WordPress Year in Blogging

On December 29, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

…not a whole lot that I didn’t say earlier today, but it’s right here. Have you gotten yours yet?

Hey, just wondering

On December 22, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking12 Comments

Who else is super excited about getting their end-of-the-year report from WordPress?

In which I have no idea where I am or what’s going on

On November 25, 2015November 25, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Uncategorized4 Comments

As of a couple of days ago, it’s been a solid two months since I managed anything like the work schedule I’ve grown accustomed to over the last 15 years, and as of right now it’ll be another two before I’m officially supposed to return. Last weekend my brother and his fiancée were in town along with my best friend and we had Thanksgiving with my family a week early. My son is on Thanksgiving break, and he’s home with me right now.

What this means is that I am a complete mess in terms of knowing what day of the week it is or when I’m supposed to be doing what or basically anything else. I wrote the headline to this piece before I actually started it and I swear it was originally a #WeekendCoffeeShare post, meaning I thought it was bloody Saturday.

Thursday/Tomorrow is Real Thanksgiving, which will be celebrated with my wife’s family, and Friday through Sunday I’ll be at Starbase Indy in, well, Indianapolis. I won’t be able to go anywhere or do anything tomorrow, though, so anything I need to buy or print or get done for Friday actually needs to be done today because everything righteous will be closed tomorrow.

That’s not helping.

So, yeah, today’s a weird day, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going on with my life right now. I’m hoping the week after Thanksgiving holds a bunch of good news, but I’m not talking about that until it happens.

In other news, the Syria post had 10,316 views yesterday. Remember when I was kvetching a little bit that it didn’t look like I’d get as many views this year as last year and that I really wanted 100K out of this year? That post has been live for about exactly a week (within half an hour) as I’m typing this and it’s had 29,445 views, so so much for worrying about that. It’s finally starting to show some signs of slowing down, and tomorrow is a major national holiday, so right now I’m guessing yesterday was the peak, but we’ll see what happens.

Much more to do today, so we’ll talk later.

In which my diamond shoes are too tight

On November 23, 2015November 23, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized7 Comments

Screen Shot 2015-11-23 at 8.34.25 AM.png

Damn post is wrecking my graphs.

It is Monday, which makes me feel like the traffic on the Syria post has got to slow down today, but the numbers so far show me differently. On Saturday, I had 200 pageviews when I woke up in the morning and 500 by noon; on Sunday, 500 when I woke up and 1000 by just after noon, and today I had a thousand by 8:00 in the morning. It’s 8:44 as I’m typing this. That picture’s less than five minutes old and it’s 50 hits out of date already.

Screen Shot 2015-11-23 at 8.34.00 AM.png

This may end up too small to read, but look at that nonsense. That 468 hourly high is after I went to bed, and I went to bed around 10:30, which means we had like ten straight hours of 350-400 hits per hour yesterday. There should be a lull in the bell curve around midafternoon, and it ain’t there. And that early-morning dip is probably still around 100-15o an hour.

The goddamn thing’s gonna catch and pass the Snowpiercer post today. In six days. Insanity.

I keep waiting for a troll invasion; I’ve stomped on one post where the person referred to “unvetted” refugees, demonstrating clearly that he had no idea how the refugee process actually works at all, and there have been a couple that I’ve laid a stinkeye on but have left alone. I’ve made one alteration to the text where a mistake was pointed out and left another alone although I probably ought to edit it a bit. I’m considering turning off comments today just because I legitimately have a shitton to do (this is my only day without the boy all week) and I don’t know how much time I have to wait for the racist hordes to land on my head.

Another interesting fact: Facebook continues to be just about the sole source for referrers. You’d think that someone in there somewhere would have dumped the thing onto Zite or StumbleUpon or Reddit or something, but so far this is a Facebook party. Which could be why I’m not seeing too many trolls; maybe they’re all staying on FB and yelling at people there. Who knows.

(8:56 AM: 1318 views, meaning the post got 116 views in the less than fifteen minutes it took to write this.)

It continues (morning blogwanking)

On November 20, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Uncategorized8 Comments

Yesterday was the highest-traffic day in the history of the blog, including the time where I was Freshly Pressed:

Screen Shot 2015-11-20 at 8.11.55 AM.png

You’ll note that I had more individual visitors than I had pageviews the day before, and I’m pretty sure the day before was the 2nd or 3rd best day I’ve ever had. That’s pretty impressive. As of now, 8:17, I’ve already got 160 views, so thus far the pace hasn’t slowed down any. And check this out:

That’s all time ranked posts, using the old stats editor. Leaving out the home page and the “About” page, which aren’t posts, that means that a post I wrote less than 48 hours ago is now the 7th highest-traffic post I’ve ever written.

Dag.

I don’t think it’s going to catch the Snowpiercer post, which has five times as many hits as its closest competitor, but it’ll be really interesting to see how far it gets before interest fizzles out. Another interesting detail: right now, traffic appears to be driven almost exclusively by Facebook referrals. As of this second the page has been shared on FB 759 times and 31 on Twitter, but I got 671 referrals from FB yesterday and only 13 from Twitter. Not one click through StumbleUpon, Reddit, Tumblr, or any of the other usual suspects. My autoshare on FB has reached 907 people and the Tumblr share doesn’t have a single note on it. Less than ten from Google +, which I think is funny, since those might be my first G+ referrals ever.

I’m actually kind of scared to see what will happen if Reddit gets ahold of the post. Which I suppose you can take as an invitation if you’re a Redditor.

Still no trolls, either. Amazing.

Now (again) if I can just get these people to buy books. 🙂

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.