Now finally I can get to considering what October meant around here, readership-wide. I’m sorry for the delay but I have good reason for not getting to it sooner: I didn’t get to it sooner.
It was a busy month, though! WordPress reports that I had some 1,507 page views from 974 distinct visitors over the course of October. That’s much more than in September (1,130 views, 697 visitors) or August (1,416 views, 779 visitors). It’s the largest number for either since last November and the Apartment 3-Gocalypse. There haven’t been any other major comic strip collapses since then and I’m glad for that. A couple of strips have ended but none that went out in any bizarre ways that needed updating and gawking.
But it’s probably not just people reading my witticisms around here and being thrilled that got my readership numbers so high. The most-read post of the month was from July, Does Mary Worth Look Different?. The answer’s simple; they have a new artist. Joe Giella retired after a career of drawing comics and comic books to roll around on the piles of money he surely made doing that. June Brigman and Roy Richardson have taken over the art, daily and Sunday.
I don’t know why this question got to be particularly urgent this month. I’d imagined it might have been a spurt of interest in the strip after last Friday, when longstanding amiable sandwich-eater Wilbur Weston announced he was taking a year off to finally wed mayonnaise.

Not so, though. The most intense interest seems to have come the weeks of the 10th and 17th, when nothing very much was happening. I suspect some popular blogger mentioned me without my knowing it.
Readership engagement figures were way down, as will happen. I have no idea how to keep them steady. The number of ‘likes’ was at 160, down from September’s 190 and August’s 187. The number of comments was 32, way down from September’s 69, but up from August’s 24. I need more Caption This! contests.
So what was popular over the past month? … None of my long-form pieces, which, all right, I can take that. My bit about not knowing what to dress as for Halloween made the top ten, which is doing pretty well for a piece that only had three days to gather readers. What did make the top five:
- Why Does Mary Worth Look Different? and, you know, maybe I should do a proper discussion of the remaining story comics because they’re very different creatures to what they were at the start of the year.
- Statistics Saturday: Actual Star Trek: The Next Generation Plots That Sound Like Parodies Of Star Trek: The Next Generation Plots which I’m happy with because it was fun writing them and I didn’t even have to mention the one where Dr Crusher has sex with a candle ghost.
- Why I’m Not Ready To Talk About How September Treated My Blog Just Yet which was a totally different excuse from this month’s delayed report. Last month I wasn’t ready because an ancient Jack Benny Program even by Jack Benny Program standards shocked me.
- Has the comic strip _Momma_ come to an end? Yes, and no, in the way of modern comics.
- Caption This: Another Question Raised By Star Trek: Voyager, which works because it features Lieutenant Barclay napping.
My most popular day of the week, with 16 percent of page views, was Monday. Mondays got the plurality, 16 percent of page views, in September too. Midnight was the most popular hour, with 10 percent of page views. That must be Universal Time. And that was up from 8 percent of page views so clearly WordPress isn’t just making these numbers up.
November starts with my blog having 42,091 page views from 22,156 distinct visitors. WordPress figures I have 698 followers on WordPress plus over a hundred via Twitter. That’s up from 687 at the start of October. You can follow this blog by using the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button. You can follow me on Twitter over as @Nebusj, where I post not too many times per day. I promise.
And now for the truly popular thing: the roster of what countries sent how many readers.
Country | Page Views |
---|---|
United States | 1219 |
Canada | 47 |
India | 39 |
United Kingdom | 30 |
Germany | 29 |
Australia | 20 |
New Zealand | 18 |
France | 16 |
Philippines | 9 |
Sweden | 8 |
Mexico | 6 |
Norway | 4 |
Brazil | 3 |
Finland | 3 |
Greece | 3 |
Ireland | 3 |
Japan | 3 |
Kenya | 3 |
Netherlands | 3 |
South Africa | 3 |
Ukraine | 3 |
Argentina | 2 |
Colombia | 2 |
European Union | 2 |
Italy | 2 |
Spain | 2 |
Bahrain | 1 |
Belgium | 1 |
Ecuador | 1 |
Israel | 1 |
Malaysia | 1 |
Morocco | 1 |
Nigeria | 1 |
Northern Mariana Islands | 1 |
Pakistan | 1 |
Poland | 1 (*) |
Qatar | 1 |
Singapore | 1 |
Switzerland | 1 |
Turkey | 1 |
United Arab Emirates | 1 |
Uruguay | 1 |
Poland’s the only country to have been a single-read country last month. Nobody’s on a two-month streak. The European Union rose from one last month. Yes, I’m hurt that Singapore was a single-read country. There were 42 countries listed as sending me any readers at all, if you pretend the European Union’s a country and I still don’t know what the designation’s supposed to mean.
Another Blog, Meanwhile Index
Maybe it’s not that the Another Blog, Meanwhile index is getting stuck. Maybe it’s the whole rest of the universe that’s got stuck and the index is just reflecting that fact. General relativity implies that if you had a spinning bucket full of water it’d be impossible to know whether the bucket or the water was spinning unless there was other stuff in the universe, so why not this with the index? Ever consider that? Why or why not?