Since the month’s off to some kind of start I can try the one essay each month that I know exactly how to write and don’t have to do hard work for. Its problem: was anything popular here and, if so, how much? After several months in a row of pretty good-sized readerships I’ve been expecting a collapse, but that may just be that I got a cold this weekend and it’s left me in a fowl mood. But WordPress is the actual authority on readership data that I’m sure they don’t make up for any weird, inscrutable reasons. Let’s look.
OK, then, so the number of page views rose to 3,454, beating May’s 3,227. Not quite beating April’s 3,590. But still, that’s all year now that I could expect about 3,500 page views. Through 2018 I think the major pieces of my blog have been a story strip reviews on Sundays, the cartoon reviews Tuesdays, long-form pieces on Thursdays, and a Statistics Saturday with some silly little list then. Apparently, that’s a nice, stable writing plan. Now if I could do something for Mondays that anyone cared about.
172 things got liked around here in June. There were 175 likes in May, and 177 likes in April, so I’m getting very marginally less likeable over time. This matches my experience with the dwindling number of people who visit me. But again, I’ve got a cold so it’s spoiled my whole attitude toward everything.
56 comments through the course of June, which is up again; there’d been 54 in May and 43 in April. Also looking at the monthly reports tells me there were 148 comments in January and that’s so hard to imagine. I think so much of my writing here as being stuff that people look at, acknowledge as existing, and then get on without worrying further about. I need to leave more nerd-bait around so people will come in trying to correct my obvious mistakes.
Recapping story-strips has been very good for my readership. The top essays in June were all comic strip explanations:
- What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?
- What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Is Something Happening In Apartment 3-G Suddenly? March – June 2018 (my post for the 11th of June, and which I’ve switched to the default Judge Parker tag so that page gets a slightly better Google ranking.)
- What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? And What Happened To Jim Scancarelli? (as above and, yes, it looks to me that the strip is back in new production and I have a recap scheduled for this month, three Sundays from now)
- What’s Going On With Judge Parker? (people really want to know about this possible Apartment 3-G reappearance)
- What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? (I’m sure people want to know this. But I think I’m accidentally clickbaiting people who want news about Stan Lee’s personal crises. I do now know these in any detail. They all look complicated and unhappy. Last report I know of is an article at the AV Club that I mostly just looked at the headline of and then felt bad about.)
Meanwhile my most popular bit of original non-review writing was The Great Lottery Experiment, which gratifies and surprises me. It’s a bit of microfiction and was a whim turned into four paragraphs. I should do more of those, but I didn’t expect the first one to happen, so who knows how to get more? My most popular long-form piece was Some Astounding Facts About Summer, and I’m glad for that too. I had fun with that piece.
That’s enough fun. Now how about the running of the countries that sent me readers at all? There were 71 of them in June, down from May’s 78 and April’s 76. There were 22 single-reader countries, down from May’s 25 and up from April’s 21.
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 2,643 |
| India | 191 |
| Canada | 96 |
| Italy | 65 |
| United Kingdom | 63 |
| Australia | 56 |
| Germany | 38 |
| Philippines | 27 |
| Mexico | 18 |
| South Africa | 17 |
| Spain | 13 |
| Brazil | 12 |
| France | 12 |
| Romania | 10 |
| Singapore | 10 |
| Sweden | 10 |
| Egypt | 9 |
| Finland | 8 |
| Ireland | 8 |
| Japan | 6 |
| Malaysia | 6 |
| Norway | 6 |
| Netherlands | 5 |
| Switzerland | 5 |
| Turkey | 5 |
| Jamaica | 4 |
| Kenya | 4 |
| Nigeria | 4 |
| Saudi Arabia | 4 |
| Argentina | 3 |
| Austria | 3 |
| Denmark | 3 |
| European Union | 3 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 3 |
| Pakistan | 3 |
| Peru | 3 |
| Poland | 3 |
| Portugal | 3 |
| Puerto Rico | 3 |
| South Korea | 3 |
| Belgium | 2 |
| Bosnia & Herzegovina | 2 |
| Bulgaria | 2 |
| Chile | 2 |
| Iceland | 2 |
| Indonesia | 2 |
| Israel | 2 |
| Ukraine | 2 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2 |
| Algeria | 1 |
| Bahamas | 1 |
| Bangladesh | 1 |
| Barbados | 1 |
| China | 1 (**) |
| Colombia | 1 |
| Ecuador | 1 (*) |
| Fiji | 1 |
| Georgia | 1 |
| Honduras | 1 |
| Hungary | 1 |
| Jordan | 1 |
| Kuwait | 1 |
| Morocco | 1 |
| New Zealand | 1 |
| Slovenia | 1 (***) |
| St. Vincent & Grenadines | 1 |
| Taiwan | 1 (*) |
| Thailand | 1 (**) |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 1 |
| Tunisia | 1 |
| Vietnam | 1 |
So Ecuador and Taiwan have been single-reader countries two months running now. China, three months running, although there’s so many people there I would have thought a second would run across the site here just by accident. Thailand’s also a three-month single-reader country, but that’s got fewer people than China, based on a quick show of hands. Slovenia’s into its fourth month with a single reader each month. This is getting confusing. What happened to the months where there’s six countries on a two-month streak, one on a three-month streak, and then Colombia was a single reader for 18 months running? Also, I’m curious what the Slovenians are looking at. I’m also curious about the readership in India, which rose like fifty people from May. And hurt that my Canadian readership dropped by a couple dozen people. I hope that roster of Fictional Canadian Provinces or Territories will help put things right and that someone will send me a box of Wunderbar candies.
Insights figures I started the month with 91,043 page views from 50,089 unique visitors and I apologize for missing visitor number 50,000. You were definitely a person there and I hope you enjoyed your visit! Also numbers 49,998 and 50,003. Number 50,006 I’m not so into because I know she was just checking in to see whether I was saying something snide about her.
As of the start of July I’ve published 118,030 words here, so I look on course to have my most verbose year yet. There were 181 total posts, gathering 411 comments in total and accumulating 1,154 total likes. That’s an average of 2.3 comments per post, and an average 6.4 likes per post. I had been at 2.2 comments per post at the start of June. But I’d also been at 6.5 likes per post in early June, too.
For the year so far I’m averaging 652.1 words per post, again down from the start of June’s 659.8 and the start of May’s 682.3. Yes, you wonder what I’m doing with all these saved words. I keep some of them in reserve against a wordage shortfall. And of course lend them out, when friends need. I’m happy to be able to help, when folks need.
With all this in mind, are you interested in reading Another Blog, Meanwhile regularly? You can add it to your WordPress reader by clicking the button on the upper right corner of this page. Here’s the RSS feed, if you want to read this page without my ever knowing you’re doing it. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, here I am. I announce new posts for here and for my mathematics blog there. Sometimes I even talk with friends there, although not so much lately, because I’ve had a cold and been very tired and would like to go upstairs and sleep through to July now. … It’s already July? … well, through to next July then.
…
Why did I have someone searching for “cartoon asian old men naked” getting to my site here? The heck? What did you find? Was it what you hoped for?
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Another Blog, Meanwhile 
Happy 4th of July one day early. Do the rabbits respond to fireworks badly like most dogs?
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I’m not sure how to generalize. There’s a lot of reports about how rabbits don’t like loud noises. But the first Flemish Giant I kept was pretty tolerant of fireworks. If they went on a bit long he might thump, the one time, and then glare at me for letting this go on after he had made his point plain. But that was all. The second was a bit of a more suspicious sort and seemed to just be waiting to see where all this fireworks activity is leading before he made a clear statement on the matter.
Our current pair of rabbits we haven’t really had long enough to tell. It’s easy to suppose that the grumblebunny would like to have all this nonsense knocked off, and the relentlessly cheery rabbit downstairs is just thrilled to be part of whatever’s going on. But the fireworks season is pretty young yet, and they’ve mostly just had to listen to the occasional fireworks after the minor league baseball game. Nothing they could get tired of yet.
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