With the month started out I’d like to look at last month. I’d especially like to see that lots of people read and appreciated my writing the past month. But I’ll settle for a day where the post is easy to write.
According to WordPress there were 4,281 pages viewed here in August. That’s the fifth-highest month on record, which is nice. Most of those records have been in the past year; only November 2015, with 4,528 views, is an old high. And that is above the twelve-month running average of 3,969.6 views per month.
There were 2,454 unique visitors, which I think is the fourth-highest I have on record. It’s above the twelve-month running average of 2,311.2 unique visitors, though.
There were 104 things liked in August, above the running average of 96.3 and the biggest month for likes since January. There were also 38 comments, again beating the running average of 23.3. That’s almost as many as in May, so while this is nowhere near the heights of January 2018, it’s at least getting chattier.
What posts were popular last month? A lot of people wanting to know about comic strip artists changing. Also that months-of-the-year-in-reverse-alphabetical-order thing. But the most popular posts from August last month? These:
- Why does Pluggers look different? Did Gary Brookins stop drawing Pluggers?
- Vintage Phantom: I can see Aunt Elsie’s point
- Why does Shoe look different? Is someone new drawing Shoe? (No; Gary Brookins is still drawing Shoe, as of today. I don’t know when he’s retiring.)
- What Your Favorite Polygon Says About You which is a kind of silly I wish I could write at least once a month.
- The Mystery Of The Call To Customer Service
78 countries sent me any readers at all in August, down from July’s 82 no significant amount. There’d been 77 of them in May and June. 18 of these were single-reader countries, down from July’s 28 but in line with May and June’s 20.
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 3,080 |
| United Kingdom | 218 |
| India | 198 |
| Canada | 142 |
| Australia | 69 |
| France | 51 |
| Brazil | 39 |
| Philippines | 38 |
| Spain | 27 |
| Finland | 23 |
| South Africa | 23 |
| Germany | 21 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 21 |
| Italy | 20 |
| Norway | 19 |
| Sweden | 18 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 18 |
| Indonesia | 16 |
| Malaysia | 16 |
| European Union | 13 |
| Vietnam | 11 |
| Belgium | 10 |
| Ireland | 10 |
| Poland | 10 |
| Mexico | 9 |
| Netherlands | 9 |
| Slovakia | 9 |
| Guadeloupe | 8 |
| Taiwan | 8 |
| Thailand | 8 |
| New Zealand | 6 |
| Russia | 6 |
| Singapore | 6 |
| Switzerland | 6 |
| Chile | 5 |
| Peru | 5 |
| Serbia | 5 |
| Egypt | 4 |
| Japan | 4 |
| Kenya | 4 |
| Nigeria | 4 |
| Romania | 4 |
| South Korea | 4 |
| El Salvador | 3 |
| United Arab Emirates | 3 |
| Argentina | 2 |
| Brunei | 2 |
| China | 2 |
| Colombia | 2 |
| Czech Republic | 2 |
| Denmark | 2 |
| Ecuador | 2 |
| Honduras | 2 |
| Hungary | 2 |
| Lebanon | 2 |
| Tunisia | 2 |
| Turkey | 2 |
| Uganda | 2 |
| Ukraine | 2 |
| Uzbekistan | 2 |
| Zambia | 2 |
| American Samoa | 1 (*) |
| Austria | 1 |
| Bhutan | 1 |
| Caribbean Netherlands | 1 |
| Dominican Republic | 1 |
| Ethiopia | 1 |
| Greece | 1 |
| Guatemala | 1 |
| Iraq | 1 |
| Jordan | 1 (*) |
| Liechtenstein | 1 |
| Lithuania | 1 |
| Paraguay | 1 |
| Portugal | 1 |
| Puerto Rico | 1 (*) |
| Slovenia | 1 |
| St. Lucia | 1 |
| Uruguay | 1 |
American Samoa, Jordan, and Puerto Rico were single-view countries last month too. Lebanon bowed out of single-reader status after six months.
Which story comics do I plan to cover the next several weeks? Subject to breaking news, of course?
- Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (8 September)
- Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (15 September)
- Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (22 September)
- Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (29 September)
- Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (6 October)
Whatever I do cover, and any news about any of the story comics, I’ll have in a post at this link.
And my overall plan remains to have a long-form essay Thursday Evening, Eastern Time. Some kind of Statistics Saturday post Saturday evenings, my dad’s favorite feature. Sundays, Popeye cartoons from the 60s. And then What’s Going On In the story comics on Tuesdays. The rest of the week I stare at my scraps file, trying to figure out whether “palindromedome” could ever be a thing. It’s not looking promising.
From the dawn of time to the dawn of September I’ve posed 2,769 things here. They drew a total 183,846 views from 103,497 unique visitors. WordPress figures I posted 15,621 words in August, an average of 503.9 words per posting. My average post, year to date, had 536 words.
If all this has convinced you to read my blog regularly, please click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page. Or if you’d rather read without being tracked, add the RSS feed for this page to your reader. If you don’t think you have a reader, get a free Dreamwidth or Livejournal account. You can add any RSS feed to your friends page from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn as you like. And I do have my semi-accessible @nebusj Twitter account set to announce posts, although I don’t get to read it most of the time. Contact me here if you need me to read what you say. I’m sorry it’s like that but I just don’t want to deal with fixing Twitter’s issues. You understand.
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