I have not used my @Nebusj account on Twitter in years. Safari decided it wanted to interact with it very slow, if at all, and while I could have just used Firefox instead I didn’t. Since that time, all I’ve tweeted there has been from an automated post relay that WordPress offers. Well, recently, Elon J Fudd, Billionaire, who owns a mansion and a web site, decided to charge way lots more for the tools to run this service. And the service said, ‘nah’, and shut down in the middle of the month. So my biggest act of promoting myself, letting this automated tweet go out once a day, vanished mid-month.
So this should explain why my readership was way down in May. According to WordPress there were 4,451 page views here in May, the lowest monthly total in a year. And there were a mere 2,537 unique visitors, also the lowest monthly total in a year. Seems easy to explain, doesn’t it? The loss of that link sank me below the 5,385.5 views and 2,905 unique visitors I’d have expected as the median monthly readership. Or the 5,510.3 views and 2,975.2 views and visitors of the arithmetic mean month. Easy!

Only maybe not so. WordPress lets me look at readership figures by day, by week, and by month, and the daily and weekly figures have a weird result. They don’t look much different before May 16th — the Twitter cutoff — and after. The two full weeks after the 16th were busier than the two full weeks before. If I am missing “deserved” readers, it looks more like because I didn’t have an extraordinary peak week, like I did around Easter with the Easter-egg-dye-color report. Well, not every month can be me patiently explaining to readers that no, The Phantom is not dead.
What was most popular around here in May? Me admitting I only got this one Far Side in 2020. But of the things published in May, here’s the top five viewed pieces:
- Did I Just Discover Something About Charlie Brown’s Family?
- The Guy Who Draws _Beetle Bailey_ Has Seen More Squirrels
- What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? How could Walt Wallet have met Abraham Lincoln? February – April 2023
- MiSTed: The Tale of Grumpy Weasel, Chapter 25
- Starting to Think the News May Be Bad
And, of course, what people consistently want to know about are the story comics and what’s happening in them. My plan for the next couple weeks is to cover these comics, in this order:
- Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (13 June)
- Shadia Amin and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye (20 June)
- Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (27 June)
- Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (4 July)
- Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (11 July)
I’m still experimenting with Olive and Popeye as part of the rotation; I’m not sure it has quite enough story to deserve this. But I’ve been rooting for Popeye to return to the pop culture so will give him a chance. I’m also really, really thinking about doing Rip Haywire recaps. Going to have to see if I can do a test run on that.

There were 88 things as good as countries sending me readers in May. Here’s who they were:
Country | Readers |
---|---|
United States | 2,997 |
India | 142 |
Canada | 137 |
Australia | 120 |
Brazil | 113 |
United Kingdom | 113 |
Germany | 106 |
Italy | 69 |
Philippines | 62 |
Finland | 41 |
Norway | 38 |
Spain | 35 |
France | 32 |
Mexico | 32 |
Poland | 28 |
Sweden | 27 |
Romania | 21 |
Bangladesh | 19 |
Japan | 19 |
Denmark | 18 |
Argentina | 15 |
Netherlands | 14 |
South Africa | 14 |
El Salvador | 12 |
New Zealand | 11 |
Peru | 11 |
Thailand | 10 |
European Union | 9 |
Portugal | 9 |
Hong Kong SAR China | 8 |
Malaysia | 8 |
Nigeria | 8 |
Serbia | 8 |
United Arab Emirates | 7 |
Colombia | 6 |
Croatia | 6 |
Israel | 6 |
Morocco | 6 |
Belgium | 5 |
Ireland | 5 |
Jamaica | 5 |
Kenya | 5 |
Ukraine | 5 |
Algeria | 4 |
Greece | 4 |
Indonesia | 4 |
Puerto Rico | 4 |
Saudi Arabia | 4 |
Singapore | 4 |
Austria | 3 |
Dominican Republic | 3 |
Ecuador | 3 |
Georgia | 3 |
Russia | 3 |
Venezuela | 3 |
Albania | 2 |
American Samoa | 2 |
Bahamas | 2 |
Bulgaria | 2 |
Chile | 2 |
Costa Rica | 2 |
Estonia | 2 |
Hungary | 2 |
Kuwait | 2 |
Mali | 2 |
Palestinian Territories | 2 |
Seychelles | 2 |
Slovenia | 2 |
South Korea | 2 |
Antigua & Barbuda | 1 |
Armenia | 1 |
Bolivia | 1 |
Bosnia & Herzegovina | 1 |
Egypt | 1 |
French Polynesia | 1 (*) |
Guatemala | 1 |
Honduras | 1 |
Martinique | 1 |
Oman | 1 |
Pakistan | 1 |
Slovakia | 1 |
Sri Lanka | 1 (*) |
Switzerland | 1 |
Taiwan | 1 |
Tunisia | 1 |
U.S. Virgin Islands | 1 |
Uruguay | 1 |
Vietnam | 1 |
I agree, that’s way more readers from Sweden and from Argentina than I would expect. Once again, I’m never going to turn away a reader, but I feel myself such a provincial interest I’m stunned I Have anything to say that could interest anyone in Bangladesh.
Pakistan and Sri Lanka were single-view countries in April 2023 too. I didn’t keep track of what single-view countries were in March. Sorry.
If you’d like to be a regular reader here, I’m sorry the last bit of my Twitter presence is gone. You can sign up to get posts delivered by e-mail, using the little box in the upper right corner that says ”Follow _Another Blog, Meanwhile_ via Email”. Or you can use the button above that to add this blog to your WordPress reader. You can use https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed in your RSS reader to get essays in a nice, organized fashion in your own reader, too. Please choose as fits your needs. I’ll be around a while yet.