So, now, September 2014: by pretty much all the reader-count-based measures there are this was my most successful month as a humor blogger. According to WordPress’s statistics page I had somewhere around 825 views from 467 unique visitors, which is well above August’s 682 views from 369 visitors. It’s also the first month I’m aware of where I had at least ten views every day, and for that matter, twenty views most days. I’m not sure what lead to this steady popularity, although I imagine part of it is I’ve felt like I’m writing at more ease lately. (Of course, this did come to an average of only 1.77 views per visitor, which is the lowest monthly average WordPress has for me, but we can’t have everything, can we?)
I got to my 8,691st reader this month. If I have another month like this, I should reach a good round 9,000 around mid-October.
The most popular articles the past month, and I’m glad to say they all had at least twenty views each, were:
- How The Pinball Machines Broke Down, which was basically true, and aided in popularity I’m sure by the pinball league reading it for the Demolition Derby Night recap.
- Statistics Saturday: Why I Am Not Putting This Book Out For The Yard Sale, a matter of close self-examination ahead of the yard sale.
- Felix the Cat Switches Witches, a silent cartoon full of what you expect from silent cartoons, and getting only the more timely as we approach Halloween.
- And Featuring TV’s Frank As The Spirit Of Competition or Fair Play or Maybe Soccer, a description from the dream world of TV’s Frank Coniff (of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame) doing stuff to help someone through some problem of not believing in soccer? I think? It was kind of weird at the time too.
- Modern Life As Seen Through The Prism Of Waiting For A Flu Shot At Rite-Aid, which is pretty much just what happened while we waited.
- Five Nights At Game Informer, or, horror comes to the editors.
- How Do We Know It’s The Future? which showcases one of those moments when Star Trek: The Next Generation was just a little bit weird in trying to be all 24th-century-ish.
In the ever-precious Nations of the World report, the United States once more sent me the overwhelming majority of my readers, 701, even though I try to use “humour” as an equally valid tag for my posts. I think that’s working, too, since the next-most-common sources of readers were the United Kingdom (33), Australia (19), and Canada (16), and I notice that India has consented to send me eight readers the past month, above even the six that I saw in August. That’s not as good per-capita as Brazil (eleven readers), although it does edge out Singapore which sent me no readers the past month, which kind of hurts since I know some folks from Singapore and follow them on Twitter and everything.
I have a bunch of single-reader countries this time around, though, among them: Albania, Barbados, Finland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mexico, the Russian Federation, and Turkey. None of them were single-reader countries in August.
As for search term poetry, nothing much this month either, I’m afraid. I do seem to be a destination for people searching for “compu-toon”, at least, and of course “can you enter a snail in the indy 500”. “What percentage of the world like saturdays?” captures my imagination, as does “percentage of pages taken up by each letter in a dictionary”, though, and I hope I was of use to the person looking for “what did twain title his story an awful ____ terible middvil romance”.
