Good news, everyone. I’ve been keeping up spreadsheets, just like last month. So I am really well set up to look over what was popular around here in September, and to learn absolutely nothing about it.
September 2019 was, it appears, the second-best-read month I have ever had around here. Certainly the best-read month since the final collapse of Apartment 3-G. I don’t know how I’ll feel if I ever do cross the readership threshold from that month I briefly caught the attention of The Onion A.V. Club. It would be all right, though. Getting somewhere near that readership every month is more soothing to the part of me that wants to be popular.
There were 4,094 pages viewed around here in September. This is substantially above even the twelve-month running average of 3,229.1 page views. Unique readers were more abundant too. There were 2,293 logged unique viewers in September. The twelve-month running average was 1,837.9. These numbers, of course, do not and cannot count people using the RSS feed to get essays. So that all feels nice and popular.
The other side of popularity, of course, is that I’m afraid of interacting with people and would rather not do it if possible. And here, too, September delivered. There were 120 things liked in September. (This isn’t necessarily stuff posted in September, although recent posts tend to be more often liked than stuff in the archives.) That’s well below the twelve-month running average of 159.5. And there were 19 comments received in September, way down from the twelve-month running average of 38.3. Also I don’t know how my twelve-month average can be nearly forty comments per month. I guess it looks like the end of 2018 was chatty is all.
The per-posting averages show the same trends. There were 136.5 views per posting in September, compared to a running average of 106.0. There were 76.4 visitors per posting, compared to a running average of 60.4. 4.0 likes per posting, compared to the running average of 5.3. 0.6 comments per posting, down from the running average of 1.3. If I didn’t just somehow have something every day those per-posting averages might be funny or weird or different.
460 different posts, other than my home page, got any page views in September. 166 of them got only a single page view, which is all right. For some of those that was too big a readership. The most popular postings were, as usual, comic strip reports:
- What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Is Judge Parker Going To Jail? February – May 2019
- On Richard Thompson
- Wait, did Funky Winkerbean just have a talking monkey kill someone?
- What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Who Told Mark Trail ‘Fetish’ Was A Word He Could Say? May – July 2018
- How Did The Amazing-Spider-Man End? Is It Ever Coming Back?
The piece about Richard Thompson was some thoughts written after he died. Thompson’s Cul de Sac was such a fantastic comic strip, the best of this century so far. It’s in eternal reruns on GoComics and worth reading.
This is also a good moment to reiterate a content warning about Funky Winkerbean. That comic is in the midst of a story including a character’s suicide. If that’s not stuff you need in your recreational reading, be advised. I’ll post a note when the storyline’s concluded.
The most-read of my original long-form essays, the things that I foolishly once thought would be the center of this blog, was October 2018’s Everything There Is To Say In Explaining How Computer Graphics Work. I don’t know. I would have thought at least one of that road trip series I’ve been doing would be the best-read. It’s certainly been getting a great number of likes, compared to my average posts.
73 countries sent me at least one reader in September. 13 of them sent me a single reader. In August that had been 74 countries and 14 single-reader countries. I assume this means that some country which existed in August has just evaporated. It’s the only answer that makes sense. Anyway, here’s the roster of what countries in the world are left:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 3,117 |
| India | 231 |
| Canada | 84 |
| United Kingdom | 70 |
| Australia | 55 |
| Philippines | 54 |
| Sweden | 37 |
| Germany | 32 |
| Romania | 32 |
| France | 28 |
| Brazil | 27 |
| Italy | 27 |
| El Salvador | 26 |
| Mexico | 25 |
| Spain | 22 |
| South Africa | 12 |
| Kenya | 11 |
| Portugal | 11 |
| Serbia | 9 |
| Morocco | 8 |
| Netherlands | 8 |
| Belgium | 7 |
| Norway | 7 |
| Poland | 7 |
| South Korea | 7 |
| Austria | 6 |
| China | 6 |
| Jamaica | 6 |
| Thailand | 6 |
| Argentina | 5 |
| Ireland | 5 |
| Singapore | 5 |
| Switzerland | 5 |
| Turkey | 5 |
| Bangladesh | 4 |
| Egypt | 4 |
| European Union | 4 |
| Finland | 4 |
| Greece | 4 |
| Indonesia | 4 |
| Japan | 4 |
| New Zealand | 4 |
| Russia | 4 |
| Saudi Arabia | 4 |
| Taiwan | 4 |
| Colombia | 3 |
| Hungary | 3 |
| Pakistan | 3 |
| United Arab Emirates | 3 |
| Croatia | 2 |
| Cyprus | 2 |
| Denmark | 2 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 2 |
| Macedonia | 2 |
| Malaysia | 2 |
| Peru | 2 |
| Puerto Rico | 2 |
| Slovenia | 2 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 2 |
| Zambia | 2 |
| Algeria | 1 |
| American Samoa | 1 |
| Bahamas | 1 |
| Bahrain | 1 |
| Barbados | 1 |
| Bolivia | 1 (*) |
| Cayman Islands | 1 |
| Dominican Republic | 1 |
| Ghana | 1 |
| Nigeria | 1 |
| Qatar | 1 |
| Tunisia | 1 |
| Uruguay | 1 |
Bolivia is the only country that was also a single-reader country the previous month. No countries are on a three-month single-reader streak. I’m surprised to have as many Hong Kong readers as I did, considering how busy things seem to be over there. On the other hand, look at the United States and how are people thinking about Funky Winkerbean against that backdrop?
My plans for the coming month? A long-form essay of about 700 words posted every Thursday evening, Eastern Time. And the usual Statistics Saturday post as long as I can think of formal structures that seem kind of joke-like. And, the important thing, What’s Going On In posts. Scheduled for the next several weeks, barring breaking news or important surprises:
- Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays), 6th October.
- Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D., 13th October.
- Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp, 20th October
- Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker, 27th October
- Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s The Amazing Spider-Man, 3 November.
The Amazing Spider-Man is still in repeats and I haven’t heard any reason to think it’s coming out anytime soon. But, what the heck, I stuck with Gasoline Alley when it was in unexplained reruns for nearly a year. I can extend Spider-Man some patience.
From the dawn of 2019 through the dawn of October 2019 I’d published 271 pieces, with a total of 157,438 words among them all. This was 16,685 words published in September. That makes for an average of 556.2 words per posting in September, up from the August 505.0 words per post. It’s also down from the 581 average words per post for the year so far.
For the whole year there’ve been 361 total comments around here for an average of 1.3 comments per post. That rate has stayed constant for four months now. There were 1,337 total likes on the year, so far, for an average of 4.9 likes per posting in 2019. That average has been dwindling down; it was 5.0 at the start of September, 5.2 at the start of August, and 5.3 at the start of July.
If you’d like to be a regular reader, thank you. You can add the blog to your WordPress reader by using the “Follow Another Blog Meanwhile” button on the upper right corner of this page. Or you can use the RSS feed, https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed/ in whatever reader you like. A free Livejournal or Dreamwidth account will do, for example.
While I am still officially on Twitter as @Nebusj I haven’t posted there in over a month. There’s an automated scheme from WordPress that posts announcements of new essays, for this and for my mathematics blog. But Twitter’s been timing out rather than let me connect and I haven’t had the energy to do something like try from a different web browser or anything. Sorry. I’ll say something if I ever can again, I suppose.
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