Tag: wordpress

This was almost a politics post

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

…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.

Some Sunday odds and ends

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews2 Comments

Had an enormous traffic spike the last couple of days– yesterday was the highest traffic day in years, possibly since the Syrian refugees post hit a couple hundred thousand views ten years ago. And other than the fact that most of them were from America (with a much smaller but still weird four-day pop from Chile, of all places) I don’t know anything about any of the visitors.

It was probably a bot– I’ve also been getting a lot of traffic from China lately– but I thought bot visits didn’t count? I wish I could get more detail on my views.

Today? Dead quiet.

We are finally, after fourteen years of living in this house, replacing the hideous curtains in our bedroom and the gross miniblinds in our living room. I found this behind the hardware for the curtains and I would like a word with whoever built this place. I just wanna talk.

I’m not doing a full review of it, but this is a really good book. My only problem is that Hastings has a weird habit of drawing attention to the race of any American who isn’t white when it isn’t necessary– there was an actual chapter about race relations among American troops, and I’ll cut some slack on that one, but just for example, referring to the youngest soldier to die in Vietnam as “a black kid” in a weirdly flippant way really stuck out. My only problem is that now I want to read twelve other books on Vietnam that he mentioned (sidenote: are there any histories of the war written in English by Vietnamese scholars?) and my backlog is bad enough already.

This image from my email is not exactly inaccurate, but I feel like maybe Amazon is still having some tech problems.

After over a year of threatening to watch it, my wife and I finally sat down to watch John Wick 4 last night, and I will forever refer to it as The Dumb John Wick. I’ve seen all of them now, and I never really loved the series, but this one takes everything that was sorta ridiculous about the first three movies and turns those up to 12, while also not adding anything of real value to the series, ignoring the cliffhanger ending of 3, and being way, way, way too long. Is there a lore reason why there are literally no cops at all in the John Wick universe, for example? Blech.

You might not be able to tell, but this picture was taken outside the window as I was removing the curtains earlier today. At 6:30. I fucking hate daylight savings time. Hate. Can we please be a society just for a little while and get rid of this bullshit? Please?

And finally, as of tonight I’ve read just over 2600 pages on my new Kindle, which means that I’ve managed to adopt the thing into my lifestyle successfully … and the battery is still at 16%, which is bloody impressive.

Uhhhh

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

WordPress appears to be having technical issues tonight, so I’m gonna just toss this up– gotta keep that streak going– and call it a night. The boy downloaded Nightreign tonight and watching him play has proven quite amusing so I’m going to go do that. Hopefully this will actually post.

(Randomly: listening to a Pearl Jam concert from May 8th of this year. I swear, Eddie Vedder has not correctly remembered the lyrics to Wishlist even a single time in his entire career.)

Ahem

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, WritingLeave a comment

Holy cow

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

I registered the site before I started using it, but Goddamn, that’s a long time.

Hmmm

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

If anyone would care to explain why my post about The Expanse from three years ago is getting so much attention over the last couple of days, I’d love to know.

Meanwhile, I’m going to turn off the “comments close after two weeks” policy and see how fast I regret it.

Blogwanking 2024

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

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!

Quick request for the WordPress gurus

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

Do any of you know how to change this image? Is it through my hosting site, maybe, because I can’t figure out how to change it on WordPress? It’s the default image on the card whenever I link a post that doesn’t have an image on it, and I have no idea what to do to change it.