Tag: readership

Statistics September: How The Past Month Treated My Humor Blog


Since the month (October) is a third done it’s time I finally got around to looking at how it fared in September. The faring was … fair, about four-fifths of the faring I’d fain see. Page reads, and unique visitors, were down, to the lowest values they’ve had in over a year. I’m sure part of that is that I had to shift into reposting my reviews of Talkartoons, a thing that does not appeal to my key demographic, who is my Dad. I’m sorry for this, but have had to ration my energies and I’ll open up to more new-ish material as I’m able.

There were 4,080 pages viewed around here in September. That’s well below the twelve-month running mean leading up to September of 5,598.3 views per month. The median, a measure of average-ness less fooled by extreme events, was 4,996 for the twelve months ending the 1st of September. So, yeah, that’s a drop. There were 2,119 logged unique visitors, well below the twelve-month running mean of 3,383.4 visitors, or the running median of 3,306.5 visitors.

Bar chart of two and a half year's worth of monthly readership figures. After a great spike in April 2021 the figures have fluttered between 4,000 and 5,000 views per month, with the most recent month dropping to about 4,000.
I guess I did only check near the start of the last minute of September, Greenwich Time. Maybe a couple hundred views came in between 7:59:10 and 7:59:59. It’s too bad there’s no way to know.

Still, the people who came here stayed about as involved as usual, so, thank you, Garrison. There were 133 likes given to posts in September, a figure indistinguishable from the running mean of 137.8 per month or median of 135 per month. And there were 35 comments, below the running mean of 53.1 and median of 45.5, but still. That’s pretty good considering what are people supposed to do, say “No, this isn’t a Betty Boop cartoon”? If that’s important toyou then fine, but it’s not that interesting.

499 specific posts got any page views at all in September. The most popular things posted in September were:

My most popular feature around here is the comic strip plot recaps. You can read all my story strip plot recaps at this tag. My plan for specific strips for the coming month are to cover:

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and most of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink.
Some month I’m just going to do a post that lists countries that don’t read me and test whether that makes any difference. (It won’t.)

A mere 69 countries or country-like organizations sent me readers in September. 13 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the roster:

Country Readers
United States 2,672
India 196
Canada 172
Brazil 145
Australia 107
Sweden 96
United Kingdom 85
Philippines 81
Spain 49
Germany 48
Norway 39
Italy 38
Finland 27
South Africa 26
Greece 24
Austria 17
Ecuador 16
Ireland 16
Argentina 15
France 15
Malaysia 14
Mexico 13
European Union 12
Russia 12
Thailand 9
Netherlands 8
Belgium 7
Israel 7
New Zealand 7
Romania 7
Singapore 7
Turkey 7
Indonesia 6
Pakistan 6
Guadeloupe 5
Japan 5
Jamaica 4
Poland 4
United Arab Emirates 4
Colombia 3
El Salvador 3
Kenya 3
Nigeria 3
Serbia 3
Switzerland 3
Taiwan 3
Bahrain 2
Bangladesh 2
Bermuda 2
Denmark 2
Guernsey 2
Peru 2
Sri Lanka 2
Ukraine 2
Brunei 1
Czech Republic 1
Egypt 1
Estonia 1
Guatemala 1
Hungary 1
Iceland 1
Malawi 1
Nepal 1
Puerto Rico 1
Slovakia 1
South Korea 1
St. Vincent & Grenadines 1
Uruguay 1
Vietnam 1

None of September’s single-reader countries were also a single-reader country in August. That’s the first clean sweep to happen since August.

WordPress flatters me by claiming I published 31,546 words in September. This is an average of 1,051.5 words per posting and my most loquacious month this year. It’s a fib, of course, the numbers padded by both the MiSTings, with many words I did not write, and the Talkartoons recaps, with many words I wrote years ago. So be it. It brings my total for the year up to 206,571 words posted, with an average 757 words per posting for 2021.

Between the first time humans and monkeys flew into space on the same vehicle (April 1985, aboard the space shuttle Challenger) and the start of October I’ve posted 3,164 things to this blog. They’e drawn 255,108 views from 146,221 unique visitors. WordPress says I have 1,363 followers here, and like you, I don’t believe it.

Still, if you’d like to be the 1,364 follower, I’d be glad to have you. First, try as hard as you can to exist. Then click on the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ sticker in the upper right corner of this page, which adds this to your WordPress Reader. Or if you prefer getting the versions that have all the typos, you can use the panel beneath that to get posts by e-mail. I don’t ever send anything else by e-mail, but I can’t say what WordPress will do with your address.

If you’d like to read these essays in private, you can add the RSS feed for Another Blog, Meanwhile to whatever your news reader is. If you need an RSS reader you can try This Old Reader, for example, NewsBlur. Or you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn to add RSS feeds to your Reading or Friends page.

However it is you’re reading me, though, thank you, whether or not you exist.

Statistics August: How August 2021 Treated My Humor Blog


August 2021 was a bad month for me. I don’t wish to get too personal here. But you see how bad it was from my mid-month crashing out of reviewing 60s Popeye cartoons. The Popeye cartoon reviews were already a thing I did to conserve energy, so you see how bad it’s been I had to switch to reposting old Talkartoon reviews. I hope that things are getting better, and that I’ll be able to get back at least to the Popeye-reviewing. However, I intend to rerun all the rest of my Talkartoon essays to give myself time to recover. Between those and the MiSTings, right now, the only things I’m writing each week are the Statistics Saturday and the What’s Going On In story strip recaps. That feels as much as I can commit to right now.

How did a month with such a limited creative output work out? To my surprise, it brought more readers than the previous several months did. Here’s the numbers:

Bar chart of monthly readership figures for two and a half years' worth of the blog. There's been a modest three-month upswing in views and unique readers. But both views and unique readers are below the twelve-month averages leading up to this, in part because of a large spike in April 2021.
Some may ask why I do these monthly recaps that are alla bout myself. One answer is that they’re not hard to do and they prove strangely popular. Another is that I want to reassure other WordPress blogger that it’s not you, the whole platform is slowly dying and nobody knows what to do about it.

So there were 4,678 page views in August. That’s below the twelve-month running mean of 5,565.3 for the twelve months leading up to August 2021. That figure’s a little distorted from April, when one of my images was posted in a Fandom Drama thread on Reddit and I got spurious hits. But it’s also below the twelve-month running median of 4,996 views. Medians are less vulnerable to fluke events.

There were 2,665 unique visitors in August. That’s below the running mean of 3,365.8, again affected by that Reddit thread. It’s also below the median of 3,036.5 unique visitors, though, suggesting people are not actually that interested in four-year-old reviews of Bimbo cartoons. Their loss.

And maybe they are interested anyway. There were 137 likes given to posts in August, which is almost dead on the averages. The twelve-month running mean was 135.1 likes, and the median 132 likes for a month. There were 63 comments given in August, above the running mean of 51.0 and the running median of 42.

None of the Talkartoon reposts have been among my most popular posts for August. No, what people did want to see were these, and fair enough:

My story comic summaries are still the backbone of my popularity here. And I still feel enough energy to write them. My plan for the next month is to do these recaps:

The Amazing Spider-Man recap I intend to be the last one I do, unless the strip somehow emerges from reruns, or jumps around in the rerun cycle. This because the strip has reached the point where I started doing recaps back in 2017. Though I could do a better job recapping these strips now, my alternative is to do less job.

That is unless I decide to replace Spider-Man with another strip to recap. I’ve held off on Rip Haywire, partly because I had felt it was driven more by the comedy than the plot. But, heck, I don’t complain about Alley Oop being a comedy-adventure strip. I suppose I feel my dividing line is story strips that appear in newspapers and I’m not sure whether Rip Haywire does. That division is arbitrary, yes, but I want some compelling rule that explains why I won’t do, like, Endtown or The Martian Confederacy.

98 countries or country-like entities sent me readers in August. 18 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the map, and here’s the table listing them:

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and most of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink.
Oh, I just missed out on a complete South America. You know, if you complete a continent (Australia excepted) they put you on the Freshly Pressed page. Also, is the Freshly Pressed page still a thing? I never got on it and I never see blogs boast about having been on it anymore.
Country Readers
United States 2,969
India 233
Canada 198
United Kingdom 195
Australia 69
Brazil 61
Germany 57
Spain 57
South Africa 49
Italy 37
Kuwait 37
Philippines 37
Saudi Arabia 37
Sweden 35
Austria 32
Turkey 32
Finland 29
France 28
Nigeria 27
Mexico 26
Japan 21
Ireland 18
Ecuador 17
New Zealand 17
Denmark 15
Malaysia 14
Peru 14
Taiwan 14
Indonesia 13
Israel 13
Norway 13
Qatar 12
Colombia 11
Romania 11
South Korea 11
Thailand 11
Argentina 10
Jordan 10
Oman 10
Russia 10
Egypt 9
Lebanon 9
Netherlands 7
Greece 6
Macau SAR China 6
Pakistan 6
Bulgaria 5
Hungary 5
Paraguay 5
Portugal 5
United Arab Emirates 5
Algeria 4
Belgium 4
Czech Republic 4
Hong Kong SAR China 4
Lithuania 4
Montenegro 4
Nepal 4
Switzerland 4
Vietnam 4
Chile 3
Croatia 3
Iraq 3
Morocco 3
Puerto Rico 3
Uruguay 3
Bahamas 2
Bangladesh 2
Barbados 2
Belize 2
Bolivia 2
China 2
European Union 2
Guatemala 2
Kenya 2
Libya 2
Poland 2
Singapore 2
Tanzania 2
Venezuela 2
Bahrain 1
Costa Rica 1
Dominica 1
El Salvador 1
Guadeloupe 1
Guyana 1
Jamaica 1
Malta 1
Mauritania 1
Panama 1
Papua New Guinea 1
Serbia 1
Sri Lanka 1
St. Lucia 1
Sudan 1
Trinidad & Tobago 1
Tunisia 1
Ukraine 1

This month was a clean sweep. No countries that sent me a single reader in August were single-reader countries in July, and vice-versa. Haven’t had that happen in ages.

WordPress figures I posted 26,178 words in August, for 844.5 words per posting. WordPress has no idea how many of these words are reprinted from earlier, including in this blog. I won’t tell it if you don’t. It brings me to a total of 175,025 words for the year, as of the start of September, and an average 720 words per posting, which is exhausting and I’m glad the number is now complete bunk.

Between the final episode of The Facts Of Life and the start of September I’ve posted 3,134 things to this blog. They attracted 251,025 views from 144,101 unique visitors. And, what the heck, a total of 4,703 comments too.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, please do. The easiest way to be sure you don’t miss anything is to use the panel in the upper right corner of the page to follow Another Blog, Meanwhile via e-mail. This will send every post the moment it’s published, and before its typos are corrected, to your inbox, where you can mark it as read and intend to get back to it sometime.

Or, if you have a WordPress account, you can add the blog to your Reader page, using the sticker that’s just above the e-mail box, and just below the search bar. Or you can add a feed of my essays to your RSS reader. If you need an RSS reader there are options. This Old Reader is one of them, for example, as is NewsBlur. Or you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn to add RSS feeds to your Reading or Friends page.

And I am @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, the mathematics-themed instance of the Mastodon network. I’m not very funny there, but then, I hear you making the inevitable joke for the other half of that sentence. In any case, thank you for reading.

Statistics July: What Comic Strips People Like Me Complaining About


It’s as good a time as any to look at the past month’s readership figures. It’s early in the month, by my standards, but what the heck.

In June the number of page views around here rose a bit from June’s relative low. This to 4,406 page views, which is below the twelve-month running mean of 5,546.0 for the year leading up to June. That’s an era that includes April 2021, when a picture of mine got cited on a Reddit thread, distorting my averages, though. When I compare it to the median, though, a figure much less likely to be distorted by extreme events? That’s also below the twelve-month running median, which was 4,996 page views in a month.

Bar chart of monthly readership figures for two and a half years' worth of the blog. July's shows a slight increase in views but decline in visitors from June. Both are below the twelve-month averages leading up to this, in part because of a large spike in October 2020.
You know, technical traders say I’m right at the natural floor so this is a great time to buy shares in Another Blog, Meanwhile. They expect a swing up to about 7500 views per month by the end of the year.

The number of unique visitors dropped to 2,362 in July. That’s below the running mean of 3,372.9, and below the running median of 3,036.5. I don’t know why so many people decided I wasn’t worth paying attention to this past month. I’m all right. I have more popular story strip plot recaps coming up this August. (And I suspect some of it is the lack of people coming here from my mathematics blog, which was all-but-silent in July.)

Unusually active, though? Likes. There were 165 likes given to any post here in July, above the running mean of 129.3 and running median of 129. And wildly active were comments. WordPress tells me there were 130 comments here in July, triple the twelve-month running mean of 43.1 and the median of 40.5. I haven’t had that talkative a month since January 2018; it’s been the sort of time that makes people wonder if Garrison and I can’t just text each other. We cannot. My phone is such an old-fashioned device that I include salutations and a signature with each text. I can’t communicate with people in any real fashion on it.

The most popular things posted in July were, for a wonder, not all comic strips news. Oh, an essay about why Funky Winkerbean angered everybody who reads Funky Winkerbean, sure. And some news about Vintage Mark Trail and Vintage Prince Valiant. But, like, one was just a bit of actual dialogue committed to text. Another was something that sounds like a clickbait title, so I’m glad people seem amused by it. Here’s the five most popular pieces from July:

I am startled that there’s no What’s Going On In … piece in the top five. I don’t know when’s the last time one of my usual story comic recaps wasn’t among my most popular pieces. (A June 2021 update on Judge Parker was popular, but that’s not a July piece.) The most popular regular story-comic update posted in July was the Gasoline Alley recap. That story with aliens and old-time-radio.

But to speak of the story comics summaries. I’m still doing story comics summaries. My plan for the next month is to take these comics in this order:

I’m pushing The Amazing Spider-Man a week “late” because, I think, this will let my summary come after the end of the current storyline. And that will be the final Spider-Man update, as this gets the strip back into stories I’ve already summarized. Yes, I’d probably do a better job recapping them, but you know what’s easier than a better job? Not working. I figure to just run a big blank space once every twelve weeks and feel happy about it. That will change if Spider-Man goes back into production, or starts running stories I haven’t already recapped.

Also the Gil Thorp recap will be an exciting challenge. I have not got the faintest recollection of anything that’s happened since the library governance story ended.

93 countries sent me any views at all. 22 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the roster:

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and most of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink.
I struggle to come up with a good alt text for this every month. It feels like anyone not seeing the image isn’t really missing anything.
Country Readers
United States 3,003
India 282
Canada 176
Greece 82
United Kingdom 82
Australia 71
Philippines 64
Brazil 56
Germany 53
Finland 46
Oman 33
South Africa 30
Spain 30
Italy 24
Ireland 19
Ecuador 18
Sweden 18
France 17
Netherlands 17
Russia 16
Mexico 13
Norway 11
Japan 10
Malaysia 9
Pakistan 9
Romania 9
Colombia 8
Hong Kong SAR China 8
New Zealand 8
Nigeria 8
Thailand 8
El Salvador 7
Argentina 6
Bahrain 6
Bangladesh 6
Chile 6
Czech Republic 6
Iraq 6
South Korea 6
China 5
Denmark 5
Israel 5
Portugal 5
Singapore 5
Taiwan 5
Bulgaria 4
Croatia 4
European Union 4
Indonesia 4
Mauritius 4
Belgium 3
Hungary 3
Puerto Rico 3
Turkey 3
Vietnam 3
Algeria 2
Jamaica 2
Jordan 2
Kenya 2
Lebanon 2
Libya 2
Montenegro 2
Nepal 2
Poland 2
Saudi Arabia 2
Serbia 2
Sudan 2
Switzerland 2
Trinidad & Tobago 2
Ukraine 2
United Arab Emirates 2
Austria 1
Barbados 1
Belarus 1 (*)
Dominican Republic 1 (***)
Egypt 1
Estonia 1 (*)
Guam 1
Iceland 1
Isle of Man 1
Kuwait 1 (*)
Kyrgyzstan 1
Latvia 1
Lithuania 1
Luxembourg 1
Madagascar 1
Morocco 1
Paraguay 1
Peru 1
Slovakia 1 (*)
Sri Lanka 1
St. Vincent & Grenadines 1 (*)
Zimbabwe 1 (*)

Belarus, Estonia, Kuwait, Slovakia, St Vincent & Grenadines, and Zimbabwe were all single-view countries in June also. Dominican Republic has been one view a month for four months now. I hope they really like whatever it is they choose to read.

WordPress figures I posted 25,348 words in July, for an average of 817.7 words per post. This is why I feel like I don’t have any time anymore. (It’s distorted by all those MiSTings, which are enormous but are also mostly written ages ago, and half of those by someone else.) July brings my words-per-posting for the year up to 702, the longest it’s been. I need to short some of these Popeye cartoons to make up the balance.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, thank you! You can get all these essays by their RSS feed, and never appear in my statistics. If you need an RSS reader, I can get you hooked up. This Old Reader is an option, for example, as is NewsBlur. Or you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn to add RSS feeds to your Reading or Friends page.

If you’d like to get new posts before I can correct their typos, you can sign up for e-mail delivery. (It’s impossible to get all the typos corrected.) Or if you have a WordPress account, you can use “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” to add this page to your Reader. And I am @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, the mathematics-themed instance of the Mastodon network. Thanks for reading, however you find most comfortable.

Statistics June: How In June 2021 Everyone Figured They Had Maybe A Bit Too Much Of Me


I know I can’t stay popular forever and it’s amazing I can be kind-of popular at all. The last couple months my readership’s buoyed by comic strip drama. There’s been none of that for a while.

According to WordPress there were 4,154 page views around here in June. That’s the lowest figure since June of 2020. It’s way below the twelve-month running mean of 5,530.2 page views per month. It’s also well below the twelve-month running median of 4,996 page views. WordPress also says the number of unique visitors dropped, too. There were 2,527 unique visitors recorded, the lowest count since August 2020. My twelve-month running mean was 3,357.0 unique visitors per month, and a running median of 3,036.5.

Two and a half years' worth of monthly readership figures. After a peak in April 2021 there've been several months of decline.
Still it is neat to have had twelve months’ worth of more than four thousand page views a month. I can’t credit all of that to clicking “refresh” 3800 times a month.

If there’s any consolation, the people who remained interacted some more. There were 134 things liked in June. That’s a bit above the running mean of 125.2 and the median of 128. And the number of comments was up, as well. There were 54 comments given, compared to a twelve-month running mean of 41.3 and median of 39.

Here’s what the most popular posts were in June:

And not to brag but I’ve had a delightful bunch of dumb Statistics Saturday posts recently. The most popular of those this past month was a tie between:

So that’s the sort of month it was around here.

There’s no sense guessing what kind of month July will be. But I have reason for hope. The comic strip plot recaps I have planned are some reliable popular ones:

That’s all a plan, though. It’s subject to change if news develops. All the story strip recaps are at this link, though.

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and most of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink.
I feel like I have fewer page views from Paraguay than I should expect. But it turns out that I’ve had nineteen whole page views from Paraguay in the past ten years alone. So that’s nice to know.

There were 86 countries or country-like entities sending me readers in June. 24 of them got a single view each. Here’s the roster:

Country Readers
United States 2,907
India 200
Canada 194
United Kingdom 86
Philippines 79
Germany 73
Australia 69
Brazil 68
South Africa 28
Switzerland 25
Japan 22
Romania 22
Mexico 21
Italy 18
Ireland 17
Spain 17
France 16
Malaysia 15
Ecuador 13
Greece 13
Singapore 13
Sweden 13
Finland 12
Indonesia 10
Netherlands 10
South Korea 10
Trinidad & Tobago 9
Vietnam 9
New Zealand 8
Norway 8
Argentina 7
Hong Kong SAR China 7
Peru 7
Taiwan 7
Chile 6
Denmark 6
Poland 6
United Arab Emirates 6
Colombia 5
Papua New Guinea 5
Turkey 5
Russia 4
Sri Lanka 4
Croatia 3
Czech Republic 3
Egypt 3
El Salvador 3
European Union 3
Hungary 3
Israel 3
Macedonia 3
Malta 3
Nigeria 3
Serbia 3
Venezuela 3
Austria 2
Bolivia 2
Bulgaria 2
Cyprus 2
Jamaica 2
Moldova 2
Uzbekistan 2
American Samoa 1
Armenia 1
Belarus 1
Belgium 1
Cambodia 1
Dominican Republic 1 (**)
Estonia 1
Fiji 1
French Guiana 1
Georgia 1
Iraq 1
Jordan 1
Kuwait 1
Maldives 1 (*)
Nicaragua 1
Pakistan 1
Panama 1
Senegal 1
Slovakia 1
St. Vincent & Grenadines 1
Thailand 1
Ukraine 1
Uruguay 1
Zimbabwe 1

Maldives was a single-view country in May. Dominican Republic has been a single-view country two months running. There’s no countries that have gone four months in a row with one view each.

WordPress estimates that I published 21,504 words here in June, which is well down from May. It’s closer to the year’s average. This was 716.8 words per posting in June. It brings me to a total 123,499 words published for the whole year. And so my average words per post this year has grown to 682. I need some more Popeye reviews where I say nothing except how this was a Popeye cartoon after all.

Between the film version of The Music Man (1962) and the start of July WordPress records 241,944 page views here, from 139,076 unique visitors. I don’t know what I’ll do for my 250,000th page view, but that’s not something I’ll have to deal with for a couple months anyway.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, I don’t know how this article convinced you. But it’s a happy thought. All my posts are available on an RSS feed. And you won’t appear in my statistics in any way if you read that way. There are several ways to read RSS. This Old Reader is an option, for example, as is NewsBlur. Or you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn to add RSS feeds to your Reading or Friends page.

If you’d like to get new posts without typos corrected, you can sign up for e-mail delivery. Or if you have a WordPress account, you can use “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” to add this page to your Reader. Whatever works for you works for me. Thank you.

Statistics May: How In May 2021 Everyone Figured They Had The Right Amount Of Me


The past couple months had unusual things bring readers here. People looking for that post about which color tablet makes which Easter egg color, for example. Easter isn’t all that unusual, but most months it doesn’t happen. Or people on Reddit linking to one of my pictures to explain Mark Trail drama. As best I can tell, in May, none of that happened. There were just people coming around for their usual reasons. These reasons are plot recaps of story strips, this one S J Perelman essay, and bots trying to place generic comments on every web site they can reach. And what does this imply for my readership totals?

They went incredibly average. May 2021 looks to be the average-est month I’ve ever had. WordPress says there were 4,910 page views in May 2021. That’s below the twelve-month running mean, leading up to May, of 5,478.7 views per month. But it’s almost dead on the twelve-month median, which was 4,930 page views. There were 2,979 unique visitors as WordPress counts these things. That’s again below the mean of 3,317.5. But it’s still quite close to the twelve-month running median of 2,979. There were 38 comments in May. In the twelve months leading up to May there were a mean of 41.3 comments per month, and a median of 39.5 comments per month.

Bar chart of two and a half years' worth of monthly readership figures. After an upward spike in April and a smaller hig point in March the readership was down to rather close to 5,000 page views in May.
Sometimes I wonder what kind of blogger I’d be if I hadn’t discovered people want to read me explaining Gil Thorp to them. It’s too horrible a fate to consider.

It’s in likability that May stands out. There were 199 things liked in May. The mean is 114.2 per month, and the median 120.5. I think people love me mentioning forgotten sitcom Alice.

The most popular things from May this past month were mostly comic strip news, as usual:

I’m glad other people are as baffled by remembering anything about Alice as I am. The most popular of the MiSTings was Dreams of a Lost Past/Loss, Part 2 of 4 and I don’t know why that should be the best-liked slice of that.

Not one of my most popular pieces, somehow, but deserving of attention? Here’s how to get rid of WordPress’s Block Editor and get the good editor back. You’re welcome, everybody who hates WordPress’s Block Editor, which is to say, everyone who uses WordPress’s Block Editor. This would include the people who programmed the Block Editor, except we know they do not use the Block Editor. If they used the Block Editor they would have either fixed any of its limitless problems, or resigned rather than continue to endorse that fiasco.

My plan for story comic recaps for the coming month is to do these:

As ever, that’s subject to rejiggering if events warrant. When Rocket Raccoon gets done insulting The Amazing Spider-Man, I figure to drop that strip. The comic will have cycled back into strips I’ve already recapped. While I could do a better job recapping them now, do I need to do that work?

I’m open to thoughts about how to replace Spider-Man. Might do one of the not-newspaper-syndicated story comics like Rip Haywire. Or the humor story strip Safe Havens. But since I’ve missed its big multi-year Mars Mission storyline that’s probably anticlimax. I will not be reporting on what’s going on in Endtown because by the time any Endtown story is a month old I have no idea what’s going on in it. But, if someone has a good idea, please share.

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and most of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink.
Also sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I hadn’t pre-written the alt text, to describe what this monthly readership map looks like, so I can copy and paste that to each month for which it applies. And what will happen if I ever have a month where it doesn’t apply, like because I get way more page views from Ecuador than from the United States.

In May, some 85 countries sent me any readers at all. 18 of them were a single reader each. Here’s the roster:

Country Readers
United States 3,416
India 226
United Kingdom 164
Canada 161
Germany 117
Brazil 91
Philippines 83
Australia 81
Italy 36
Spain 30
Sweden 29
France 28
Norway 26
Austria 22
Finland 22
Romania 21
Netherlands 18
Ecuador 17
South Africa 17
Denmark 16
Indonesia 16
European Union 14
Ireland 14
Mexico 14
Japan 12
Poland 12
Argentina 10
Jamaica 10
New Zealand 10
Czech Republic 9
Egypt 8
Greece 8
Albania 7
Malaysia 7
Turkey 7
Chile 6
French Guiana 6
Georgia 6
Israel 5
Nigeria 5
Portugal 5
South Korea 5
Thailand 5
Ukraine 5
Belgium 4
Cape Verde 4
Cayman Islands 4
Singapore 4
Switzerland 4
Bahamas 3
Colombia 3
Croatia 3
Hungary 3
Kuwait 3
Peru 3
Russia 3
St. Lucia 3
Taiwan 3
Bangladesh 2
Burundi 2
Costa Rica 2
Guernsey 2
Honduras 2
Hong Kong SAR China 2
Paraguay 2
Trinidad & Tobago 2
United Arab Emirates 2
Algeria 1 (*)
Brunei 1
Bulgaria 1
China 1
Dominican Republic 1 (*)
Guatemala 1
Iceland 1
Latvia 1 (*)
Lebanon 1
Libya 1
Lithuania 1
Macau SAR China 1
Maldives 1
Morocco 1
Oman 1
Qatar 1 (*)
Saudi Arabia 1
Serbia 1

Algeria, Dominican Republic, Latvia, and Qatar were single-view countries in April also. There’s no countries that have gone three months in a row with one view each.

WordPress says I posted 26,084 words in May, bringing my year’s total up to 101,995. I’ll accept that, even though it means my average post was a hefty 841.4 words. I think the MiSTings are ratcheting my averages up. It does bring my average post for the year up to 676 words. That’s the highest that figure’s been this year.

In the time between US President Dwight Eisenhower’s first meeting with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1956) and the start of June, I have posted 3,042 pieces here. They were viewed a total 237,789 times by 136,548 unique visitors.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, great! Keep doing the thing you’re doing right now. That would be easier if you have an RSS reader. You won’t show up in my statistics, unless you comment, but you can read the articles from my RSS feed. If you don’t have an RSS reader you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn lets you add any RSS feed to your friends page. More blogs than you imagine have RSS feeds. Give it a try.

And if you have a WordPress account, you can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button to add this page to your Reader page. You can also sign up for e-mail delivery of posts as they happen. That will give you posts with all the typos that I fix in the quarter-hour after a post publishes, so, be warned.

Statistics April: how Mark Trail once again gets people to sort of notice me


I do not keep obsessive, day-to-day track of my readership figures. I’m too prone to obsession for it to be good to track things that flutter so. But the panel used to post things has a little readership graph.

So I noticed a spike of views, and viewers, the 12th of April. And a bigger one the next day. Most of that spike evaporated by the 14th. But the readership was still appreciably larger than average for a week or so. And it wasn’t the spike from my post about what color tablet produces which Easter egg color. There was a spike from that, yes, but in the days leading up to Easter, like you’d expect. So what explains this 51st-anniversary-of-Apollo-13 spike?

(Daytime) photograph of the exit gate for Lakeside Amusement Park (Denver, Colorado), with the word 'REDIT' spelled out in (not yet illuminated) lights.
By the way, if you should have the chance to visit Lakeside Park in Denver, I highly recommend it. It’s got great piles of gorgeous 1930s-era amusement park architecture, a fantastic wooden roller coaster we didn’t get to ride enough, and one of the strangest carousels you could hope to ride. Also a fantastic and strongly democratic philosophy about ride pricing.

Yeah, it’s Reddit’s fault. A thread on the Hobby Drama Reddit described how James Allen left Mark Trail and how Jules Rivera joined it. The thread linked to one of the strips I’ve used in a What’s Going On In … post. And a lot of people clicked on that. So WordPress credited me with a lot more views, and viewers, than I’d otherwise expect. This was my most popular month by far, but, must be said, there’s an asterisk attached. I can’t fault anyone for linking to a picture I copied for fair use from Comics Kingdom. It reassures me in my judgement that these are important, representative strips I’m selecting. But I would like it if sometimes writers linked to my blog, or at least the tag, directly. It’d be nice to pick up a regular reader or two from these flash floods sometime.

Granting there is an asterisk, though, this gives me quite happy-looking readership figures. WordPress credits me with 9,423 views in April. This doesn’t quite double the twelve-month running mean of 5,160.6 views, nor does it quite double the twelve-month median of 4,930 views. It’s close to doubling, though, so I look forward to this messing up my mean and median comparison for a year to come. I’m also credited with 6,594 unique visitors, and that is more than double the twelve-month running mean of 3,047.7 visitors. And the twelve-month median of 2,937 visitors.

Bar chart of monthly readership for two and a half years. After several months that were higher than average April 2021 was extremely high, nearly double the average month from the past year.
Bar chart of monthly readership for two and a half years. After several months that were higher than average April 2021 was extremely high, nearly double the average month from the past year.

In the figures that show some engagement? That’s all much more average. There were 140 things liked in April, which is pretty good lately; the twelve-month mean was 108.3 and the twelve-month median 108.5 likes per month. Nothing like the flush days of 2015, though, when there wasn’t a month below 279 likes. And there were 40 comments. This is exactly the median of the previous twelve months. The running mean was 42.0, so, I probably had a typical enough month with a heap of Reddit splashed on top.

So. I like looking at what posts were popular. The six most popular things this past month which were posted in March or April were:

I went to six, rather than give, just because I’m so stupidly fond of that Movie Mis-Quotes one. It might be my dumbest post ever and I don’t care. It’s glorious.

Of course, the things most sought-after are my comics posts. My plan for the coming month is to explain what’s going on in:

That’s just the plan, of course, and it’s subject to change if circumstances call for it.

World map with the United States in deepest red, and most of the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and the Pacific Rim countries in a more uniform pink. A handful of African countries are also in pink.
Wow, strange that it looks like nearly all those Reddit readers interested in Mark Trail drama were from the United States. How could that happen?

There were 93 countries, or things like countries, sending me readers in April. 27 of them were a single view each. Here’s the roster.

Country Readers
United States 6,785
Canada 444
Australia 408
United Kingdom 286
India 251
Germany 200
Philippines 83
France 79
Brazil 67
Italy 50
Sweden 49
Finland 46
Spain 42
South Africa 36
Norway 34
Singapore 33
Ireland 32
Portugal 31
Malaysia 27
Japan 26
European Union 23
Romania 21
Sri Lanka 21
Netherlands 20
Switzerland 20
Mexico 19
New Zealand 19
Indonesia 18
Thailand 15
Denmark 14
Puerto Rico 14
Chile 13
Belgium 12
South Korea 12
Greece 11
Poland 11
Pakistan 9
Turkey 8
Austria 7
Hong Kong SAR China 7
Russia 7
Argentina 6
Lebanon 6
Peru 6
United Arab Emirates 6
Bosnia & Herzegovina 5
Colombia 5
Hungary 5
Israel 5
Ecuador 4
China 3
Czech Republic 3
Kenya 3
Serbia 3
Trinidad & Tobago 3
Vietnam 3
Bahamas 2
Brunei 2
Costa Rica 2
Croatia 2
Egypt 2
Estonia 2
Jordan 2
Mauritius 2
Slovakia 2
Ukraine 2
Algeria 1
Bangladesh 1
Cambodia 1
Cayman Islands 1
Cook Islands 1
Cuba 1
Dominican Republic 1
El Salvador 1
Fiji 1
Georgia 1
Ghana 1
Isle of Man 1
Jamaica 1
Jersey 1
Kuwait 1
Latvia 1
Lithuania 1 (*)
Macedonia 1
Malta 1 (*)
Panama 1
Qatar 1
Sint Maarten 1
Slovenia 1 (*)
Taiwan 1
Tunisia 1 (*)
U.S. Virgin Islands 1
Venezuela 1 (*)

Lithuania, Malta, Slovenia, Tunisia, and Venezuela were single-view countries in March also. Nowhere’s been a single-view country three months in a row.

WordPress figures I posted 16,856 words in April, setting a new low for the year. This was an average of 561.9 words per posting in April. It gets me to 75,911 words so far in the year, an average of 633 words for each of 120 posts.

Between Margaret E Knight’s design of a machine to create flat-bottomed paper bags (1871) and the start of May 2021 (1st of May, 2021) I’ve posted 3,011 things here. These have drawn 232,879 views from 133,569 unique visitors.

I’d be glad to have you as a regular reader. This link is the RSS feed for my posts. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can get one with a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Add any RSS feed to your reading page through either https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or through https://www.livejournal.com/syn. If you’re on WordPress, you should be able to use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button to add it to your Reader page. And if you want, the link underneath “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” should let you sign up for e-mail delivery. I’m terrified of that one, since that sends out posts before I realize the three typos left in the article however much I proofread. But if that’s what you’re interested in, that’s what you’re interested in. Also every time I re-read an old post there’s more typos. No one has ever been able to explain this phenomenon.

Statistics March: How March 2021 Treated My Humor Blog


These reviews of my readership are always popular, somehow. And they don’t take serious work to write. Why, then, does it take me later and later in the month to actually post them? To the point that by next year I’m going to to slip a whole month behind? That’s a good question and it gets right to the heart of the matter, which is, I don’t know.

March was a busy month here. I can account for some of it. With Easter approaching people wanted help telling which was the pink Paas tablet. And one comic strip got cancelled and another got pulled from dozens of newspapers. That always brings some interest. That doesn’t seem like enough, though. There were 6,078 page views here in March, which is the third-highest readership I have on record. In comparison, in the twelve months leading up to March, the mean number of views was 4,984.3. The median was a relatively paltry 4,628.5.

Bar chart of monthly readership for two and a half years. The last several months have been at considerable highs, with March 2021 a peak above several months of declining but still-high readership.
Upgrade for even more stats, you say? Hmmm. I do like more. This is a strong appeal.

The number of unique viewers also came in high. WordPress tells me there were 3,593 of them in March. The twelve-month running mean was only 2,947.0, and the median 2,701.5. It was even a chatty month. There were 128 likes given, compared to a mean of 103.9 and median of 102.5 for the twelve months prior. And an enormous 76 comments given, compared to a mean of 38.2 and median of 38.5. That’s the greatest number of comments I’ve had since November 2018, and as ever, I have no idea how that happened.

The most popular March-posted things this past month were what you’d expect: a lot of comic strip talk. Here’s the top five.

My most popular Statistics Saturday piece from March was Papal Regnal Numbers Over Time, 1900 – Present. I’m glad this is a popular chart because it graphs something that needs no graph and then makes a very silly interpolation.

I haven’t decided what to post for long-form pieces once Venus For Dummies is exhausted. I’m inclined toward another MiSTing, though. I do plan to continue the comic strip plot summaries. What I expect to do in the weeks ahead is:

Gasoline Alley by the way seems to have finally started its centennial of Skeezix. I don’t know why it started this months behind the actual day. Maybe it matched some important date besides Skeezix’s first appearance.

World map with the United States in deepest red, and much of the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and the Pacific Rim countries in a more uniform pink. A handful of African countries are also in pink.There were 89 countries or country-like entities sending me readers in March. Which ones? Here’s the always well-liked roster:

Country Readers
United States 4,693
Canada 205
United Kingdom 132
Germany 131
India 129
Australia 126
Philippines 50
Italy 46
South Africa 40
Finland 39
Brazil 36
Malaysia 33
Spain 29
France 26
Mexico 21
Norway 20
Indonesia 17
Iceland 13
Ireland 13
Japan 13
New Zealand 13
Puerto Rico 12
Hong Kong SAR China 11
Kenya 11
Denmark 10
Netherlands 10
Romania 10
Sweden 10
United Arab Emirates 10
Argentina 8
Hungary 8
Macedonia 8
Israel 7
Singapore 7
South Korea 7
Belgium 5
Colombia 5
Sri Lanka 5
Switzerland 5
Turkey 5
Ecuador 4
Egypt 4
Jamaica 4
Nigeria 4
Russia 4
Austria 3
Bangladesh 3
European Union 3
Greece 3
Mauritius 3
Morocco 3
Namibia 3
Poland 3
Saudi Arabia 3
Taiwan 3
Thailand 3
Trinidad & Tobago 3
Ukraine 3
Bosnia & Herzegovina 2
Cambodia 2
Cameroon 2
Kuwait 2
Lebanon 2
Montenegro 2
Pakistan 2
Peru 2
Vietnam 2
Åland Islands 1
Bahamas 1
Bahrain 1
Barbados 1
Botswana 1
Bulgaria 1 (*)
China 1
Cyprus 1
Ethiopia 1
Guadeloupe 1
Guam 1 (*)
Guatemala 1
Guyana 1
Lithuania 1
Malta 1
Oman 1
Slovakia 1
Slovenia 1
Somalia 1
Tunisia 1
Uganda 1
Venezuela 1

There were 22 single-view countries. Bulgaria and Guam were the only ones to be single-view countries in February also. No country is on a three-month or longer streak.

WordPress figures I posted 18,611 words in March, my fewest for any one month this year. It’s an average of 600.4 words per posting in March, which is what happens when I don’t write up so many Popeye cartoons. I’m at 59,055 words for the whole year, so far, an average of 656 words per posting in 2021.

Between the Broadway debut of The Male Animal (9th of January, 1940, at the Cort) and the start of April 2021 (1st of April, 2021) I’ve posted 2,981 things here, says WordPress. These have drawn 223,457 views from 126,975 unique visitors.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, you’re being kind. You can add my posts to your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then add any RSS feed to your reading page through https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or through https://www.livejournal.com/syn. If you’re on WordPress already, you should be able to use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button to add it to your Reader page. And if you want you can have posts sent to you by e-mail, using the link underneath “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile”.

Statistics February: People Are Acclimated To The New Mark Trail


As the month is well underway, it’s fair to look at what the readership around here last month was like. I can see from the most popular posts that people were upset about Mark Trail. But the number of people looking up Mark Trail, or other comic strips, dropped for the fourth month running.

It’s almost at a transition point, too. According to WordPress there were 4,778 page views here in February. That’s just below the twelve-month running mean, from February 2020 through January 2021, of 4,851.3. It is still above the twelve-month running median of 4,385.5. This tells me I’m benefiting from people who want the change in artist explained if not justified. The thing is, February’s also a short month. There were on (arithmetic mean) average 170.6 page views per day in February. The twelve-month running average was 158.9 leading up to February. The twelve-month running mean median 143.9. So I’m coming back to normal, after the Mark Trail boost, but not quite there yet.

Bar chart of about two and a half years' worth of monthly readership figures. The past five months have seen a steady decline; in February 2021 were 4,778 views from 2,780 visitors.
Thinking of starting a rumor that Olivia Jaimes is taking over The Far Side just so I can enjoy the sweet popularity of clickbait and outrage.

The story’s similar for the unique views. There were 2,780 unique viewers in February, a mean of 99.3 per day. The twelve-month running mean was 2,879.4 unique viewers per month, but that’s 94.3 per day. The running median was 2,564 unique viewers per month, or 84.1 per day.

On things that are exactly in line with everything? There were 101 likes given my blog in February. The running mean was 101.8. The running median 99.5. Prorated per day, it’s a little less in-line. This was an average 3.6 likes per day, compared to a running mean of 3.3 and running median of 3.2.

And comments! I had comments in February, always to my amazement. In particular there were 38 comments. The running mean was 35.5 and running median 38.5. This is an average 1.4 comments per day, with a running mean of 1.2 and running median of 1.2 for the twelve months leading up to February.

This all suggests I’m losing the Mark Trail outrage readership. The Mallard Fillmore controversy might help me out a bit this month.

I intended to link the five most popular articles from the past two months. This ended up with another tie for fifth place. That’s convenient, though, as it lets me reach to one of my long-form pieces.

I do expect to finish off The Tale of Fatty Raccoon this month. I haven’t decided whether to go back to writing wholly original long-form pieces or what. I might do some more MiSTings. They’ve been pleasant to do, although much of that pleasantness depends on how Arthur Scott Bailey is good source material. I can’t guarantee that another book would be as good. Also I don’t know that I want to go another twenty(?) weeks on some forgotten animal-adventure book. I’m open to hearing opinions, if anyone has them, though.

What I do plan on writing are comic strip plot summaries. My plan for the month ahead is to take this order, provided breaking news or special circumstances don’t get in the way:

Yeah, The Amazing Spider-Man is never coming out of repeats. I figure to do a couple more recaps, to get back to the story where I started doing plot recaps, and then retire it. I might start recapping Rip Haywire to make up the gap, or shift to an 11-week cycle. Or if there’s another good story strip I’m overlooking, and that could use recapping, let me know. It’s what people like to see me do, and it’s fun doing, so that’s a good match.

Map of the world showing the United States in darkest red, with Canada, India, and the United Kingdom in a moderately dark red, and then pink for much of the rest of the Americas, Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and some of the Pacific Rim. There's few readers in Africa or in the arc from Iran through China.
Not sure which of these are small islands with one or two page views and which ones are my need to clean my screen. Please let me know of any world islands you don’t see.

77 countries sent me readers at all in February. Here’s the roster:

Country Readers
United States 3,505
United Kingdom 167
Canada 159
India 150
Philippines 81
Australia 63
Germany 53
Brazil 52
France 44
Spain 36
Finland 29
Italy 28
Peru 22
Mexico 21
Norway 20
South Africa 19
Sweden 19
Latvia 18
Malaysia 18
United Arab Emirates 15
Poland 14
Portugal 12
Denmark 11
Kuwait 11
Austria 10
Indonesia 10
Jamaica 10
Saudi Arabia 10
Netherlands 9
Singapore 9
Belgium 8
Costa Rica 8
Egypt 8
Ireland 7
Japan 7
Serbia 7
Chile 6
Puerto Rico 6
Thailand 6
Hong Kong SAR China 5
Lithuania 5
Nigeria 5
Switzerland 5
Croatia 4
European Union 4
Greece 4
New Zealand 4
Argentina 3
Czech Republic 3
Hungary 3
Turkey 3
Vietnam 3
American Samoa 2
Cayman Islands 2
El Salvador 2
Georgia 2
Iceland 2
Israel 2
Kenya 2
Romania 2
Slovenia 2
South Korea 2
Sri Lanka 2
Taiwan 2
Zimbabwe 2
Bangladesh 1 (*)
Belize 1 (*)
Bhutan 1
Bulgaria 1
Colombia 1
Guam 1
Iraq 1
Jordan 1
Liechtenstein 1
Pakistan 1
Russia 1
St. Martin 1
Trinidad & Tobago 1

Thirteen of these were single-reader countries. Only Bangladesh and Belize have been single-reader countries for two months running. Nowhere has a three-month or longer streak going.

WordPress says that I posted 19,578 words in February, which comes to an average 699.2 words per post. To date for 2021, I’m averaging 686 words per post. I need to stop having such verbose discussions of Popeye cartoons. It’s been 40,444 words for the year, up to the start of March.

Between the first publication of the nursery rhyme Mary Had A Little Lamb (the 24th of May, 1830) and the first of March, I’ve published 2,950 things to this blog. They drew a total 217,379 views from a recorded 123,380 unique visitors.

I’d like to have you as a regular reader. I don’t know how this would convince you. But you can add my posts to your RSS reader. If you lack an RSS reader, you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then add any RSS feed to your reading page through https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or through https://www.livejournal.com/syn. If you’re on WordPress already, you should be able to use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button to add it to your Reader page.

Thank you all for reading, including those of you that are bots seeking blogs to which you can post “Great topic with lots of valuable information to think about thanx! amazorn-11824500683037495538aqprd.zabooty.narf”. Those are the ones that make it all worthwhile.

Statistics January: People don’t hate Mark Trail as much as they used to


I enjoy reviewing a month’s readership figures, normally at the month’s end. So this is a good chance to look over January’s postings. It was another month in which my readership declined, a steady process since October, when Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail debuted.

Still. There were 5,082 pages viewed here in January 2021. That’s a good bit above the twelve-month running mean of 4,686.8 views per month, and above the running median of 4,286.5. These came from 3,094 unique visitors, also above the running mean of 2,767.4 visitors and running median of 2,479.5. All I need to stay popular is for story comics to go on looking weird. So I’m rooting for the Macanudo cartoonist take over Spider-Man.

There were 143 things liked in January, beating the running mean of 100.4 and running median of 99.5 likes per month. And there were even 48 comments — I’m surprised by that number too — well above the mean of 32.7 and median of 36.5 comments per month. It’s my chattiest month since, well, November, although some of that is comments I didn’t reply to before Sunday night. That’ll go in to boosting February’s numbers, though.

Bar chart of thirty months' worth of readership figures. After a new high in October 2021 the monthly views and unique visitors have been dropping steadily but are still above the average.
I can only imagine how popular I’d be if I did plot recaps for the stories in Vintage Barney Google over on ComicsKingdom. … But I have a strong suspicion.

My most popular posts were all about why various comic strips (Mark Trail, Mallard Fillmore, Heart of the City) look different. They got new artists. Well, Mallard Fillmore, the old artist came back, I’m told; I’m not reading it. The most popular posts published in either December or January were:

And yeah, those all turn out to be January posts; nothing from December had much of a January life. My most popular Statistics Saturday post was Things From 1925 Now In The Public Domain. This shows again the value of posting something a little clickbait-y. The most popular of the long-form pieces, which have all been Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfiction lately, was MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, Chapter X.

I plan to keep on MiSTing The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, one chapter per week, so I’ve got something that I should be doing tonight. Statistics Saturday will keep on going you-know-when too. And for the story strip recaps, my plan is to take these strips in this order:

That’s all subject to revision. There may also be extra stuff to write about Gasoline Alley come the middle of February.

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and most of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink.
I’m experimenting with using the same alt-text for this map of countries that sent me readers every month. How is it working? … rather well. Sometimes I have to go and double-check there was any change month-to-month.

82 countries or things as good as countries sent me readers in January. Here they are, and how many:

Country Readers
United States 3,573
United Kingdom 188
Canada 187
India 180
Germany 93
Philippines 72
Australia 62
Italy 61
Indonesia 45
Portugal 40
South Africa 37
Spain 36
Sweden 36
Finland 33
Brazil 30
Denmark 30
Ireland 22
Netherlands 22
Mexico 21
United Arab Emirates 21
Sri Lanka 18
France 16
Thailand 16
Norway 15
Singapore 14
El Salvador 13
European Union 13
Malaysia 13
Japan 11
Latvia 11
Romania 11
Belgium 8
Argentina 7
Turkey 7
New Zealand 6
Austria 5
Mongolia 5
Peru 5
Russia 5
South Korea 5
Chile 4
Colombia 4
Greece 4
Israel 4
Nigeria 4
Switzerland 4
Trinidad & Tobago 4
China 3
Czech Republic 3
Serbia 3
Ukraine 3
Barbados 2
Bosnia & Herzegovina 2
Ecuador 2
Egypt 2
Hong Kong SAR China 2
Hungary 2
Iceland 2
Jamaica 2
Maldives 2
Pakistan 2
Panama 2
Poland 2
Puerto Rico 2
Qatar 2
Saudi Arabia 2
Taiwan 2
Venezuela 2
Vietnam 2
Bahrain 1 (***)
Bangladesh 1
Belize 1
Croatia 1
Kenya 1
Lebanon 1
Liberia 1
Macedonia 1
Oman 1
Palestinian Territories 1
Senegal 1
Slovenia 1 (*)
Tanzania 1

13 of them were single-view countries, way down from December’s 23. Slovenia was a single-view country two months in a row. Bahrain’s on four months in a row. Nobody else has a streak going.

Between the debut of that awful 1990s Land of the Lost TV show and the start of February 2021, I’ve posted 2,922 things here. They gathered in all 212,601 views from a logged 120,599 unique visitors. WordPress things I published 20,866 words over the month, for an average of 673.1 words per post. Watch this post mess that all up.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, I don’t know how this post convinced you. But you can add my essays feed here to your RSS reader. If you need an RSS reader, sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. You can then add my, or any, RSS feed through https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn. And if you’re on WordPress you should be able to click “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” and have it in the Reader you mean to look at more than you do.

Thanks for reading, or at least letting the page load so it looks to me like a page view. Take care, please.

Statistics Saturday: How 2021 Treated My Humor Blog


I thought I might get ahead of schedule for once in my life and so check what my 2021 readership figures might look like. So here’s where we go based on the start of the month:

Bar chart of annual readership, showing from 2013 through 2020 a general growth. The bar for 2021 is empty, and a pop-up window explains the year as having, as of the moment of New Year's, 0 views, 0 visitors, nad 0.00 views per visitor.
I bet things looked totally different two minuts after midnight New Year’s Day, when dozens of people stopped in to see what the deal was with Mark Trail.

Zero page views, zero visitors … Maybe I checked too early.

Statistics 2020: How Last Year Treated My Humor Blog


I do like starting the month, and the year, with a look at the past month’s, and year’s, readership statistics. Someday I’ll learn something from all this, but until then, it’s a good way to fill a publication slot with something that’s oddly well-liked.

2020 was my eighth year of this blog; I’ll reach the actual anniversary later this month. It was also the best-read year I’ve ever had around here. There were 56,241 page views recorded from 33,209 unique visitors. Both are about one-third higher than 2019’s figures, of 42,746 views from 24,539 visitors. The number of likes resumed its drop, falling to 1,205 from the previous year’s 1,714. My likes around here peaked in 2015 and have dropped every year except 2018 since. Comments rose a bit, with 392 received in 2020, compared to 277 in 2019. My comments also peaked in 2015, with 879 of them, although 2018 almost overtook that earlier year with 830 comments.

Bar chart showing annual readership and unique visitor counts from 2013 through 2020. There's a considerable rise between 2019 and 2020 on both figures.
So I had a big readership spike in 2015 when Apartment 3-G went all to pieces. Then another one in 2020 when Mark Trail tried to somehow be more dramatic than the whole world. Clearly what I need is to somehow cause a bitter controversy to break out over, I don’t know, Gil Thorp and then sell my blog to Hollywood.

That’s what the readership looks like, in pictures and a handful of numbers. But what are people looking to read? Mostly, they want to read about Mark Trail. Also, to an extent, other comic strips. The ten most-read things I posted in 2020 were these; see if you spot any common themes:

It’s a bit sobering to realize that what people most want from me is that I read the Daily Cartoonist and mention stuff from it later on. If that’s what people want and actual comic strip news sites don’t block my IP, fine. I’ll do that.

The most popular long-form essay I posted in 2020 was What Your Favorite Polygon Says About You, which pleases me. That’s a nice silly piece just true enough to catch.

There was a tie for my most popular Statistics Saturday post. Statistics Saturday: Where Comic Strips Are Set, which offers real information, got as many views as Hypotheses about How the Premise to _Loonatics Unleashed_ Came About, which mocks a harmless cartoon for no good reason. I’d still like to know how such a weird thing came about, though.

There were 151 countries or country-like things, such as the United Kingdom, to send me readers at all in 2020. Here’s who they were:

Country Readers
United States 42,247
India 2,335
Canada 1,679
United Kingdom 1,510
Australia 895
Philippines 693
Brazil 525
Germany 498
Italy 445
Sweden 423
Finland 294
South Africa 283
France 275
Spain 267
Norway 205
Macedonia 164
Netherlands 157
Mexico 156
European Union 138
Colombia 120
Portugal 111
Ireland 105
Indonesia 104
Japan 104
Malaysia 104
Denmark 94
New Zealand 88
Belgium 81
Kenya 78
Russia 76
South Korea 76
Singapore 71
Thailand 71
Chile 70
Hong Kong SAR China 67
Poland 67
Switzerland 66
Peru 63
Trinidad & Tobago 63
Romania 62
Taiwan 60
Argentina 57
El Salvador 56
China 50
United Arab Emirates 47
Pakistan 44
Nigeria 43
Austria 42
Turkey 41
Serbia 37
Greece 36
Jamaica 33
Vietnam 33
Sri Lanka 32
Bosnia & Herzegovina 28
Hungary 28
Czech Republic 25
Israel 24
Saudi Arabia 22
Bulgaria 21
Croatia 21
Kuwait 21
Papua New Guinea 21
Egypt 20
Ukraine 19
Morocco 18
Bangladesh 17
Ecuador 17
Nepal 17
Slovakia 17
Slovenia 17
Puerto Rico 16
Zambia 15
Costa Rica 14
Venezuela 14
Cyprus 12
Guadeloupe 12
Lebanon 12
Iceland 11
Oman 11
Tanzania 11
Uruguay 11
Estonia 10
Guatemala 10
Honduras 10
American Samoa 9
Qatar 8
Dominican Republic 7
Myanmar (Burma) 7
Kazakhstan 6
Panama 6
Bahrain 5
Barbados 5
Belarus 5
Guyana 5
Mauritius 5
Moldova 5
Paraguay 5
Bermuda 4
Bolivia 4
Brunei 4
Cook Islands 4
Fiji 4
Jordan 4
Latvia 4
Montenegro 4
Belize 3
Ethiopia 3
Laos 3
Tunisia 3
Uzbekistan 3
Zimbabwe 3
Albania 2
Algeria 2
Azerbaijan 2
Bhutan 2
Botswana 2
Cambodia 2
Libya 2
Malta 2
Senegal 2
St. Lucia 2
Uganda 2
Åland Islands 1
Aruba 1
Bahamas 1
British Virgin Islands 1
Burkina Faso 1
Caribbean Netherlands 1
Cayman Islands 1
Congo – Kinshasa 1
Curaçao 1
Georgia 1
Ghana 1
Guam 1
Iraq 1
Isle of Man 1
Jersey 1
Kosovo 1
Liechtenstein 1
Lithuania 1
Madagascar 1
Maldives 1
Mali 1
Mauritania 1
Mongolia 1
Nicaragua 1
Rwanda 1
Somalia 1
Suriname 1
Turks & Caicos Islands 1
Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and most of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink.
I actually just reused the alt text from my December-2020-recap post. How right was it?

Nobody from Greenland, but that’s all right. I had two page views from Greenland on my mathematics blog so I’ll be riding on that high for a while.

Over 2020, I published 204,435 words here, says WordPress. Spread over 366 essays that’s an average of 559 words per posting. Both of these are down a little from 2019’s totals,

What do I plan doing for 2021? Plot recaps for the story comics, obviously. I could probably shut down everything else on this blog and be as well-read. But I hope to keep publishing some long-form piece every Thursday night, Eastern Time. And some Statistics Saturday post, where I puff a quick joke up into a pie chart every week. And besides that? I don’t know; I guess I’m committed to finishing watching all these King Features Syndicate Popeye cartoons from the 60s. That’s something.

I’m glad to have you reading along. You can get all my posts by using this feed in your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can get one (among other ways) by signing up for a free account with Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then you can add any RSS feed to your reading page, through this link for Dreamwidth and through this link for Livejournal. Or you could click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” link on this page, and have it in your WordPress reader.

Thanks for being wherever it is you’ve ended up.

How December 2020 Treated My Humor Blog


December 2020 was the second month that I’ve been in low-power-mode here. That’s been marked by using old Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfiction for the weekly long-form pieces, and lots and lots of Popeye cartoon reviews for daily stuff. It was a bit more actually active than in November. I suppose in the next months I’ll have more non-review writing here, as I feel able to do. But, again, writing about Popeye cartoons is comfortable and easy and I understand I’ve needed more comfortable and easy.

Ah, but how did this affect my desire to be popular? And that’s what I try to do a review of monthly readership figures for.

All my readership statistics, as WordPress logs them, fell in December. There were 5,759 page views recorded, from 3,381 unique visitors. The twelve-month running mean, for December 2019 through November 2020, was 4,462.2 page views in a month. The twelve-month median was 4,228 page views. So I do feel good about coming in above average. The twelve-month running mean was 2,632.3 unique visitors per month. The median was 2,450.5 unique visitors. So again that’s comfortably above the average.

Bar chart of 30 months of readership figures. After a spike in October 2020 there've been two months of gradual decline in readership and unique visitors.
I like that I’ve somehow recreated the Philadephia skyline, though, so I accomplished that this month at least.

There were 128 things liked in December. That beats the twelve-month running averages — 98.4 likes as a mean; 99.5 likes as a median. It’s still well below, like, the average for 2019, or 2018. I don’t know if it’s me or if it’s WordPress.com that’s in such a decline. Or whether buying my own domain name would help, however much WordPress advertises the service. The most dire single number was comments: there were only 18 in December. The twelve-month mean was 32.9, and the median 36.5. I may be asking too much of people to ask them to have an opinion about a 1960s Popeye cartoon.

What did people want to read here in December? Anything about Mark Trail. I only do so much of that. Most of it was older comic strip posts, though. The five most popular essays posted here in November or December ended in a three-way tie, naturally enough. But here’s the roster:

I’m surprised The Phantom drew so many views but, all right. I am embarrassed that among the things I forgot to list as happening in 2020: that time in Animal Crossing when suddenly everything was eggs.

Still, what people always really want to read is the story strip recaps. The comic strips I plan to look at the next month include:

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and much of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink.
Bah! Two Baltic states away from having all of NATO this month. I guess I have the former SEATO, but who cares about SEATO? (Yes, yes, I apologize to Leszek Buszynski, but c’mon, his book about SEATO is even subtitled “The Failure of an Alliance Strategy”.)

There were 88 countries or country-like countries sending me any page views in December. 23 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the roster:

Country Readers
United States 4,603
India 164
Canada 117
United Kingdom 103
Philippines 92
Sweden 78
Australia 55
Brazil 46
Italy 37
Norway 31
Germany 30
South Africa 25
Portugal 24
Finland 23
Chile 21
Spain 20
France 18
Japan 16
Mexico 16
Netherlands 13
Romania 11
Malaysia 10
Greece 9
Indonesia 9
Poland 9
Denmark 8
European Union 8
Hong Kong SAR China 8
Ireland 8
Serbia 8
Cyprus 7
Czech Republic 7
South Korea 7
Iceland 6
Russia 6
Belgium 5
Puerto Rico 5
Trinidad & Tobago 5
Ukraine 5
Bangladesh 4
Saudi Arabia 4
Singapore 4
Bermuda 3
Hungary 3
Kuwait 3
New Zealand 3
Switzerland 3
American Samoa 2
Austria 2
Azerbaijan 2
Belarus 2
Bosnia & Herzegovina 2
Cambodia 2
China 2
Guyana 2
Kazakhstan 2
Kenya 2
Moldova 2
Morocco 2
Pakistan 2
Peru 2
Tanzania 2
Thailand 2
Turkey 2
Vietnam 2
Bahrain 1 (**)
Barbados 1
Botswana 1
Colombia 1 (*)
Costa Rica 1 (*)
Estonia 1
Guatemala 1
Isle of Man 1
Israel 1 (**)
Jamaica 1
Jersey 1
Jordan 1
Kosovo 1
Madagascar 1
Malta 1
Mauritius 1 (*)
Nigeria 1
Qatar 1 (*)
Rwanda 1
Slovenia 1
Sri Lanka 1
Taiwan 1
Uruguay 1

Colombia, Costa Rica, Mauritius, and Qatar were single-view countries in November. Bahrain and Israel were single-view countries for the third month in a row. Nobody’s on a four-month streak.

Between that time everyone got mad at U2 because they Apple gave everyone their album and the start of January 2021, I posted 2,891 things here. They gathered a total 207,519 views from 117,505 logged unique visitors.

In December 2020 I posted 19,802 words, for an average of 638.8 words per posting in the month. And that’s brought my annual words-per-posting, for 2020, up to 559. Popeye cartoons are easy to write about; they’re hard to write about succinctly.

So, what will I write for tomorrow, as I’ve used up past years’ chapters of The Tale of Fatty Coon? And past that? You can see by checking in here regularly. Or by adding the essays here to your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can get one easily. One way is by signing up for a free account with Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then you can add any RSS feed to your reading page, through this link for Dreamwidth and through this link for Livejournal. Or you could just click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” link on this page, and have it in your WordPress reader.

However you do it, though, thank you for reading. See you again soon, I hope.

Statistics November: How Many People Wanted Me To Fix Mark Trail Last Month


November 2020 was an exceptional one for me, as it was for many people. The big one is I went into a low-power mode. This has been a very stressful year. I had great fears for the United States elections. I needed to shift to things I could do when more emotionally fragile. And that’s reprinting a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfiction and reviewing a lot of Popeye cartoons. What did readers think of this?

They didn’t notice, because they wanted to know about Mark Trail. But that’s all right since, by good fortune, I had the plot recap for Mark Trail posted in the middle of the month. I’m sure I can’t stay in low-power mode forever. But for now? This is an easier way to manage my blog, and I’ll keep at that until I’m ready to go back to normal. Probably after the new year.

According to WordPress, there were 6,284 pages viewed in November. This is fewer than in October, but October was the greatest number of page views I’d had in a month. November was the second-greatest. I can’t be too fretful about that. The twelve-month running average leading up to November was 4,282.9 page views per month. So a lot of people are upset about Mark Trail and they’re coming to me to ask about it.

Bar chart of monthly readership, which mostly rose for about a year's worth of figures; November saw a drop from October but is still quite high.
I absolutely dare Google Ad Technologies Inc to come up with a way to make money on me talking about the Popeye cartoons of the 60s.

There were 3,868 unique visitors logged around here in November. Again that’s down from October, but October was my record high. 3,868 is still my second-highest unique visitor count on record. The twelve-month running average is a mere 2,517.7 unique visitors.

The things where people interact with the page in some way were up, also. WordPress recorded 136 likes given to posts in November, above the running average of 94.8. It’s the greatest number of likes I’ve gotten in a month since July of 2019. And there were 48 comments given, way above the 29.9 running average and my greatest number since … well, April, which also saw 48. But no month’s had more than 48 comments since January 2019, when 70 comments came in here. Again, people really want to argue about Mark Trail, or Alley Oop. I’m spoiling the fun by not being too obviously angry about or fannish of either strip.

What was popular around here in November? Everything with “Mark Trail” in the subject line. But to be more exact, the most popular things posted in October or November have been:

I’m delighted that my needless mocking of an unimportant cartoon captured people’s imagination. Also that my Statistics Saturday piece for my Dad was received so well. Dad, if you have other statistics ideas, please, let me know; apparently, they play well. The most popular long-form piece was the first chapter in the MiSTing of The Tale of Fatty Coon. Chapters of that should keep going through the month, at least.

I of course intend to keep publishing my What’s Going On In series. Coming up are some of the comics that were pretty big draws back in their day, before everybody got mad at Mark Trail and Alley Oop. If pressing news, or pressing life, doesn’t force a change I expect to publish:

I’m aware that The Amazing Spider-Man is still in repeats and is almost certainly not coming out again. My plan, right now, is to cover the strip until it starts repeating things I’ve already recapped. I’ll change that if I get bored making retread Spider-Gags.

87 countries sent me readers in November, up rom a couple months of 77 countries each. The roster this month was:

Country Readers
United States 4,941
India 207
Canada 187
United Kingdom 142
Philippines 107
Australia 72
Germany 41
Sweden 40
France 35
South Africa 33
Spain 31
Brazil 30
Finland 26
Mexico 26
Bosnia & Herzegovina 25
Italy 24
Malaysia 18
Japan 15
Ireland 14
Morocco 13
Peru 13
China 12
Jamaica 12
Netherlands 12
El Salvador 10
Russia 10
Belgium 9
Norway 9
Trinidad & Tobago 9
Indonesia 8
New Zealand 8
Saudi Arabia 8
Thailand 8
Switzerland 6
Denmark 5
Estonia 5
European Union 5
Kenya 5
Poland 5
Romania 5
United Arab Emirates 5
Chile 4
Croatia 4
Lebanon 4
Montenegro 4
Nigeria 4
Oman 4
Taiwan 4
Ukraine 4
Egypt 3
Portugal 3
Singapore 3
Argentina 2
Czech Republic 2
Greece 2
Hungary 2
Kuwait 2
Pakistan 2
Panama 2
Serbia 2
Slovakia 2
Slovenia 2
South Korea 2
Sri Lanka 2
Bahrain 1 (*)
Bangladesh 1 (*)
Bulgaria 1
Cayman Islands 1
Colombia 1
Costa Rica 1
Cyprus 1
Ecuador 1
Ethiopia 1
Guadeloupe 1
Hong Kong SAR China 1
Israel 1 (*)
Latvia 1
Macedonia 1
Mauritius 1
Myanmar (Burma) 1
Nepal 1
Qatar 1
Senegal 1
Turkey 1
Uzbekistan 1
Venezuela 1
Vietnam 1 (*)

Bahrain, Bangladesh, Israel, and Vietnam were single-view countries in October also. No countries have been single-view for more than two months in a row, just now.

Map of the world with the United States in deepest red, and most of the world except Africa and central Asia in a light pink. Greenland and Iceland are blank, though, like always.
Victoria II map challenge here.

Between the introduction of the second-generation iPod and the start of December I posted 2,860 pieces here. They gathered 201,752 views from 114,113 logged visitors. Oh, man, think if I’d gotten one more visitor. That would have been so nice.

For all that November was an easy month, it was not a terse one. WordPress records me as writing 25,140 words in November, for an average of 838.0 words per posting. Well, these routine, bulk-quantity Popeye cartoons give me a lot to talk about, all right? It means that for 2020 I’m averaging 551 words per post, a jump of nearly thirty words per post since October. I need to say less stuff about these cartoons, I guess.

Will I? You can find out by adding my essays to your RSS reader. Don’t have an RSS reader? Sign up for a free account with Dreamwidth or Livejournal. You can add any RSS feed to your reading page there, using this link for Dreamwidth or this link for Livejournal. If you’re on WordPress, too, you can click “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” on this or any post’s page.

Thanks for the reading.

Statistics October: When Am I Going to Do Something About Mark Trail, And What Will That Be?


I have not a thing to do with Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail. Even in the world of comic strip snark bloggers I’m a third-tier player. The nearest connection I have is that a former friend went on to become a syndicated cartoonist.

But I do read it, and I occasionally recap its plot. I do this for a dozen story strips. This is my plan for what comic strips I’ll be recapping the next month, and when I plan to post those recaps:

So my first comments about the story and my reaction to it, I figure to have in two weeks. Hope you feel it’s worth the wait. Me? I’m just reveling in that I figured out how to post from the Classic, or “Good”, WordPress editor again and don’t have to fight the new Block, or “Bad”, one to do stuff like embed images or videos.

So, like, every month I hope to look at my readership figures and see what was popular and what wasn’t. This month? It was extremely popular for me, according to WordPress’s count of page views, and other stuff. WordPress tells me there were 7,149 page views here in October. This is the largest I’ve ever had in a single month, going past even the Apocalypse 3-G peak in November 2015. It’s way above the 4,050.8 twelve-month running average of page views. The number of unique visitors was way up too. WordPress recorded 4,135 unique visitors in October, also a record, and way above the twelve-month running average of 2,374.8. Heck, 4,135 views, never mind visitors, would be among my most-read months.

Bar chart of monthly readership figures. After several months of slight rises around 4,000 views per month, it leaps to just over seven thousand views and four thousand visitors for October.
I feel like daring them to tell me how I could get people to pay me for reading Gil Thorp.

I know why all these visitors. You do too. But let’s let that wait a moment and look at other statistics. There were 115 things liked here in October, tolerably above the twelve-month running average of 95.3. And there were a positively robust 43 comments, beating the average 27.5. I do like seeing all this. My next goal will be getting two commenters having a conversation with each other, instead of chatting with me. Well, that’ll probably never happen. I’ve been doing this daily for eight years; if I knew how to say stuff that attracted people who want to talk to each other, I’d have done it by now.

So what does draw people in? The mode of them were looking for Mark Trail news. The five most-read pieces in October were posts with names like Why does Mark Trail look funny? and Why Does Mark Trail look different? As I noticed these getting popular I put up tags to tell people about the new artist-and-writer, and to point them to my plot-recaps pages. They’ll never come back. The only pieces to compare were, well, that months-in-reverse-alphabetical-order post, and one asking about what’s going on with Mallard Fillmore. Daily Cartoonist says that Bruce Tinsley is returned to the comic strip he originated. That’s all right. I return from not reading Mallard Fillmore to not reading Mallard Fillmore.

The five most popular pieces around here that were posted in September or October of this year were largely comic strip based. One original thing did make the cut:

My most popular long-form essay was Some Astounding Things About The Moon, which it’s nice to see get some recognition. Especially since I both like the piece and had the main bulk of it spill out in about twenty minutes’ thinking, which is a pretty good ratio. Some pieces I spend all week trying to get into shape and they’re still formless blobs. My most popular Statistics Saturday piece was, of course, How Many People Wanted To Know What Was Up With Mark Trail This Past Week. I’m not above being a little clickbait-y, as long as I can whitewash it with irony. Yes, I’m Gen-X.

77 countries sent me any readers at all in October. That’s the same count as in September. There were 15 single-view countries, up from 10 the month before. Here’s the roster:

Country Readers
United States 5,677
India 262
Philippines 144
Canada 142
United Kingdom 113
Australia 102
Colombia 51
Germany 49
South Africa 43
Sweden 42
France 35
Spain 33
Brazil 29
Norway 28
Finland 24
Italy 24
Sri Lanka 22
Netherlands 21
Chile 20
Japan 18
Kenya 18
Malaysia 15
European Union 14
Greece 14
Belgium 12
Thailand 10
Austria 9
Mexico 9
New Zealand 9
Singapore 8
Hong Kong SAR China 7
Switzerland 7
Trinidad & Tobago 7
Turkey 7
China 6
Croatia 6
Denmark 6
Indonesia 6
Poland 6
Tanzania 6
Costa Rica 5
Nigeria 5
Peru 5
Romania 5
Russia 5
Serbia 5
Argentina 4
Cook Islands 4
Pakistan 4
Egypt 3
Saudi Arabia 3
Slovenia 3
South Korea 3
United Arab Emirates 3
Algeria 2
Bulgaria 2
Czech Republic 2
El Salvador 2
Ireland 2
Kuwait 2
Portugal 2
Taiwan 2
Åland Islands 1
Bahrain 1
Bangladesh 1
Congo – Kinshasa 1
Curaçao 1
Georgia 1
Guatemala 1
Israel 1
Libya 1
Morocco 1
Myanmar (Burma) 1
Puerto Rico 1
Turks & Caicos Islands 1
Vietnam 1
Zimbabwe 1
Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and most of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink.
Some month I’m going to just repeat the previous month’s map and see if anyone notices. I bet that’s the month I get a reader from Greenland, too.

There’s no countries that were single-view two months in a row. I’m not sure that’s ever happened before that I noticed. I’m happy seeing it, though. If I am going to be barely noticed, at least it can be a broad bare-noticing.

From the dawn of time to the start of November I had posted 2,830 pieces. These gathered 195,475 total views, from 110,257 logged unique visitors.

WordPress credits me with 14,152 words posted in October, my most laconic month this year. I averaged 416.2 words per posting in October. And that’s with stuff like the Popeye cartoon reviews and the story strip plot recaps bulking out my average. Recapping a Sunday-only strip like Prince Valiant helps. But, this means for the year to date I’ve posted 159,495 words, and have an average for the year of 523 words per post, dropping from 536. We’ll just see what I do about that.

If you’d like to see what I do, add my RSS feed to whatever you use to read essays. If you don’t have an RSS reader? Sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. You can add any RSS feed — which most every WordPress blog has, and many comic strips and other regularly updated stuff does too — from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn as you like. Or, if you have a WordPress account, click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page somewhere.

Thank you all for reading.

Statistics September: How September 2020 Looked At Me, And What For


As I’ve said before I like starting the month with a look at what got read around here, and how much. I’m sure this is going to be fun. WordPress kicked me off the Classic, or “good”, post editor and the New, or “bad” one is really bad. Like, it was annoyingly many steps to embed pictures in yesterday’s Popeye cartoon post. And every attempt working through the Bad editor to embed the video starting at the right time marker failed. I had to post it and then edit it using the back path to get the Good editor back. It takes some doing to screw up stuff like that. Don’t worry. You’ll hear a lot more from me on this topic.

All the statistics I track around here were up this past month, which is to say, good. WordPress reports 4,479 page views in September, which is the third-highest month I have on record. (April 2020 and November 2015 were higher yet.) That’s a good bit above the twelve-month running average of 4,018.7 views per month.

These views came from a recorded 2,623 unique visitors. That, too, is up from the running average 2,347.3. I think that’s also the third-highest unique visitor count, but WordPress doesn’t make that number easy to track. There were 130 things liked, which is above the average 94.4 and the largest number since July of 2019. And there were a positively chatty 41 comments, well above the 25.7 average. That was the greatest volume of comments since April 2020, owing to people turning caps lock on.

Bar chart of monthly readership. The last several months have seen around four thousand page views and two thousand to 2500 unique visitors each month.
You don’t suppose it’s possible I got like a thousand page views between 7:59 pm and 8:00 pm when the new month started, do you?

What articles were popular here? The most popular things published in September were:

I was, in the interest of fairness, looking for top things posted in August too, but it turns out nothing from August was as popular as the Jules Rivera news. That’ll happen.

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in darkest pink, most of the Americas, Europe, Russia, and the Pacific Rim in light pink, and scattered African countries, plus India, also in pink.
I feel like I’m far less popular this month in Africa, but it turns out the difference is two page views from Zambia and one from Ethiopia. Well also that Ukraine wasn’t interested in me this month either.

77 countries sent me any readers last month. That’s down from August’s 78 and July’s 82, and not at all significantly so. There were ten single-view countries, noticeably down from August’s 18 or July’s 28. I suppose next month there’ll be minus two.

CountryReaders
United States3,108
India223
Canada149
Brazil135
United Kingdom114
Australia103
Philippines99
Sweden38
South Africa34
Germany32
Norway31
Italy27
Finland26
Spain25
Japan23
Netherlands23
France15
Denmark14
Nepal14
Trinidad & Tobago14
Mexico12
Indonesia11
Belgium9
Portugal9
Argentina8
Singapore8
Turkey8
Colombia7
European Union7
New Zealand7
United Arab Emirates7
Hong Kong SAR China6
Ireland6
Switzerland6
Thailand6
Chile5
Honduras5
Malaysia5
Peru5
Slovenia5
Venezuela5
Fiji4
Greece4
Hungary4
Qatar4
Taiwan4
Austria3
China3
Czech Republic3
Ecuador3
Guyana3
Israel3
Kazakhstan3
Kuwait3
Myanmar (Burma)3
Pakistan3
Poland3
South Korea3
Vietnam3
Bulgaria2
Egypt2
Guadeloupe2
Kenya2
Nigeria2
Puerto Rico2
Romania2
Russia2
Belize1
Bolivia1
Costa Rica1
Croatia1
El Salvador1
Iceland1
Jamaica1
Maldives1
Mauritius1
Paraguay1 (*)

Paraguay is the only country that was a single-view country in August. And no countries are on a three-month or longer streak. So that’s fun.

My plan for the next several weeks of story comics is to do these, on these days:

All this is subject to revision in case of news or anything getting in my way. I am thinking of what I might shuffle around to make sure the week of Election Day is as low-stress for me as possible, around here at least, for example. I’ll have some What’s Going On In The Story Comics post, or news, at this link. And hopefully a plot recap every Tuesday, Eastern time.

Also in my plans: a long-form essay Thursday evenings, Eastern Time. Also Statistics Saturday posts, Saturday evening, Eastern Time. And I’m hardly out of 1960s Popeye cartoons to talk about Sunday evenings.

Through the start of October I’d posted 2,799 things here. Those collected 188,327 views from 106,121 unique visitors. WordPress thinks I posted 16,141 words this past month, an average of 538.0 words per posting for all thirty posts. My average post, year to date, has been 548 words, so my goal of writing shorter was going great until I started this post.

If you’d like to be a regular reader here, 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 RSS feeds to your friends page from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn as you like. And my @nebusj Twitter account announces posts. Don’t try to contact me through it, though. Safari often refuses to let me see Twitter. I don’t know why, and I don’t know what the pattern is. Am I going to make the surely slight effort it would be to clear up the problem? No, not this year. Why would I want to see more Twitter than I already do? In 2020? Thank you for your understanding.

Statistics August: People Wanted To Know About The Guy Who Drew Pluggers Last Month


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.

Bar chart of monthly readership. The last several months have seen around four thousand page views and two thousand to 2500 unique visitors each month.
Still not buying this claim about turning a blog into a source of income. I don’t know what they’re selling but I know it’s not legit.

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:

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.

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in darkest pink, most of the Americas, Europe, Russia, and the Pacific Rim in light pink, and scattered African countries, plus India, also in pink.
Would I get a Greenland reader if I mention I finally saw that episode of Conan O’Brien where he went to Greenland and met all 24 inhabitants? … No, it would not.

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?

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.

Statistics July: how July 2020 treated Another Blog, Meanwhile


I say that, but I always mean how the readers treated Another Blog, Meanwhile. And by “treated” I mean “looked at one or more pages”. That’s what I’m really here for. Page views and the chance to think of a good joke about Prince Valiant, since nobody else is.

According to WordPress’s counter, in July there were 4,175 pages read here. It’s nice to see that above four thousand. It’s also above the twelve-month running average of 3,911.4 page views. These views came from 2,447 unique visitors, which is higher than the 2,260.6 running average.

Bar chart of about 30 months' worth of readership figures. The July figures are rising after a slight drop in June. There was a peak in April.
The tease to ‘accept payments for just about anything’ is a nice sentiment but it’s not as though I was turning away payments before. The trick is getting anyone to give me money for doing the stuff I have fun doing.

There were 95 things liked in July, which is a bit below the average of 100.3, but at least if my figures are representative, people don’t go liking stuff on WordPress anymore. I get about two-thirds as many likes as I did a year ago, and this with more page views and unique visitors. There were 35 comments given, gratifyingly above the average of 21.8, though.

So regarding the most popular posts: I’m getting a little tired linking to that months-of-the-year-in-reverse-alphabetical-order one. So I thought I’d just list the top five posts from July here. That’s a fine idea except there was a three-way tie for the fifth-most-popular piece, so, fine, have seven links. I’m glad that this includes at least one of my long-form pieces and also a Statistics Saturday piece. It gives a little more balance to things.

I should probably do something to account for, like, a post the last day of the month that gets most of its views the next month. But that’s getting to be a little too much work for me.

Where do my readers come from? For July, they were from 82 countries, a bit above the 77 that I’d seen in June and in May. 28 of them were single-view countries, which is up from the 20 of June and of May. Here’s the roster:

World map showing the United States in deepest red, most of the Americas, South and Pacific Asia, and Europe in a more uniform pink, and few countries in Africa or central Asia with any readers.
I missed my goal of getting all the nations formerly part of the Federal Republic of Central America: no readers from Costa Rica or El Salvador last month. Maybe next time!

Country Readers
United States 3,044
India 301
Canada 155
United Kingdom 131
Australia 78
Brazil 40
Finland 38
Germany 33
Sweden 29
Spain 25
France 24
Italy 22
Norway 18
Philippines 15
Austria 14
South Africa 14
South Korea 10
Portugal 9
Taiwan 9
Argentina 7
Indonesia 7
Ireland 7
Mexico 7
New Zealand 7
Poland 7
Netherlands 6
Singapore 6
Belgium 5
Colombia 5
European Union 5
Guatemala 5
Kenya 5
Peru 5
Denmark 4
Malaysia 4
Zambia 4
Bangladesh 3
Hong Kong SAR China 3
Japan 3
Nigeria 3
Russia 3
United Arab Emirates 3
Albania 2
Belarus 2
Czech Republic 2
Dominican Republic 2
Jamaica 2
Oman 2
Paraguay 2
Saudi Arabia 2
Switzerland 2
Thailand 2
Turkey 2
Venezuela 2
American Samoa 1
Barbados 1
Bermuda 1
Botswana 1
Brunei 1 (*)
Chile 1
China 1
Croatia 1
Cyprus 1 (*)
Ecuador 1
Egypt 1
Estonia 1
Honduras 1
Hungary 1
Israel 1
Jordan 1
Kuwait 1
Lebanon 1 (*****)
Mali 1
Mauritius 1
Nicaragua 1
Pakistan 1
Puerto Rico 1
Romania 1
Slovakia 1 (*)
Ukraine 1
Uruguay 1
Vietnam 1

Brunei, Cyprus, and Slovakia got a single view two months in a row now. Lebanon has had a single page view for each of six months in a row now. I’m not sure whether my longest streak is seven months or what, but that’s one of the longest single-reader streaks out there.

I’m continuing my plan for stuff to write this coming month. A long-form essay posted Thursday evening, Eastern Time. A Statistics Saturday piece posted Saturday evening, Eastern Time. More Popeye cartoons on Sunday evenings. And on Tuesday evenings What’s Going On In the story comics. My plan, barring special circumstances, is to cover the story comics in this order:

As of the start of August I’ve posted 2,738 things. These have drawn 179,564 page views from 101,044 unique visitors. Sorry to have missed you, visitor #100,001. You should have said something. In July I published 15,701 words, for an average of 506.5 words per posting in the month. And that brings my words per posting average for the year down to 541.

I’m happy to have more readers, if you know anyone who’d like to be one. You can subscribe through WordPress by using the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button. Or you can put the RSS feed for posts into any reader you have. This includes free accounts at Dreamwidth or Livejournal, if you don’t have anything else. You can add an RSS feed to your Dreamwidth page from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ and to your Livejournal friends page from https://www.livejournal.com/syn. I also announce new posts on my @nebusj Twitter account, that I can only sometimes post to manually. So if you need to contact me use literally any other method, including asking people you know if they happen to know me. It’s that bad, but somehow, too low-priority for me to sort out or just use a different web browser on. Sorry.

Statistics June: How June 2020 Treated My Humor Blog


June 2020 was another recessional month around here, as most of my readership figures have it. The number of page views dropped about 250 from May, to 3,964. I’m still hanging on ahead of the twelve-month running average, of 3,842.8 page views, but it’s a closer thing. The number of unique visitors dropped about 150, to 2,336. This is again above the running average of 2,217.0, and a bit more comfortably above that.

The number of likes jumped nearly twenty, to 87 given in the month. The secular decline somehow continues, though. The running average is 105.0 likes in a month even though I haven’t seen that kind of number since January 2020. And to give you some idea how long ago January 2020 was: remember how long ago June 2020 was? January was twenty times that long ago.

The number of comments dropped seven, also, to 32 in the month. This still has it above the average of 21.0, though.

Bar chart of monthly readership for the past two and a half months. After a spike in April the readership and unique visitors counts are declining again.
Couldn’t get a picture of the statistics at exactly the start of July, Universal Time, because we were going to a drive-in movie showing Ferris Bueller and The Breakfast Club as part of their “what the heck, let’s just be the 80s” program. This week: Ghostbusters 1984, the one with the toxic fandom.

The per-posting averages have almost an identical story. Since I have something posted every day that’s not much of a surprise. The views per posting and visitors per posting are almost exactly the twelve-month average: 127.9 visitors per posting, compared to an average 126.1; and 75.4 unique visitors per posting, compared to an average 72.8. 2.7 likes per posting, compared to the average 3.4. 1.0 comments per posting, better than the average 0.7. The per-posting averages are more useful on my mathematics blog, where I’ll let days go without a posting.

The most popular postings in June were, as often happens, not ones that were posted in June. One of them I totally understand, though, and it’s probably going to be a steadily inappropriately popular post in the months to come:

What things from June were popular in June? Nothing involving June Morgan, it happens. Instead we had these:

Altogether, 577 distinct pages, plus my home page, got at least one view in June. 330 pages, counting the home page, got at least two views. 78 pages got at least ten views. That’s right about the same as in May. Probably these figures can’t change much until someone goes and gets me some viral bundle of attention.

77 countries or things like countries sent me viewers in June, which is the same number as in May. 20 of them were a single view, which again is the same count as in May. Here’s what they all were:

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in darkest red, most of the Americas and Europe in a uniform pink, and also South Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
Yes! Landed both Czech and Slovakia this month! Next month: everything that used to be part of the Federal Republic of Central America.

Country Readers
United States 2,640
India 226
United Kingdom 177
Macedonia 163
Australia 123
Canada 118
Finland 60
Germany 37
Brazil 32
Italy 26
Philippines 26
South Africa 25
Netherlands 22
Sweden 21
Norway 20
Mexico 13
Spain 13
France 11
Indonesia 11
Denmark 10
Ireland 10
Malaysia 10
Peru 10
Kenya 9
Nigeria 9
Romania 9
Japan 8
Singapore 8
Hong Kong SAR China 7
New Zealand 7
Kuwait 6
Taiwan 6
Trinidad & Tobago 6
Belgium 5
Switzerland 5
Hungary 4
Slovenia 4
United Arab Emirates 4
Austria 3
Greece 3
Israel 3
Thailand 3
Zambia 3
Argentina 2
Bulgaria 2
Croatia 2
Egypt 2
Jamaica 2
Oman 2
Pakistan 2
Panama 2
Poland 2
Russia 2
Serbia 2
South Korea 2
Ukraine 2
Vietnam 2
Belize 1
British Virgin Islands 1
Brunei 1
Colombia 1
Costa Rica 1
Cyprus 1
Czech Republic 1
European Union 1
Kazakhstan 1
Lebanon 1 (****)
Myanmar (Burma) 1
Nepal 1
Paraguay 1
Portugal 1
Qatar 1
Slovakia 1 (*)
Sri Lanka 1
Tanzania 1
Turkey 1
Venezuela 1

Slovakia’s been a single-view country two months running now. Lebanon’s been one for five months now. Macedonia hadn’t sent me any readers in May so I’m wondering if there was maybe something miscommunicated to the Balkan nations regarding my content here. Again, I’m always glad to have readers, wherever they’re from. I just know how far short I am of discussing anything like universal truths regarding the human condition.

My plan for the coming month is very like my plans for past months. A long-form essay posted Thursday evening, Eastern Time. On Saturday evening, Eastern Time, a Statistics Saturday piece. And on Tuesday evenings, What’s Going On In the story comics. My plan for the next few weeks — barring something special that forces me to change plans — is to cover there:

As of the start of July I’ve posted 2,707 things here. That all has drawn 175,391 page views from 98,598 unique visitors. There were a relatively slender 14,534 words published here in June, for a sleek average of 484.5 words per posting. I like that. For the year to date I’ve published 97,880 words, averaging 547 words per post. That average is down from the 556 at the start of June. This is doing well considering that every time I think I can cut a review of the 60s Popeye cartoons down to a couple well-chosen paragraphs they sprawl out to 1200 words.

I’m always glad to have more readers, either as subscribers or just stopping in for a while. You can subscribe through WordPress by clicking the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ button. You can use the RSS feed in whatever reader you like, which can include a Friends page on a free Dreamwidth or Livejournal account. New posts are announced to my Twitter account, @nebusj, although I only sometimes can actually post to it manually. Sorry. Nice to see you in any form, though.

Statistics May: How the past month treated my humor blog


So how do my readership figures for May look? And how do they look compared to past months? And the short answer is that it’s down from April, because nobody cares about Easter egg dye colors anymore. But it’s still a comfortably large number. Not quite the figures I saw at the end of Apartment 3-G, but surprisingly close.

Specifically, there were 4,292 page views here in May 2020, spread across 2,505 unique visitors. That’s above the twelve-month running averages for these figures. The average was 3,769.6 page views from 2,179.8 unique visitors. The twelve-month running averages are increasing month-to-month too, but I’m not going to start tracking that because that’s getting daft.

Bar chart of two years, four months, in total views and unique visitors. The trend is generally upward, though falling back after a spike above 5,000 visitors in April.
By the way the default chart shows two years and five months’ worth of figures. I write this because every month I swear I’m going to remember just how much it shows, and then I forget, and I look at all the month tabs and I get lost and I guess it’s about two and a half years. Which it is, although why 29 months instead of 30 is another of those mysteries.

The disappointing figure in all this was the number of likes, which have been trending down forever now. There were 67 things liked in all of May, way below the running average of 109.5. More important than that, though, was that 39 comments came in over the month, well above the 19.8 average. That’s also three months in a row with more than thirty comments, which makes me feel so much better, really.

The per-post averages are all rather similar. There were on average 138.5 views per posting in May; the twelve-month average is 123.7. There were 80.8 unique visitors per posting in May; the average is 71.6. There were 2.2 likes per posting in May; the average was 3.6. There were 1.3 comments per posting; the average was 0.6.

There were 556 distinct postings that got at least one page view in May, up from April’s 514. 359 of them got more than one page view, up from 323. Only 72 pages got more than ten views, slightly down from April’s 76.

The most popular comic strips were a recurring mystery, and then a bunch of comic strip stuff:

I continue to have no idea why that months-in-reverse-alphabetical-order is popular, or why it’s staying popular. I feel like it must have got put on a list incorrectly. Or there’s just that many bots who got something wrong.

All those posts are old ones, though. The most popular thing posted in May was a comic strip recap, What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why is the Phantom punching terrorists? February – May 2020. My most popular May piece that was intended to be funny was Remembering the home computers of the 1980s, one of my long-form essays that’s still a mushy nostalgic haze.

There were 77 countries, or things like countries, that sent me any readers in May. There’d been 78 in April and 73 in March, so that’s all normal enough. There were 20 single-view countries, just like in March, and basically like in April, when there were 19. Here’s the roster of what countries they were, and how many views each got:

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in deepest red. Most of the Americas, western Europe, South Asia and the Asian Pacific nations are in a uniform, less intense pink. Almost no African countries are pink.
I do kind of wish WordPress would use a different map projection, because every single month I give this the alt-text ‘Mercator-style map of the world’ and every single month I have to look up whether it’s ‘Mercator’ or ‘Mercatur’. And I’m the map freak here. Me! Anyway if they could do an equirectangular or maybe a Gall or Lambert I’d save myself that little bit of monthly embarrassment.

Country Readers
United States 3,171
India 177
United Kingdom 135
Canada 128
Australia 65
Germany 59
Sweden 58
Brazil 46
Italy 35
South Korea 33
Philippines 28
Finland 24
France 20
Spain 19
Colombia 14
El Salvador 13
Ireland 13
Russia 13
Mexico 12
Portugal 12
Norway 11
Argentina 9
Indonesia 9
Malaysia 9
Vietnam 9
Kenya 8
Netherlands 8
New Zealand 8
South Africa 8
Serbia 7
Singapore 7
Taiwan 7
China 6
Denmark 6
Jamaica 6
Japan 6
Poland 6
Turkey 6
Hong Kong SAR China 5
Pakistan 5
United Arab Emirates 5
Belgium 4
Chile 4
Czech Republic 4
Peru 4
Croatia 3
European Union 3
Iceland 3
Israel 3
Romania 3
Venezuela 3
Barbados 2
Bolivia 2
Costa Rica 2
Ecuador 2
Morocco 2
Zambia 2
Bahamas 1
Bangladesh 1 (**)
Belarus 1
Bhutan 1
Egypt 1 (**)
Greece 1
Guam 1
Guatemala 1 (*)
Lebanon 1 (***)
Mauritius 1
Panama 1
Puerto Rico 1
Saudi Arabia 1 (*)
Slovakia 1
St. Lucia 1
Switzerland 1
Trinidad & Tobago 1
Tunisia 1
Uruguay 1 (*)
Zimbabwe 1

Guatemala, Saudi Arabia, and Uruguay were single-view countries last month too. Bangladesh and Egypt have been single-view countries three months in a row. Lebanon is on its fourth month so.

Through the start of June, I had published a total 2,677 posts. They’ve drawn 171,428 views from a recorded 96,260 visitors. And I’m hoping some of them will stick around for my writing. Each Thursday, Eastern Time, I post a long-form humor essay. Each Saturday, similarly, I post something for Statistics Saturday, my Dad’s favorite feature here. And then, for Tuesdays lately, I watch What’s Going On In the story comics. My plan for the coming month, subject to breaking news, is to cover these strips:

WordPress estimates that I published 15,458 words here in May, in 31 posts averaging just over 515 and a quarter words each. For the year to date I’ve published 83,346 words, over 150 posts, for an average 556 words per posting. This is running a bit under the pace for 2019, which I am fine with.

I’m always glad to have more regular readers. If you’re on WordPress you can become a regular reader by clicking the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page. Or you can add the RSS feed for articles to whatever reader you use. If you don’t have an RSS reader, good news: you can get a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal, and use their Friends page to look at any RSS feed you like. I also announce posts by automated service to my Twitter account of @Nebusj. But while I’d sort of like to be active there again, Twitter only sometimes lets Safari read it. I don’t know what its issue is, and I don’t have the energy to work it out. Sorry.

Statistics April: How That Month Treated My Humor Blog


Better than I expected! Well, that covers that. See you next month, everyone.

Well, I have to talk a little more. My blog set a new readership record in April, topping — finally — the November 2015 spike when The AV Club noticed I wrote so much about how nothing was happening in Apartment 3-G. This can almost be explained by one thing: Easter. Particularly, Easter egg dying. I had taken pictures of what Paas-brand Easter egg dye tablets looked like, and what color they actually made eggs, and put that up on the web. And people were looking for exactly that. That page alone drew 1,057 views in April. This was even more than the home page for this blog, ordinarily the actual most-viewed page, drew. I figured that this would be a much-referred-to web site. I did not expect it to be that viewed.

Take away the 1,057 page views caused by the Paas corporation, though? And then … I … still have a record month for me. November 2015 saw 4,528 page views. April 2020 had 5,606 page views. That’s a gap of just more than 1,057 page views. It’s quite the spike. Some of that is probably spilloer from Paas-tablet-readers. But otherwise? Who’s reading and why? That’s what I look for here.

Bar chart of the last two and a half years' worth of monthly readership figures. After a drop in January 2020 the number of views and visitors have risen the last two months, with May towering above everyone.
The really good thing is now I have a replacement abnormally-great-readership-spike to look back on, as the November 2015 spike fades so far into the past that even the longest-range bar charts soon won’t be showing it.

So, yeah, the numbers look good, if we take more to mean good. 5,606 page views, way above the twelve-month running average of 3,638.5. Even discounting the Paas page, 4,549 page views would be a new record. There were 3,356 unique visitors, again way above the running average of 2,101.6. The down beat was that there were only 70 things given likes in all April, below he average of 123.1. Comments, though? There were 48 of them, way above the average of 16.6, and my best commenting month since January 2019.

Per-post, the figures are just about the same: 186.9 views per posting, above the average of 119.3. 111.9 visitors per posting, above the 69.0 running average. 2.3 likes per posting, below the average 4.0. 1.6 comments per posting, way above the 0.5 average. I’d like to think this sort of viewing and commenting is a trend that’ll continue, but I understand how much of it is juiced by Paas.

So what was popular? Paas tablets and what else? The top posts in April were:

  • Which Color Paas Tablet Is Purple? Which is Red? Which is Pink?
  • Why does Mallard Fillmore look different now? What happened to Bruce Tinsley?
  • Statistics Saturday: The Months Of The Year In Reverse Alphabetical Order
  • What Is Going On With Mark Trail?
  • Why does Mark Trail look funny? Did something happen to James Allen?

    • As you see, what people really want to know from me is why comic strips look weird today. Mallard Fillmore, that’s easy to say. Loren Fishman has taken over as “guest cartoonist” until Bruce Tinsley returns. Don’t care. I’m not reading Mallard Fillmore unless I hear it’s great from multiple independent lines of trusted references.

    April’s most popular thing I wrote in April was Emotional Drafting, one of my long-form essays. And one focused on a little bit of coping with Covid-19, in an extremely small and me way. The most popular statistics piece was Where Comic Strips Are Set. I mention because I hope linking to it will make it easier for people to find. Legitimately: Wikipedia reports Chic Young, the creator of Blondie, asserted in 1946 that the strip was set near Joplin, Missouri.

    514 posts got at least one viewing in April, up from 484 in March. 323 got more than one view, up from 302 in March. 76 of them got at least ten views, which is basically tied with March’s 75.

    78 countries sent me any viewers at all in April. That’s right about March’s 73 and February’s 71. 19 of these were single-view contries, basically the same as March’s 20 and February’s 18. And here’s what they were:

    Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in darkest pink. Most of the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia and New Zealand are in a roughly uniform pink. A random smattering of African nations are similarly pink.
    Hi, reader in Burkina Faso.

    Country Readers
    United States 4,474
    India 191
    Canada 149
    United Kingdom 125
    Australia 90
    Germany 57
    Italy 42
    Sweden 33
    Mexico 28
    South Africa 26
    Philippines 24
    Brazil 21
    Colombia 21
    France 19
    Netherlands 18
    Ireland 16
    New Zealand 15
    Kenya 14
    Spain 14
    Finland 13
    Pakistan 12
    China 10
    Indonesia 10
    Norway 10
    Peru 10
    Russia 10
    Singapore 9
    Belgium 8
    Portugal 8
    Turkey 8
    United Arab Emirates 8
    El Salvador 7
    Malaysia 6
    Poland 6
    Switzerland 6
    Ecuador 5
    Hungary 5
    Thailand 5
    Argentina 4
    Romania 4
    Taiwan 4
    Bulgaria 3
    Chile 3
    Israel 3
    Laos 3
    Moldova 3
    Nigeria 3
    American Samoa 2
    Bahrain 2
    Costa Rica 2
    Czech Republic 2
    Denmark 2
    Estonia 2
    Hong Kong SAR China 2
    Jamaica 2
    Serbia 2
    Sri Lanka 2
    Ukraine 2
    Zambia 2
    Austria 1
    Bangladesh 1 (*)
    Burkina Faso 1
    Croatia 1
    Egypt 1 (*)
    European Union 1
    Guadeloupe 1
    Guatemala 1
    Japan 1
    Lebanon 1 (**)
    Mauritania 1
    Nepal 1
    Oman 1
    Saudi Arabia 1
    South Korea 1
    Suriname 1
    Uruguay 1
    Venezuela 1
    Vietnam 1

    Bangladesh and Egypt wee single-view countries in March too. Lebanon is on a three-month streak of single views. Also … really, wow? Only one page view from Japan? I know I write a painfully parochial blog, but Japan also has like 750 million people who can read English in it. I’d think just by accident it would have to out-draw, like, Suriname. Which again is nothing against Suriname; I just think of what I write and totally get nobody in Suriname caring.

    And what do I write? Well, late Thursday, Eastern Time, I post a long-form essay, trying to get to around 700 words. Saturday nights I post a Statistics Saturday thing, some joke that can be a list or a pie chart and that doesn’t save as much time to write as you’d think. And then, at least this cycle, I’m trying out putting my What’s Going On In Story Strips posts on Tuesdays. My plan for the next month is:

    This is always subject to change in the event of fast-breaking story comic news or my deciding I want to do something different.

    As WordPress counts things I posted 19,010 words in April, for an average post length of 633.7 words. This is quite up from March’s 17,019 words and 549 words per posting. So, yes, I’m getting longwinded again. For the year through the start of May I had published 67,888 words in 119 postings. This averages 571 words per posting.

    The start of May saw me posting 2,646 things, viewed a total of 167,135 times by 93,757 unique visitors.

    If reading a bunch of numbers about posts has encouraged you to read me regularly, all right, that’s a valid choice. You can follow this blog in your WordPress reader by clicking the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button. Or you can add my RSS feed to whatever reader you use. If you don’t have an RSS reader, sign up for a free account with Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Their Friends pages let you add RSS feeds from anywhere. And you can catch announcements of these posts on my no-longer-inaccessible Twitter account, @nebusj. Thank you for reading, if that is what you’re doing here. Take care, please.

    Statistics March: How March 2020 Treated My Humor Blog, At Least


    They say that in times of crisis, keeping up routines is a good thing. That’s why I’ve moved the What’s Going On In series from posting late Sunday to posting late Tuesday: I don’t know what I’m doing. Also this lets me handle the Sunday-only strips more gracefully. Still, I do want to look at what kinds of things get read around here, and how much, and this is my first really good chance for that. So here’s a quick review of what my readership was like, according to WordPress, which I keep going ahead and trusting even when I don’t like the results. This is known as integrity or being too lazy to do something else.

    Bar chart showing a little over two years' worth of monthly readership figures; after three depressed months the readership is back up again.
    Yeah so I was at home at 8 pm Eastern Time on the 31st of March so I could take this snapshot at exactly the moment to have April not appear. Frankly, I would rather have been out messing around playing pinball at the hipster bar two blocks over.

    So, three months of a slump seems to have passed. There were 3,963 page views in March, comfortably above even the twelve-month running average of 3,605.3 views per month. These came from a logged 2,385 unique visitors, which is also a fair bit high of the 2,083.3 running average. That’s all looking good from my perspective. The number of likes was flat, though, the same 75 as in February. This is a fair bit below the average of 131.5. This suggests a great fall-off in reader engagement. But then the number of comments rose to 30, its greatest number in over a year, and well above the twelve-month average of 16.1.

    Pro-rating things per post gives a similar story. There were 127.8 views per posting for March, above the average 118.3. There were 76.9 unique visitors per posting, up from 68.4 as an average. Only 2.4 likes per posting, below the twelve-month average of 4.3. But 1.0 comments per posting, way above the 0.5 average. April is already looking nicely chatty, too. Now that I’ve said that I can watch comments shrivel up and die, apart from people upset about Mark Trail.

    I am, as ever, not joking about Mark Trail. The most popular five essays last month were:

    My most popular long-form essay last month was In Which I Am Very Petty About This Covid-19 Business, the first of what’s turning out to be a series of me rambling about my minor neuroses. It implies that I’ve finally figured out my niche, and it’s complaining about myself.

    There really is no official word on what the deal is with James Allen and Mark Trail recently. I shared my best information, which is to say rumor and conjecture, and intend to post if I hear anything.

    What else do I intend to post? In the comic strip plot recap lineup, these things, over the coming month:

    These are subject to change in case of breaking news or something that demands my attention or whatever other chaos breaks out in the world.

    484 posts got at least one page view in March, well up from February’s 401. 302 of them got more than one view, up from 245. 75 of them got at least ten views, compared to 56 in February.

    Mercator-style map of the world; the United States is in darkest red. Most of the Americas, Europe, Russia, and Pacific and South Asia is in pink; little of Africa is.
    Someday I will get a reader in Greenland and I won’t know what to do with it. … Hi, Greenland! I’m sure you have someone where who could read me!

    73 countries sent me any viewers in March, right about February’s 71. 20 of them were single-view countries, close enough to February’s 18. Herees the full roster:

    Country Readers
    United States 3,030
    India 161
    Canada 121
    United Kingdom 90
    Philippines 68
    Germany 50
    Australia 38
    South Africa 35
    Brazil 34
    Sweden 24
    Spain 23
    Papua New Guinea 21
    France 17
    Thailand 15
    Finland 14
    Switzerland 14
    Italy 13
    Portugal 13
    New Zealand 11
    Argentina 10
    Netherlands 10
    Romania 10
    Denmark 9
    Ireland 9
    Norway 8
    Pakistan 8
    China 7
    European Union 6
    Singapore 5
    Taiwan 5
    Belgium 4
    El Salvador 4
    Japan 4
    Kenya 4
    Colombia 3
    Croatia 3
    Dominican Republic 3
    Hong Kong SAR China 3
    Indonesia 3
    Malaysia 3
    Poland 3
    Russia 3
    South Korea 3
    Ukraine 3
    American Samoa 2
    Austria 2
    Greece 2
    Honduras 2
    Jamaica 2
    Mexico 2
    Saudi Arabia 2
    Sri Lanka 2
    Zambia 2
    Bangladesh 1
    Belize 1
    Chile 1
    Ecuador 1
    Egypt 1
    Estonia 1
    Iceland 1
    Israel 1
    Jordan 1
    Kuwait 1 (*)
    Lebanon 1 (*)
    Nigeria 1
    Peru 1 (*)
    Puerto Rico 1
    Serbia 1
    Somalia 1
    Trinidad & Tobago 1 (**)
    Turkey 1
    United Arab Emirates 1 (*)
    Zimbabwe 1

    Kuwait, Lebanon, Peru, and the United Arab Emirates were single-view countries in February also. Trinidad & Tobago has been on a single-view streak for three months now.

    WordPress figures in March I posted 17,019 words. That’s 549 words per posting exactly, a rare decimal-free appearance for that figure. It’s my most verbose of 2020 so far, though. For the year to date I’ve posted 48,878 words, in 90 posts, for an average of 543.09 words per posting. The start of April saw me complete 2,616 posts altogether, drawing 161,530 views from 90,399 unique visitors.

    And you could be among them! If you’re reading this, you already are. Unless you’re reading by way of RSS reader, in which case I’ll never know unless you say something to me. But you can also follow by clicking the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page. Or follow me on Twitter as @nebusj, if you’d like. Thank you, however it is you’re doing things.

    Statistics February: How the past month treated my humor blog


    It seems like I did this just a couple days ago, doesn’t it? But at least I’m getting to my monthly review of readership numbers sooner this month than last. I do like taking a moment to look at what got read around here, and how much, since it serves as a reminder that I’m not as popular as I think I am. Also that I never will be. And that I used to be more popular. Or at least more less unpopular.

    There were 3,181 page views around here in February. That’s the third month in a row at about that level, although it is rising a little. It’s a chunk under the twelve-month running average of 3,542.6. The numbers aren’t bad by themselves; it’s just this is like a one-quarter chunk of the readership from the previous three months vanished. I don’t know what happened there, or why.

    It’s a similar story with the number of unique visitors. There were 1,969 of them in February, which is a bit up from the last couple months and is at least in the neighborhood of the Chuckletrousers running average of 2,038.3. Again, though, like a quarter of my readership vanished between November and December and I can’t figure a reason why.

    Bar chart of monthly readership going back four and a half years; after the readership dropped about a quarter following December, it's been slowly rising again.
    Now, this same chart but for my mathematics blog tells me the number of things posted in the month. It happens I know how many things I posted here in February; I had something every day. But why does that not get attention in the little pop-up window then?

    After a couple months fluttering upward the number of likes has crashed again. There were 75 of them in February, way below the running average of 138.3. It’s the lowest number of likes in a month since 2013, which is amazing to consider because that was a time I would get, like, 300 views and 170 visitors in a month. Comments, too, have rolled over and died: six of them in February, below the average of 18.4 and the lowest since the first months of this blog, back in 2013.

    Nevertheless, people are reading stuff. Mostly my comic strip talk. The most popular essays here in February were none at all published in February, but:

    So if we learn nothing else, it’s that people really want to know what’s with Mark Trail leaving people for dead. Trust me, I’ll have words about this on Sunday. Also I have no idea why that months-of-the-year thing is proving so popular month after month. I think someone must have linked to it from somewhere trusted. The most popular thing I published in February was also about people wanting story comic characters’ motivations explained. That was What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why is the Python held by the Wambesi? November 2019 – February 2020.

    My most popular long-form essay of the month was It Is Supposed To Be Cold Tomorrow which shows how people like to see me vaguely complaining about stuff. I am thinking of other topics I can go on about in this vein. Anyway each Thursday night, US time, I try to post a long-form essay at this link. We’ll see what I can do with any of that.

    Altogether 401 posts, plus my home page, got any views at all this past month. 245 of them got more than one view. 56 got at least ten views. There’d been 450 posts getting any views in January, and 277 more than one view then.

    But I know what people really want to see and that’s my plot recaps of the story comics. The plan for the next several weeks is to feature:

    As ever, this is subject to change for reasons of breaking news or broken schedules on my part. And, not to jinx myself, but: Mark Trail, Mary Worth, The Phantom, and Rex Morgan? In the story-strip-snark community we know these as the breadwinners. Gil Thorp, well, that’s the hipster breadwinner, a story strip for people who want to snark on something a little more obscure than Mary Worth.

    Mercator-style map of the world, with the Americas, western Europe, South India, Australia, and Russia in a mostly uniform pink. There's only a few African countries to have sent any readers at all.
    I acknowledge that I will never have a reader from Greenland but I’m startled to see Switzerland ignoring me.

    71 countries sent me any readers in February. That’s right about January’s 68 and December’s 65. 18 of these were single-view countries, again right about January’s 20 and December’s 13. Here’s the full roster:

    Country Readers
    United States 2,313
    Canada 182
    India 116
    United Kingdom 82
    Australia 52
    European Union 40
    Germany 36
    Brazil 35
    Sweden 30
    Philippines 25
    Spain 20
    France 17
    Portugal 17
    Norway 15
    Finland 13
    Indonesia 12
    South Africa 11
    Denmark 7
    Israel 7
    Poland 7
    Argentina 6
    Netherlands 6
    New Zealand 6
    Russia 6
    Chile 5
    Ireland 5
    Italy 5
    Kenya 5
    Romania 5
    Bangladesh 4
    Colombia 4
    Jamaica 4
    Japan 4
    Malaysia 4
    Mexico 4
    Pakistan 4
    Puerto Rico 4
    Serbia 4
    Singapore 4
    Taiwan 4
    Austria 3
    El Salvador 3
    Hong Kong SAR China 3
    Hungary 3
    Nigeria 3
    Thailand 3
    Turkey 3
    Cyprus 2
    Ecuador 2
    Latvia 2
    Oman 2
    Switzerland 2
    Tanzania 2
    Aruba 1
    Barbados 1
    Belgium 1
    Bolivia 1
    Ghana 1
    Kuwait 1
    Lebanon 1
    Libya 1
    Malta 1
    Panama 1
    Peru 1
    Qatar 1
    Saudi Arabia 1
    South Korea 1
    Sri Lanka 1 (*)
    Trinidad & Tobago 1 (*)
    United Arab Emirates 1
    Venezuela 1

    Sri Lanka and then Trinidad & Tobago were single-view countries in January. There’s no countries on three-month streaks. Italy’s dropped to a more typical number of readers after January’s spike of 170 page views. Most of my readers are from the English-speaking countries that I expect to see there.

    I posted, counts WordPress, 14,874 words in February. This seems low. It averages to 512.9 words per posting, which is down from January’s 548. As of the start of February I’ve posted 2,585 things, and attracted 157,567 page views from a logged 88,016 unique visitors.

    I’d be glad to have you as a regular reader here. You can put the blog into your RSS reader. (Friends pages on a free Livejournal or Dreamwidth account can serve as an RSS reader.) Or you can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page and add it to your regular RSS read. If you’re on Twitter, you’re one ahead of my @nebusj account, but that link still announces postings. Thank you for reading at all, though, however it is you do it.

    Statistics January: Oh Yeah, How The Start Of 2020 Treated My Humor Blog


    So back in January I didn’t get my review of the previous month’s statistics done until the 11th. I wrote how I hoped to get it done sooner in the next month. Now it’s the 14th, or the 15th by the time you read this, in certain time zones. You see how well I’m doing keeping on top of everything, everywhere. It’s been busy. But let’s get to seeing how well-read I was in January of 2020, before we get into March of 2020.

    There were 3,108 page views around here in January. That’s slightly up from December. It’s still down an appreciable bit from the twelve-month running average, though, of 3,562.2 views per month. I don’t know whether this reflects December and January being abnormally low readership or the several months before that being abnormally high. There were 1,750 unique visitors recorded in January, just about the same as December (1,760). But that’s also below the twelve-month running average, which was was 2,044.9.

    Bar chart of monthly readership figures going back to early 2015; the least year and a half has fluttered fairly consistently between 3000 and 4500 readers, and 1750 to 2500 unique visitors.
    My problem is that one (1) semester I taught signals processing and so a part of me really wants to take this data and figure out what of it is random fluctuations and what of it is actual changes. There is no figuring out either of these, though, and never will be, and nothing will ever convince me of that.

    127 things were liked during January, the highest monthly figure since August. That’s still below the twelve-month average of 142.9, though. And the monthly figures for that seem to be on a long-term decline anyway. There were 14 comments in January, well below the twelve-month average of 23.1. But the comic strip summaries were about the less controversial comics, so maybe that’s nothing big.

    By the way, the plan for the next several weeks of comic strips are to report What’s Going On In …

    As ever, this is subject to change in the event of news. All the story strip comics essays whatever the comic should be gathered at this link.

    Those essays are reliably my most popular. But there’s still surprises. For example, here’s the five posts read the most in January, none of which were posted in 2020:

    I do not feel bad for clickbaiting people looking for “mark trail fetish” because they got what they should have expected. I’m surprised who’s that interested in reading about the Fleischer Studios Talkartoons all of a sudden, though.

    Past that, the most-read thing I posted in January was a single-sentence post, which implies terrible things about how amusing my essays are. Speaking of essays, two tied for the title of most-popular long-form comic essay for the month. My Question To You, And My Windshield Wiper was one of them. It’s the true story of how somehow I can have buying a windshield wiper turn into a fiasco. The other most-popular-essay was Some Reasons Everybody Treated Me Like That In Middle School, recounting things that my dumb young-adolescent brain insisted on thinking about back then. I am sincerely glad that people enjoy looking at the things that go on in my brain in place of thought processes.

    Overall, 450 posts got any page views at all, up from 420 in December. 173 of them got only a single page view, up from December’s 159 but just a little.

    Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in darkest red, Italy in second-darkest, and then much of the Americas, Western Europe, the Pacific Rim and South Asia in a more uniform pink.
    You know, I just assumed those readers from Spain and Portugal were from the continent. I don’t know that they aren’t actually, like, all in the Canary Islands or the Azores instead, though. Wouldn’t that be neat if they were? Well, I’d think it was neat. Let me know if you’re in the Azores or the Canary Islands and seeing any of this.

    68 things that WordPress calls countries sent me any page views in January. That’s right about the same as December’s 65 and near enough November’s 74. 20 of these countries sent a single view, up a noticeable bit from January’s 13. The full roster was:

    Country Readers
    United States 2,166
    Italy 170
    India 109
    Canada 89
    United Kingdom 80
    Germany 53
    Australia 48
    Brazil 38
    European Union 35
    Philippines 27
    Denmark 21
    Mexico 18
    Spain 17
    El Salvador 13
    France 13
    Portugal 12
    Sweden 12
    Bulgaria 11
    Colombia 10
    Finland 10
    Russia 10
    Belgium 9
    Netherlands 9
    Thailand 9
    Nigeria 8
    Switzerland 8
    South Korea 7
    United Arab Emirates 7
    South Africa 6
    Taiwan 6
    Uruguay 6
    Ireland 5
    Norway 5
    Austria 4
    Hungary 4
    Malaysia 4
    Argentina 3
    Poland 3
    Romania 3
    Singapore 3
    Slovakia 3
    Egypt 2
    Indonesia 2
    Japan 2
    Kenya 2
    Kuwait 2
    Peru 2
    Vietnam 2
    American Samoa 1
    Bangladesh 1
    Bosnia & Herzegovina 1
    Chile 1 (*)
    China 1
    Costa Rica 1
    Dominican Republic 1
    Ethiopia 1
    Hong Kong SAR China 1
    Jamaica 1 (*)
    Latvia 1
    Mongolia 1
    Myanmar (Burma) 1
    New Zealand 1
    Pakistan 1
    Senegal 1
    Serbia 1
    Slovenia 1
    Sri Lanka 1
    Trinidad & Tobago 1

    Chile and Jamaica were single-view countries in December also. No countries are on three-month streaks. I have no idea what happened that Italy sent me 170 page views; in December it had sent eight. I must have accidentally optimized a search engine or something.

    In January I posted 16,985 words here, as WordPress counts words, which is always slightly mysterious. This averages to 548 words per post. That’s almost exactly on December’s average, as there were 16,820 words in that month. Overall, by the start of February, I had posted 2,556 things, which collected 154,386 views from 86,047 unique visitors. I suppose now that figure’s higher than 86,400. So someone out there was the same viewer number as the typical number of seconds in a day. I bet they didn’t even have an inkling. If I had this thought earlier, it would have been an explanation for why people treated me like that in middle school.

    If you’d like to be a regular reader here, please, do be one. You can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page to add it to your WordPress reader. If you have an RSS reader, you can put https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed/ in. A free account on Livejournal, which exists, or Dreamwidth, which also does, will let you add RSS feeds on your Friends page. My moribund Twitter account @Nebusj still has the automated postings of new pieces, too. Whatever way you do choose to read, though, thank you for doing it, and here’s hoping you choose to do it again.

    Statistics 2019: What Was Read Here, And How Much, Back Then


    I have meant to do my usual readership-review thing, but for the whole of 2019. I can’t put it off much longer, either, or I’ll start running into February. Few people ever run into February on purpose; it just sort of settles on us instead, and then we get three weeks of our socks getting wet even through the waterproof boots. So let’s see what was popular around here last year:

    Bar chart showing the mostly steady increase of readership, by year, from 2013 through 2019.
    Boy, I’m glad the statistics for 2020 aren’t ending now because that would be a pretty sharp drop.

    2019 was my greatest year for being read, which is nice to see. 42,746 pages got viewed at all, from 24,539 unique visitors. That’s also a record; 2018 saw only 39,130 views from 20,889 visitors. Also the unique visitors from 2019 was only slightly below the 24,695 total page views in 2017. That’s not a bad rate of growth. There were 1.74 views per visitor in 2019, which is down but probably not significantly from 2018’s 1.87. It’s up but probably not significantly from 2017’s 1.63.

    Bar chart of likes per year, from 2013 to the present. It's hung around 1700 to 2300 most years, with 2015 abnormally high.
    People really, really liked it when Apartment 3-G was dying and I was covering it weekly.

    This is not to say I’m getting any more likable. The number of likes given out in 2019 declined to 1,715, my lowest number since 2013. Given the increase in readers, and page views, this decline’s particularly dire. I can understand the decrease in comments. There were 277 comments given last year, the lowest for a full year that I’ve ever had. But I get that: there’s little to say about a Statistics Saturday post, or any of those wordplay bits I was doing on Wednesdays. Even the What’s Going On In series only offers slight openings for discussion. I don’t make a lot of speculations about stories and since I spend three months getting back to any comic, anyone with a good joke about Mark Trail has used it in a more relevant spot first.

    Bar chart of comments per year, 2013 to present. There were a good number of comments in 2014 and 2015, with a decline from there --- except for a huge number of comments in 2018.
    Gosh, was it as long ago as 2018 that Ray Kassinger ran across this page and commented on everything I’d ever written? You never notice how fast time moves until it’s done, do you?

    So perhaps I need, especially in the posts that are reviews, to write things that more invite comment. My brain is able to think only of adding, “What do you think?” to the ends of posts. So that’ll be a while to develop.

    There were, besides the home page, 1,320 posts that got at least a single page view in 2019. 1,055 of them got at least two page views, and 524 got at least ten page views. 63 of them got over a hundred page views, and one of them was about Fearless Fred, Betty Boop’s boyfriend who even she forgot she had. The things people most wanted to read were, yes, comic strip stuff and S J Perelman:

    Also someone went and put a single-star rating vote on the Rex Morgan, M.D. piece about Edward’s Dog. I don’t take any of these ratings personally but … what is their conceptual model for a two-star essay about why we don’t see Edward’s Dog on-screen? What would that have which I was lacking?

    Anyway all the most popular essays in 2019 which were published in 2019 were What’s Going On In essays, and I’ll admit some overworked days I feel like I could drop everything but that and save myself some work. My most popular post of 2019 that wasn’t about comic strips was also not an attempt to be funny. It was an attempt to serve the public: Which Color Paas Tablet Is Purple? Which is Red? Which is Pink? Knowing the answer to this has become less urgent now that you can use either water or vinegar for all the colors, pink included. But it may still help people work out which color is purple and which is blue.

    And the most popular long-form essay was In Which I Cannot Honestly Say I Dodged A Bullet Here, about an axe-throwing place that opened in town. It just barely beat out The Stages Of The Road Trip: Stage One, the start of a surprisingly long sequence about … just … driving. I really liked writing the road trip sequence though, and if I could manage one series like that every four months I’d feel I had reached the mastery I wanted.

    The single-view pages are split between ones that I’m amazed didn’t get more views and ones I’m amazed got that many views. One view for On The Problems Of Credit In The 19th Century New England Economy is probably about right, though, given that it has a title like that. I don’t know what I was thinking with that one.

    Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in darkest red, and the rest of the world in a more roughly uniform pink. Countries sending no readers at all include Greenland, Cuba, the Guianas, a swath of central Africa, and Iran, Afghanistan, and some neighboring countries. Also Syria, apparently.
    I notice the lack of Madagascar readers, mostly because I have always had an irrational fondness for the island-nation owing to its appearance in a Donald Duck comic book which asserted that it was the premier nation if you wanted papier-mache. I have no idea where the comic book got that idea but, some country has to be the best at papier-mache, so why not Madagascar?

    136 country-like things sent me readers in 2019. The United States alone sent me 31,339 page views. This is more page views than I had in any year before 2018 and also shows just how amazingly provincial my writing is. Here’s the full list of page views, though:

    Country Readers
    United States 31,339
    India 2,458
    Canada 1,229
    United Kingdom 957
    Australia 722
    Sweden 470
    Philippines 422
    Germany 385
    Brazil 367
    European Union 264
    Italy 237
    Spain 237
    France 202
    Hong Kong SAR China 187
    South Africa 170
    Mexico 153
    Finland 145
    Romania 137
    Netherlands 131
    Norway 131
    Japan 115
    Peru 112
    Denmark 104
    Kenya 94
    El Salvador 89
    Malaysia 88
    New Zealand 84
    Turkey 81
    South Korea 75
    Portugal 69
    Indonesia 68
    Singapore 68
    Thailand 59
    Ireland 58
    Belgium 57
    Russia 56
    Taiwan 55
    United Arab Emirates 55
    Poland 49
    Argentina 48
    Colombia 46
    Switzerland 46
    American Samoa 42
    Austria 42
    Serbia 36
    Israel 35
    Slovenia 32
    Greece 30
    Pakistan 30
    Chile 29
    Jamaica 28
    Ukraine 28
    Puerto Rico 27
    Nigeria 26
    Hungary 24
    Bangladesh 21
    Saudi Arabia 20
    Trinidad & Tobago 20
    Nepal 19
    Croatia 18
    Czech Republic 18
    Egypt 16
    Uruguay 16
    Slovakia 15
    Ecuador 13
    China 12
    Vietnam 12
    Morocco 9
    Venezuela 9
    Iraq 8
    Kuwait 8
    Georgia 7
    Jordan 7
    Macedonia 7
    Zambia 7
    Bolivia 6
    Bulgaria 6
    Cyprus 6
    Guam 6
    Guatemala 6
    Kazakhstan 5
    Lithuania 5
    Sri Lanka 5
    Bermuda 4
    Bosnia & Herzegovina 4
    Dominican Republic 4
    Latvia 4
    Mongolia 4
    Montenegro 4
    Qatar 4
    South Sudan 4
    Albania 3
    Algeria 3
    Bahrain 3
    Estonia 3
    Ghana 3
    Honduras 3
    Iceland 3
    Lebanon 3
    Malta 3
    Moldova 3
    Tunisia 3
    Angola 2
    Armenia 2
    Brunei 2
    Cambodia 2
    Cameroon 2
    Cayman Islands 2
    Costa Rica 2
    Curaçao 2
    Liberia 2
    Panama 2
    Réunion 2
    Uganda 2
    Antigua & Barbuda 1
    Bahamas 1
    Barbados 1
    British Virgin Islands 1
    Gibraltar 1
    Guadeloupe 1
    Guernsey 1
    Isle of Man 1
    Libya 1
    Luxembourg 1
    Mauritania 1
    Mauritius 1
    Myanmar (Burma) 1
    Nicaragua 1
    Oman 1
    Papua New Guinea 1
    Paraguay 1
    Sint Maarten 1
    St. Martin 1
    Tanzania 1
    Uzbekistan 1
    Zimbabwe 1

    Hey, three countries with more than a thousand page views each! That’s … not different from my 2018 record. It still feels accomplished, though. My India readership almost doubled.

    In all, WordPress says I published 204,420 words in 2019. It also says I published 363 posts, which does not square with my having published something every day. I have no explanation for this. This is my second-most-loquacious year, a bit down from 2018 with 233,406 words. I averaged, according to WordPress, 563 words per posting. I make out 204,420 divided by 365 to be just over 560 myself. Either way, it’s just a little more wordy than 2017 was, and with fewer comments and likes. Hm.

    While it’s still early to say what the year ahead will offer, I know my plans. What’s Going On In the story comics, once a week. On Thursday evenings, US time, a long-form essay. On Saturday evenings, US time, a Statistics Saturday quick little joke. And I guess I’m reviewing the Popeye cartoons nobody cares about too. Plus whatever fills in the gaps, the other days.

    Thank you for reading. What do you think?

    Statistics December: How The Last Month Treated My Humor Blog


    I like taking some time near the start of any month to look at what my readership is like. I would have liked to get to it earlier this month but I haven’t had the time to think, much less write. I’d also like to know why I like doing this. Well, I know why I usually like it. Usually the statistics tell me that I’m quite popular with a select group of people and that’s nice to see. December 2019, though? … well, not so much.

    It’s an exaggeration to say this was a plummet. But there were “only” 3,064 page views around here in December. That’s about three-quarters what there were in November. It’s a fair bit below the twelve-month running average of 3,545.7 views per month. Looking at the number of views per posting seems less dire, even though there were more posts in December than in November. There were 98.8 views per posting in December, below the running average of 116.5 views per posting. This seems less dire because there are more decimal points in it.

    Bar chart of several years' worth of readership figures. After several months of increase December 2019 sees a drop to near June 2019's level.
    Boy, the end of Apartment 3-G was a long time ago, wasn’t it?

    There was a roughly identical drop in the number of unique visitors. There were 1,760 logged unique visitors in December 2019, below the twelve-month running average of 2,034.3. Per post, that’s 56.8 unique visitors, below the average of 66.8. If there’s any bright spots to this it’s in the things that measure engagement. There were 104 things liked in December, a rise from November’s total of 92, and getting closer to the running average of 145.7. This is 3.4 likes per posting, still fairly below the 4.8 likes per posting average. The number of comments was up, though, with 21 received in December. That’s the greatest number since June, and is not that far below the twelve-month running average of 25.0. It’s also an average of 0.7 comments per posting, below but near the average of 0.8.

    There were 420 posts, besides my home page, that got any views at all in December. That’s down from November’s 446. 159 of these pages got only a single view, which basically matches November’s 150 and October’s 162. The most popular pieces were nothing posted this December, it happens:

    Those last three make me think I need to do something optimizing about my comic strip plot recap posts. My most popular long-form essay for the month was also a new one, Some Books You Can Get Me For Christmas. I’m quite happy about this because I really, really liked this piece and I’m glad other people do.

    I plan to keep doing long-form essays every Thursday evening, Eastern Time, until someone likes them. I also plan to keep doing What’s Going On In Story Strips essays, normally posted Sunday evenings. My planned schedule, barring breaking news or other urgent developments, for the next few weeks is this:

    65 countries or country-like entities sent me views in December. That’s down from November’s 74 and October’s 76. I thought last month I had found a level, and see where that’s got me. There were 13 single-view countries, down from November’s 15 and October’s 23. Here’s the full list of them:

    Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in darkest red, and much of South America, Europe, South Asia, and Australia and New Zealand in a more uniform pink. A few African countries have also sent readers.
    Yeah but seriously, is there anybody in Greenland? If you know anybody who’s going to Greenland could you ask them to send me just one page view so I know the system is working? Thank you.

    Country Readers
    United States 2,206
    India 118
    Canada 103
    European Union 98
    Philippines 91
    Australia 62
    United Kingdom 47
    Sweden 44
    France 26
    Germany 25
    Finland 21
    Spain 17
    Malaysia 14
    Turkey 14
    Brazil 13
    South Africa 12
    Netherlands 11
    Italy 8
    Denmark 7
    Poland 7
    Greece 6
    Singapore 6
    Taiwan 6
    Ukraine 6
    Croatia 5
    New Zealand 5
    Portugal 5
    Russia 5
    Colombia 4
    Israel 4
    Japan 4
    Argentina 3
    Czech Republic 3
    Hong Kong SAR China 3
    Ireland 3
    Mexico 3
    Romania 3
    Serbia 3
    Slovenia 3
    United Arab Emirates 3
    Angola 2
    Austria 2
    Bangladesh 2
    Ecuador 2
    Hungary 2
    Norway 2
    Pakistan 2
    South Korea 2
    Switzerland 2
    Thailand 2
    Vietnam 2
    Zambia 2
    Belgium 1
    Cayman Islands 1
    Chile 1
    Iceland 1
    Indonesia 1
    Jamaica 1
    Kazakhstan 1
    Kenya 1
    Lebanon 1 (*)
    Macedonia 1 (**)
    Nigeria 1 (*)
    Peru 1
    Slovakia 1

    Lebanon and Nigeria were single-view countries in November. Macedonia’s been a single-view country three months running now.

    I figure to do a review of all 2019 sometime later, most likely in 2020. But I can share some things. In December I posted 16,820 words altogether, for an average of 542.6 words per posting. That’s below the 2019 year’s average of 563 words per post. From the start of this blog to the start of 2020 I’d had 2,526 postings, which got altogether 151,278 views from 84,297 unique visitors.

    I’m happy to have you as a regular reader. You can add https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed/ to your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader you can create one by using the Reading/Friends page on a free Dreamwidth or Livejournal account. Or if you’d like to show up in my statistics you can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button that’s on this page too. And I have an account on Twitter as @Nebusj which posts announcements of new pieces, although I haven’t got around to getting back into the account. For whatever reason Safari stopped letting me read Twitter and I haven’t had energy to protest this anywhere useful. But thanks for reading this here, at a minimum.

    Statistics Monday: How November 2019 treated my humor blog


    I like starting the month with a look at what’s happening to my readership. I don’t know how they like the experience. Nobody’s complaining about me being too nosey, anyway.

    So, I have still not broken the November 2015 page-view high set off by the end of Apartment 3-G and my moment of attention from The Onion A.V. Club. But I did set a new unique-visitors record, the third month this year that’s set such a record. So that’s nice.

    There were 4,133 pages viewed here in November. That’s down from October, but still appreciably above the twelve-month running average of 3,457.7 views per month. There were 2,492 unique visitors, the greatest number of unique visitors on record so far. And, naturally, above the twelve-month running average of 1,970.9 unique visitors per month. There were 137.8 views per posting, above the average of 113.5 views per post. And 83.1 unique visitors per post, again above the running average of 64.7 unique visitors per post.

    Bar chart of monthly views and visitors. The last six months have seen a steady increase in both; views, however, crested in October, while visitors continues to rise.
    I was so happy with myself for getting the snapshot of the statistics right as the WordPress Server Month rolled over that I forgot to do the URL hacking that lets me see all the numbers from mid-2015 to the present day. Sorry.

    The drawback of knowing more people are looking at my pages, and reading pages? That I have evidence they like me less. There were 92 things given likes in November (not all of them things published in November). That’s below the twelve-month running average of 150.5 likes per month. There were twelve comments over the month, way below the running average of 31.3 comments per month. Likes, around here, have been on a decline, with minor interruptions, since early 2015. Comments rolled over and died after early 2015, except for a short while after Roy Kassinger discovered the place.

    There were 446 posts, besides the home page, that got any page views in November. There had been 468 in October and 460 in September. 150 of these pages got only a single view, which is about the same as the 162 in October and 166 in September. The most popular several pieces were, unsurprisingly, comic strip related. What was the most popular did surprise me, though:

    So that’s another perfect sweep away from “original stuff that I write with the intention of being funny”. If I’m not overlooking something the most popular original-premise thing was Statistics Saturday: The Size of Rhode Island in terms of Football Fields, which I’m glad to see remembered. It’s a very me sort of joke to make. My most popular long-form original essay was Some Alarming News, starting off November’s running motif of alarms. I have notes for another alarm-based piece, too, so get ready for that.

    As ever, I figure to publish a long-form essay every Thursday evening, Eastern Time. And some Statistics Saturday thing Saturday evenings. My most reliably liked thing, though, is the What’s Going On In story strips essays, which I’ve mostly published Sunday evenings. My plan for the next couple weeks is to recap the plots in:

    There were 74 countries that sent me any viewers at all in November. That’s down from 76 in October, and up from 73 in September. I seem to have found a level. Fifteen of them were single-view countries, down from 23 in October but back around to September’s 13. Here’s the full roster:

    Mercator-style map of the world with The United States in deepest red, most of the Americas, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia and New Zealand in a fairly uniform pink, and almost nothing in Africa, nor a trail from Syria through to China.
    This time around were 83 views marked as “European Union”, which is even more than I got from the Philippines. I really have no idea what’s going on there. But I also feel like my own writing is so parochial I don’t get why anyone in the Philippines would look at it except by accident.

    Country Readers
    United States 2,964
    India 286
    Canada 106
    United Kingdom 100
    European Union 83
    Philippines 57
    Germany 55
    Sweden 54
    Australia 51
    Brazil 42
    Norway 19
    Spain 19
    Finland 17
    Netherlands 17
    Slovenia 17
    South Africa 15
    Denmark 14
    Italy 14
    France 13
    Indonesia 12
    Chile 10
    Russia 10
    Kenya 9
    Malaysia 7
    Mexico 7
    Portugal 7
    Saudi Arabia 7
    New Zealand 6
    South Korea 6
    Thailand 6
    Ecuador 5
    Israel 5
    Trinidad & Tobago 5
    Bangladesh 4
    Poland 4
    Slovakia 4
    Switzerland 4
    Turkey 4
    United Arab Emirates 4
    Austria 3
    El Salvador 3
    Hong Kong SAR China 3
    Hungary 3
    Ireland 3
    Jamaica 3
    Japan 3
    Pakistan 3
    Peru 3
    Argentina 2
    Belgium 2
    Bolivia 2
    Bulgaria 2
    Greece 2
    Puerto Rico 2
    Romania 2
    Serbia 2
    Taiwan 2
    Ukraine 2
    Venezuela 2
    Albania 1
    Colombia 1
    Ghana 1
    Gibraltar 1
    Guam 1 (*)
    Jordan 1 (*)
    Lebanon 1
    Macedonia 1 (*)
    Mauritius 1
    Montenegro 1
    Nigeria 1
    Uganda 1
    Uruguay 1
    Uzbekistan 1
    Zambia 1 (*)

    Guam, Jordan, Macedonia, and Zambia were single-view countries in October too. No countries have been single-view for three months in a row yet.

    From the start of the year to the start of November I’ve published 187,600 words here, however WordPress counts words exactly. This was in 332 posted articles, for an average of 565 words per post. This was a slender 15,441 words posted over the course of thirty pieces. So that’s a nice 514.7 words per post. So that shortens me up from the start of October’s 571 words per posting on the year.

    There’ve been 1,548 likes of anything over the year, an average of 4.7 per posting. That’s down from the start of October’s 4.8 average likes per posting. There’ve been 434 comments in all, an average of 1.3 comments per posting, which is an average holding steady from the start of last month.

    As of the start of November I’ve had 2,494 posts around here in total. They’ve drawn 148,214 total views, from 82,536 logged unique visitors.

    I’d be glad if you chose to be a regular reader. You can add https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed/ to your RSS reader and not show up in any of my statistics. Or if you’d like, use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” link at the upper right corner of the page. My automated reposting of new-post announcements on my dead Twitter account of @Nebusj is still running, too. Thanks for reading in any circumstance, though.

    Statistics October: People Want Me To Talk About Comic Strips


    I continue to have spreadsheets alongside my monthly readership review. This may not seem important to you but, trust me, I love having them to look at. They let me do this running-average stuff that’s so gratifying to work with.

    It’s gratifying because the trend has been good the last few months. I did not quite break my November 2015 readership high point. That month, when the collapse of Apartment 3-G got me a bit of attention from the Onion A.V. Club, still has my highest number of page views. It’s now got only the third-greatest number of unique visitors in a month. October 2019 now has the second-greatest number of page views and largest number of unique visitors on record. Let’s get to the specifics.

    There were 4,363 page views here in October. These were spread across 469 pages, including the home page that I imagine people default to reading. There’d been 460 such in September. 162 of them got a single view each. There were 166 such in September. The count of page views is rather above the twelve-month running average of 3,349,9 page views. The November 2015 peak was 4,528 page views, so, mm. Better luck next month.

    Bar chart of monthly readership statistics from February 2015 through October 2019. It jumped up considerably in early 2018 and has been rising the last half-year steadily.
    Huh. I wonder when I started including regular recaps of what the story comics were up to. It’s a shame there’s no way to tell.

    In October there were 2,420 unique visitors. That’s above the twelve-month running average of 1,909.3. That’s also above the longstanding November 2015 record of 2,308 unique visitors, and the more recent April 2019 record of 2,418 unique visitors.

    The things that reflect reader engagement, as opposed to just letting pages load, continue to dwindle, though. There were only 119 things liked here in October, well below the twelve-month average of 155.0, which itself was down from years gone by. There were only 14 comments, too, down from the average of 35.8. That’s also in a long secular decline. I don’t know why, especially as more people read posts.

    The per-posting averages show just the same trend. There were 31 posts in October; there were 140.7 views per posting, above the average of 11.0. 78.1 unique visitors per post, above the average of 62.7. 3.8 likes per posting, below the average of 5.1. 0.5 comments per posting, below the average of 1.2.

    The most popular postings in October were, mostly, not things published in October. The top six (there was a tie for fifth) postings were:

    The most popular long-form essay was from way back in October 2018, Everything There Is To Say In Explaining How Computer Graphics Work. That was the most popular thing in September too. I suspect it might be getting spurious results from people looking for computer-graphics advice.

    76 countries sent me any readers in October. In September this was 73; in August, 74. 23 countries sent me a single page view in October, way up from September’s 13 and August’s 14. Here’s the full roster:

    Mercator-style map with the United States in deepest red, and most of the Americas, Europe, Russia, and South Asia in pink. Also in pink: Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand.
    By the way, there were 48 page views recorded from the European Union, as separate from any particular nation, and I really wonder what the “European Union” designation means and why there’s so many this time. It’s usually an origin that gives me a handful of page views. 48 is getting up into, like, Brazil or Australia numbers.

    Country Readers
    United States 3,252
    India 195
    United Kingdom 111
    Canada 94
    Germany 89
    Australia 54
    European Union 48
    Brazil 45
    Italy 43
    Sweden 38
    Philippines 33
    Spain 28
    El Salvador 20
    Romania 20
    South Africa 20
    France 18
    Finland 17
    Mexico 16
    Turkey 14
    Thailand 13
    Japan 11
    Norway 11
    Argentina 10
    Indonesia 10
    Kenya 9
    Serbia 9
    South Korea 9
    Netherlands 8
    New Zealand 8
    Ireland 7
    Czech Republic 6
    Denmark 6
    Pakistan 6
    Switzerland 6
    Egypt 5
    Hong Kong SAR China 4
    Poland 4
    Portugal 4
    Russia 4
    Ukraine 4
    United Arab Emirates 4
    Malaysia 3
    Singapore 3
    Slovakia 3
    Bangladesh 2
    Colombia 2
    Costa Rica 2
    Ecuador 2
    Greece 2
    Hungary 2
    Kuwait 2
    Nigeria 2
    Taiwan 2
    Algeria 1 (*)
    American Samoa 1 (*)
    Austria 1
    Bahrain 1 (*)
    Belgium 1
    Bermuda 1
    Bosnia & Herzegovina 1
    China 1
    Curaçao 1
    Guadeloupe 1
    Guam 1
    Guatemala 1
    Iraq 1
    Jordan 1
    Lithuania 1
    Macedonia 1
    Peru 1
    Qatar 1 (*)
    Slovenia 1
    Venezuela 1
    Vietnam 1
    Zambia 1
    Zimbabwe 1

    Algeria, American Samoa, Bahrain, and Qatar were single-view countries in September. No countries have been single-reader for more than two months running now.

    For November, as ever, I intend to have a long-form essay of about 700 words published every Thursday evening, Eastern Time. Saturday evenings should continue to have some kind of formalistic joke dubbed “Statistics Saturday”. And every Sunday evening I work out what’s happening in one of the story comics. My plan for the coming month, subject to revision if breaking news requires, is:

    And again, The Amazing Spider-Man is in repeats, and I don’t know if or when it’ll ever come out. For now I’m keeping the flame alive, but we’ll see how long that holds up. If I do decide to keep recapping the strip despite it being in repeats, maybe I’ll be forced by logic to add Mandrake the Magician or Flash Gordon into the cycle.

    From the start of 2019 through the start of November I published 303 things here. This made a total of 172,159 words, for an average 571 words per post. This was a laconic month. The 14,721 words over the 31 posts brought my average down from 581 words per post. Yeah, I’m surprised it was not quite 15 thousand words too; just the What’s Going On In posts tend to run, like, eight thousand words each. But this averaged only 474.9 words per post in October, down from the September 556.2. I must have saved minutes over the course of the month that way. There have been 1,456 likes on anything over the year, an average of 4.8 per posting. It’d been an average 4.9 at the start of October. There’d been 403 total comments on the year, an average of 1.3 comments per post, which is where the year’s average had been the start of October too.

    If you’d like to be among my regular readers, please do join in. You can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” link at the upper right corner of this page. Or you can put https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed/ into your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can fake it by getting a free Livejournal or Dreamwidth account and putting that feed on your friends page.

    I’m still officially on Twitter as @Nebusj, although I haven’t checked in on it in ages. I had a good month or so where it wouldn’t let me connect at all. Maybe it’s worth checking in again.

    Statistics September: People Want To Know What Funky Winkerbean, Judge Parker’s Issues Are


    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.

    Bar chart of monthly readership figures from February 2014 to September 2019. It's been rising each of the last several months and is above 4,000 again.
    In that November 2015 Apartment 3-G surge I recorded 2,308 unique visitors, so September 2019 fell just short of that figure too. But then in April 2019 there were 2,418 unique visitors anyway and I don’t remember if I noticed that at the time.

    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:

    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:

    Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in the darkest red, most of the rest of the Americas, Western Europe, Australia, and South Asia in lighter red. Curiously lacking in visitors: the Baltic states.
    As ever I’m surprised to have so many readers from India or, really, considering how provincial I am in what I write about, any readers who aren’t from New Jersey or from Michigan’s lower peninsula.

    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:

    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.

    Statistics August: People Like It When I Have A Dead YouTube Link here


    I was able to examine my readership earlier this month than I did last time around. Thank the month starting conveniently on the weekend and while I didn’t have anything else major going on. I’ve kept up my spreadsheets, too, so now I have lots of numbers with decimal points and all that to think about. Also I learn something unsettling about my most popular posts. Let’s look things over.

    In August there were 3,692 recorded page views. This came from 2,201 unique visitors as far as WordPress will tell me. Both of these are increases for the last several months. More, they’re both above the twelve-month running average. The running average for page views had been 3,158.8 views from 1,804.4 unique visitors. This implies a growing popularity, which is gratifying and reassuring and all kinds of happy.

    Slightly over four years' worth of monthly readership figures as seen in a bar chart. The last several months see the number of monthly views rising.
    So it looks like I have eight months before the glory days of the final collapse of Apartment 3-G fade completely from memory. I mean the memory of everyone except me.

    There were 127 things liked around here over month of August. The twelve-month running average was for 163.9 things to be liked each month. This implies that while more people are looking at more things, they’re not so crazy about any of it. It was another dire month for comments, also: nine posted over the month of August, below the twelve-month running average of 40.8. Well. All right, then.

    I can break this down into more decimal points too. There were 31 posts published in August. It’s not the case that only stuff posted in August was viewed in August. But I can calculate the statistics-per-posting, which seems relevant since how often I post is the thing I’m most in control of. I mean apart from writing anything actually interesting.

    August saw 119.1 views per posting; the twelve-month running average was 103.7. There were 65.2 visitors per posting; the running average was 59.3. There were 4.1 likes per posting; the twelve-month running average was 5.4, which makes it sound like the likability shortfall wasn’t that bad, really. There were 0.3 comments per posting, compared to a twelve-month average of 1.3, which makes it sound like I barely need a comments section at all. Hm.

    The unsettling thing is in what the most-visited pages were. There were 473 pages, besides the home page, to get any views in August 2019. 186 pages got only a single view. The five most popular were dominated by What’s Going On In reports, as ever:

    The most popular wholly-original-to-me content was that microfiction With The Rise Of Digital-Life Persons, which I’m quite happy about. It was a different kind of writing and I had fun doing that. My most popular long-form essay was Why I Figure You Should Write Your Own Web Browser, which is amazing because it got all its likes in the two days between its publication and the end of the month.

    The unsettling thing is the second-most-popular piece of the month. That was a 2014 review of an ancient Paul Terry cartoon. It’s one of historic value, since it’s a full-sound cartoon that predates Disney’s Steamboat Willie. But it has a dead YouTube link for the cartoon itself. I can believe some weird event causing a bunch of people to look up an obscure cartoon from a forgotten animation studio and hitting my site. But one that doesn’t even have the video? I suspect some kind of shenanigan.

    74 countries or things like countries sent me at least one reader in August. 14 sent me just the single reader. There’d been 70 countries sending me any reader in July and 69 in June. There’d been 20 single-view countries in July and 18 in June. Here’s the full roster:

    Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in the darkest red. Most of the Americas and Eurasia are in a fairly uniform pink, as are Australia and New Zealand. India's a slightly darker pink. There are only a couple African countries to have sent any readers my way.
    Well, you know me: as popular in Nigeria as I am in Argentina and Jamaica. Or as in Moldova and Honduras combined.

    Country Readers
    United States 2,631
    India 235
    Canada 111
    United Kingdom 72
    Australia 67
    Sweden 67
    Brazil 59
    Philippines 45
    Kenya 42
    South Africa 25
    Italy 23
    Belgium 19
    Finland 17
    Germany 17
    Denmark 16
    Mexico 16
    Norway 14
    Japan 13
    El Salvador 12
    Romania 12
    Spain 12
    Puerto Rico 11
    France 9
    European Union 8
    Indonesia 7
    Thailand 7
    Ireland 6
    Turkey 6
    Colombia 5
    Greece 5
    Malaysia 5
    Argentina 4
    Jamaica 4
    Nigeria 4
    Russia 4
    Singapore 4
    Slovakia 4
    South Korea 4
    Israel 3
    Nepal 3
    Netherlands 3
    New Zealand 3
    Pakistan 3
    Poland 3
    Portugal 3
    Saudi Arabia 3
    Serbia 3
    Switzerland 3
    United Arab Emirates 3
    Vietnam 3
    China 2
    Guam 2
    Honduras 2
    Hong Kong SAR China 2
    Latvia 2
    Lithuania 2
    Moldova 2
    Taiwan 2
    Ukraine 2
    Uruguay 2
    Antigua & Barbuda 1
    Bangladesh 1
    Bermuda 1
    Bolivia 1
    Brunei 1 (*)
    Croatia 1 (*)
    Curaçao 1
    Czech Republic 1 (*)
    Georgia 1
    Iraq 1
    Oman 1
    Papua New Guinea 1
    Peru 1 (*)
    Sri Lanka 1

    Brunei, Croatia, Czech Republic, and Peru were single-view countries in July also. No country’s been a single-view place for more than two months in a row just now.

    What do I plan to post over the coming month? A long-form essay, Thursday evenings, Eastern Time. Then, also Statistics Saturday posts for as long as I think of silly things to categorize. And all my What’s Going On In posts, published Sunday nights Eastern Time. In particular my schedule is, barring breaking news or important surprises:

    From the start of 2019 through the start of September I’d published 241 posts in all. These had a total of 140,753 words so far this year. This was 15,654 words in total in August. That is 505.0 words in the average post for August. That’s comfortably down from July’s average of 610.3, and even the year-to-date average of 582 words per post. I can sometimes be brief.

    Through the start of September were 314 total comments this year, for 1.3 comments per posting. This average has held for three months now. There had been 1,221 total likes for the year, an average of 5.0 likes per posting. The average had been 5.2 at the start of August and 5.3 at the start of July.

    If you’d like to read these posts regularly, you can add the https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed/ RSS feed to whatever reader you use. If you don’t have a reader, you can get a free Livejournal or Dreamdwidth account and put it in your Friends page there. You can also keep track of this blog in WordPress, by using the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on the upper right corner of this page.

    I am on Twitter as @Nebusj, although I haven’t been there lately. Twitter’s server has refused all connections from my web browser (Safari) and I’ve been just this close to doing anything about that. The automated tweet-about-new-WordPress-postings hasn’t broken yet, at least, but who knows how long that will last?

    Watch this space for developments, future or past. Thank you.

    Statistics July: Finally, the Judge Parker reports people wanted


    This is, I swear, the first good chance I’ve had to look at my July 2019 readership statistics. I had a lot going on the first week of the month. This probably won’t happen next year, when I look to have a lot going on the first week of July instead. Well, we’ll know about next year when it arrives, if it does.

    Oh, also, I started making new spreadsheets, which is a good way of keeping me distracted. This is probably a mistake, but I’ll make do with it.

    There were 3,477 pages viewed here in July. That’s a fair number. The twelve-month running average leading up to July 2019 was 3,117.7 page views per month. There were 1,840 unique visitors in July, according to WordPress. The twelve-month running average leading up to that was 1,781.8 unique visitors per month. Since I posted something every day, again, I can say that’s an average of 112.2 views per posting, above the twelve-month average of 100.6. And 59.4 unique visitors per post, technically above the twelve-month average of 58.6.

    Bar chart of monthly readership, which over the past several years has mostly increased, with particular peaks in November 2015 and January 2018.
    Now when was it that Apartment 3-G finally collapsed? I know it was sometime a couple years ago.

    There were 142 things that got liked around here in July. That’s not all stuff published in July; just something someone read in July. The twelve-month average was 165.8 likes per month. That’s 4.6 likes per post on average in July, down from 5.5 likes per post in the twelve-month average. There were 18 comments in July, way down from the twelve-month average of 42.3. This is on average 0.6 comments per posting, way down from the already poor 1.4 comments per posting in the twelve-month running average.

    So, yes, I worked out twelve-month running averages in my spreadsheets.

    469 separate pages got at last one page view in July. There’d been 401 separate pages in June. 182 different pages got only a single page view, up from the 154 single-view pages of June. The greatest number of page views were all from comic strip posts, naturally:

    I’m not surprised that so many people want to know the heck is with Judge Parker, Rex Morgan, or Nancy. I’m not sure what’s so curiosity-arousing about Henry and Hazel but I’m glad to be of use.

    The most popular of my not-comic-strip related stuff was an essay from October, Everything There Is To Say In Explaining How Computer Graphics Work. This is a piece I’d forgotten entirely and I like rediscovering it. Thank you for your choice, readers.

    70 countries or country-like entities sent me readers in July. There’d been 69 such in June and 75 in May. That seems about my standard. Here’s the roster:

    Mercator-style map of the world, with the most intense red in the United States and India. There's some readers in much of the Americas and Europe, plus Russia, China, and Southeast Asia.
    I don’t understand why there’s a dark grey line around Kazakhstan, but I’m sure there’s some good reason based in an inexplicable user-interface interaction.

    Country Readers
    United States 2,441
    India 354
    Canada 109
    Australia 56
    United Kingdom 48
    South Africa 35
    Romania 33
    Philippines 30
    Hong Kong SAR China 27
    Spain 25
    Austria 22
    Brazil 22
    Germany 22
    Netherlands 19
    Colombia 18
    El Salvador 16
    Italy 15
    Kenya 14
    France 10
    Japan 10
    Mexico 10
    Finland 8
    Portugal 8
    New Zealand 7
    Nigeria 7
    Malaysia 6
    South Korea 6
    Sweden 6
    Taiwan 6
    Denmark 5
    Singapore 5
    Ukraine 5
    Argentina 4
    Belgium 4
    European Union 4
    Indonesia 4
    Puerto Rico 4
    Egypt 3
    Israel 3
    Jamaica 3
    Norway 3
    Pakistan 3
    United Arab Emirates 3
    American Samoa 2
    China 2
    Greece 2
    Ireland 2
    Switzerland 2
    Thailand 2
    Vietnam 2
    Albania 1
    Bosnia & Herzegovina 1
    Brunei 1
    Croatia 1
    Cyprus 1
    Czech Republic 1
    Ecuador 1
    Estonia 1
    Guam 1
    Hungary 1 (*)
    Iceland 1 (*)
    Jordan 1
    Kuwait 1 (*)
    Macedonia 1
    Morocco 1
    Peru 1
    Poland 1
    Russia 1
    Serbia 1
    Tunisia 1

    Hungary, Iceland, and Kuwait were single-reader countries the previous month too. There weren’t any countries on a three-month single-reader streak. There were 20 single-reader countries in July, compared to the 18 in June and 19 in May. So that’s all holding about steady.

    What have I got planned for the coming month? A long-form essay, published Thursday evening, Eastern Time, for one. Statistics Saturday posts, for as long as I can continue thinking of things to list. And of course What’s Going On In the story comics. Barring surprises, and there can be surprise or breaking news I’m planning to feature:

    From the start of 2019 through the start of August I’d published 210 posts, for a total of 125,099 words. This was 18,921 words in all. That’s 610.3 words per post in July, way above June’s average of 463.5 words per post. I had thought I was writing shorter but all that Judge Parker talk is complicated. My year-to-date average post has had 593 words per post, which is just what the year-to-date average was at the start of July. This seems like I must have calculated something wrong.

    Through the start of August there’d been a total 283 comments, an average of 1.3 comments per posting. That’s the same average as at the start of July. There’d been an average 5.2 likes per posting, down from the 5.3 at the start of July.

    Are you reading this post? Would you like to? You can add my humor blog to your RSS reader using the feed https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed/ or, if you prefer to keep things in WordPress, use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on the upper right corner of this page. On Twitter I’m @Nebusj and I try starting the month with rabbit pictures. You might like that, too.

    Thanks for visiting at all.