I shouldn’t complain about my readership in October 2017. It was up a little bit from September and August, for one thing. There were, WordPress says, 2,151 page views the past month here. This is up from September’s 2,126 and August’s 1,965. 2151 is also special for being one of the years named on-screen in Star Trek, although to be fair, only Enterprise. The number of unique visitors rose to 1,337, from September’s 1,089 and even August’s 1,301. I thought that 1337 was a promising number too, what with it being the year of Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, but of course that was 1381. I have no idea how I made such a dumb mistake and I apologize for the inconvenience.
The popular stuff continues to be comic strip stuff and things by great humorists who weren’t me. The top five essays in October were:
- What’s Going On With Judge Parker?
- What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? July – October 2017
- Mark Twain: Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance
- What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
- Has the comic strip _Momma_ come to an end?
I understand people coming to me in search of plot recaps for the story strips. That’s just practical, especially for comics that haven’t drawn their own commentary community the way Funky Winkerbean or Mark Trail have. I am surprised by the number of people looking up Momma is all. I mean, what’s going on in story or semi-story strips is a question people can reasonably wonder many times over. Whether Momma is still being made a person would wonder once after the strip goes into eternal reruns. Maybe twice if you allow for forgetting the original answer.
The most popular piece of my own original-brand humor was the Statistics Saturday piece, Some TV Show Episodes I’m Still Angry About Decades Later (I imagine everybody has a list like this). The most popular long-form piece of my own creation last month was Why I Am Not A Successful Urban Fantasy Writer, a bit of a surprise to me since that one was published the 27th. I’d have figured one of the goofball writing posts from earlier in the month more likely to take the lead, just because they probably all have about the same audience and would have several times as long to draw readers.
I make out there having been 70 countries sending me readers in October. That’s up from 65 in September and 68 in August. There were 21 single-reader countries, down from September’s 24 and up from August’s 20. And which were all these places of wonder and readers? These.
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 1,516 |
| India | 69 |
| Canada | 67 |
| United Kingdom | 65 |
| Brazil | 51 |
| Italy | 26 |
| Germany | 25 |
| Australia | 22 |
| Philippines | 21 |
| Netherlands | 20 |
| Spain | 19 |
| Ukraine | 15 |
| New Zealand | 13 |
| Romania | 13 |
| Vietnam | 13 |
| Russia | 12 |
| South Africa | 12 |
| Poland | 11 |
| Singapore | 9 |
| Sweden | 9 |
| France | 8 |
| Greece | 8 |
| Finland | 7 |
| Hungary | 7 |
| Argentina | 6 |
| Czech Republic | 6 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 6 |
| Thailand | 6 |
| Mexico | 5 |
| Pakistan | 5 |
| Serbia | 5 |
| Turkey | 5 |
| Bangladesh | 3 |
| Denmark | 3 |
| Japan | 3 |
| Kuwait | 3 |
| Lebanon | 3 |
| Malaysia | 3 |
| Slovakia | 3 |
| Armenia | 2 |
| Cambodia | 2 |
| Estonia | 2 |
| Ghana | 2 |
| Indonesia | 2 |
| Ireland | 2 |
| Kenya | 2 |
| Lithuania | 2 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2 |
| Uruguay | 2 |
| Belgium | 1 |
| Bulgaria | 1 |
| China | 1 |
| Colombia | 1 (**) |
| Cyprus | 1 |
| Egypt | 1 |
| Georgia | 1 |
| Haiti | 1 |
| Israel | 1 |
| Laos | 1 (*) |
| Norway | 1 |
| Palestinian Territories | 1 |
| Paraguay | 1 (**) |
| Peru | 1 |
| Portugal | 1 |
| Qatar | 1 |
| Saudi Arabia | 1 (*) |
| Slovenia | 1 |
| South Korea | 1 |
| St. Kitts and Nevis | 1 (*) |
| Trinidad and Tobago | 1 |
Laos, Saudi Arabia, and St-Kitts-and-Nevis have been single-reader countries two months in a row now. Colombia and Paraguay have been for two months in a row. And Cambodia snapped a five-month streak as a single-reader country by sending me two page views. That’s something!
November starts with a total of 65,163 page views, from 35,411 unique visitors. Are you one of them? Maybe. If you use the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ button on the upper right corner of this page you can have it appear in your Reader page, if you’re on WordPress, and then I’m not sure if it ever counts your reading my posts here. If you use the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile Via E-Mail’ button underneath you can get these e-mailed to you, and then I’m almost sure I won’t know anything about it except that my father tells me sometimes I wrote something hilarious two months ago.
WordPress figures I’m starting November with 782 followers on the site. It figured I started October with 780 so, hm. This is savings-account levels of growth rate. I guess that’s better than when I put my readership in a CD for six months. (It was a Jelly Roll Morton album, so it’s not like anyone was unhappy with it, but six months is a long time to spend in just seventy minutes of music.) And there’s 252 people following me on Twitter, many of them not search engine optimization bots, so please join me over at @Nebusj if you’d be so kind.
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Another Blog, Meanwhile 
Referencing numbers as years reminds me of the time I was in a hotel at a writers’ conference, and for some reason the rooms had four-digit numbers that happened to run from about 1920 to 1980 (it wasn’t THAT large a hotel so I wasn’t sure why they’d done it). I kept telling my wife it was like travelling through time. We were stuck (if I recall correctly) in the 1970s, but fortunately the hotel hadn’t carried the idea through by decorating each room per period.
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That’s a pretty nice bit of weirdness. The weirdest room-numbering thing I ever had to work with was a while that my office had been carved out of space from a once-larger-room. And so it officially had a number higher than anything else on the floor. But it wasn’t anywhere near the next-highest number because, of course. But that was all right, since they didn’t put the office number on my door anyway. I felt all conspiratorial just having my normal office routine.
My love did once stay at a hotel that had wings themed to the various decades, although they’d only built the 1950s and 1960s. I think there were supposed to be plans for all the decades of the 20th century, which would probably have been a good bit of jolly fun for the 70s and 80s, and even the 20s, but goodness, who’d stay in the 30s given a chance? I suppose the rooms would be cheap but otherwise … and the 40s aren’t looking all that much better apart from the music.
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