times in the last five or six years I’ve done the year-end blogwanking roundup on Christmas Eve, with the justification that no one is on the internets today so it’s a great day to write a completely irrelevant damn post. The problem is that right now I’m about 1750 pageviews away from passing last year’s traffic, which would be the first traffic gain in several years. I’m a few thousand back on individual visitors, but views have a chance of being up. And I kinda don’t want to write that post until I know?

What I need for Christmas is for one or two of you to take an hour and go through the archives.(*) 1750 pageviews in 7 days is an unlikely week under the best of circumstances, and the week of Christmas and New Year’s? I may as well go ahead and write the blogwanking post. But it’s possible. Highly unlikely. But possible.

In other news: I took the boy to get a much-needed haircut today, which marks the last time that I ought to need to leave the house between now and going to the comic shop on Wednesday, which suits me right down to the ground. We’ll have family in tomorrow, and I’m pretty sure we have every single thing we could possibly need here, and the shopping’s all done, so barring some sort of surprise I ought to have a couple of days where I don’t technically need to wear pants if I don’t want to. Which, hey, that’s what the Christmas season is all about, right? Jesus didn’t wear pants. That’s in the Bible somewhere. I have an MA in Biblical studies, I know these things.

Anyway. I hope you’re happy and with family for the next couple of days, unless your family makes you unhappy, in which case I hope you’re happy and literally anywhere else.

(* ETA: I just remembered I actually did this once. Randomly came across a WordPress blog at OtherJob back when I still worked at OtherJob, and the guy needed X number of hits to reach some amount of traffic for the year. I was alone and at work and bored and I literally went through every post on his blog twice just for the sheer hell of it to put him over the top. I’m mostly not serious when I suggest someone do this, for the record, but I HAVE actually done it once. 🙂 )

Well look at that

On August 22, 2018 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 April 9, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

…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.

In which I am viral

On April 6, 2018April 6, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

So yesterday morning I wrote a nine-word snarky response to a tweet from the MIT Tech Review. I write two or three dozen tweets in more or less exactly the same tone as this one every week.

It appears to have hit a nerve.

To put this in perspective, this tweet, in barely over a day, has now reached over three times as many people as this entire blog has in the entirety of its existence. And now that the western hemisphere is starting to wake up again it’s starting to speed up from the 2,000-impressions-per-minute pace that it kept up while I was asleep last night. I think I’ve probably got a solid day at least before it starts slowing down so I imagine it’ll double those numbers.

I’d kind of prefer that the most popular thing I’ve ever written be a blog post or, God forbid, a book, but it’s still fun watching the numbers go psychotic. And the ratio is unreal, so I’m not getting a ton of responses relative to the numbers and 98% of them have been supportive. Not like I have time to notice anybody to argue with them, at any rate.

Speaking of noooooooope…

On February 27, 2018February 27, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

So, remember a couple of weeks ago when I said I was applying for a teaching job? That wasn’t quite true, at least in the strictest sense of the word “teaching.” It was a job, in a school, that would involve occasionally interfacing with kids but which seemed, from the description, to actually mostly involve backing up teachers and being a resource for them rather than a job where I was in front of a classroom all day. I messed around with my work schedule a bit this week after getting a couple of emails from the HR director, who indicated there would be an informational meeting at the school that it might be useful to come to.

(I’m leaving out a lot of details, obviously; this program involves a pretty substantial infusion of money and is a new thing for the school to the point where renovations are happening in the building right now for it, so the idea that they’d invite people who are applying for the job to this informational meeting makes more sense than you might think– the building staff was also invited.)

So. Yeah. I went to the meeting. There were maybe a dozen staff members present and at least three people who were there because they were applying for the same job I was– me and two others, in other words.

The lack of buy-in from the staff was a physical force in the room, and the sinking feeling that started moments after the presentation began never really got any better.

I happened, after the meeting was over, to walk out of the building with one of the other two applicants.

“Was that job what you thought it was when you applied?” I asked.

“Not even a little bit,” she said. And she didn’t say “You can have it,” but it was pretty damn clear she didn’t want it any longer.

They are actually looking for two people to fill this job, who will both be in the new facility at all times. Along with sixty kids.

Sixty. At once.

Three blocks a day, of– lemme say it again– sixty kids. Seventh and eighth graders. In a program that, in my professional opinion, is a massive waste of time and resources if they’re going to treat it as a class that you get a grade for. In a nicely renovated, brand-new space featuring two load-bearing walls in the middle of the Goddamn room that cannot be moved and guarantee that there will be no place where a single teacher can stand and see all of his or her students.

So.

oh-shi