Tag: readership

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.

Statistics June: What, If Anything, People Wanted To Read That I Wrote


I enjoy taking the start of the month to look over my readership figures from the past month. Really, I like looking at bunches of numbers. Most of the video games I enjoy feature some kind of ledger that I can just watch data roll in on. If someone ever makes Multiple Entry Accounting Simulator they’re going to get all my Steam credits. I kid. I only load Steam on rare occasions, at which point the computer tells me I need to spend an hour waiting for Steam to finish its updates, after which I don’t have time to play anything anymore. So what did readership here at Another Blog, Meanwhile look like in June 2019?

It’s dropped for the third month running. I somehow expected that. It’s not as though I changed posting habits or anything, but somehow, June felt off. Maybe something in my writing came through. There were 3,140 page views from 1,813 unique visitors in June. In May there were 3,414 page views from 2,058 unique visitors. Busy April had 4,033 page views and 2,418 unique visitors. The number of views is strikingly close to the twelve-month running average before June, of 3,143.8 views. The number of unique visitors is slightly higher than the twelve-month running average of 1780. Not enough to matter.

Bar chart covering about five years of readership; it's a rising oscillation except for a great spike in November 2015. The last two months have been a decline from the average.
And hey, good news: I haven’t forgotten how to make the bar chart of my readership go back way more than the like 30 months it does by default. And hey, can you find the spot where Apartment 3-G finally died and I got a mention from someone I knew who was writing for The AV Club?

The number of ‘likes’ fell, technically, to 130 from May’s 133. And April’s 233. This is an appreciable bit below the twelve-month running average, which was 169.3 likes per month. But at least I make up for that in comments? Which were 22 for June, compared to … 24 in May. And 10 in April. This doesn’t look too bad, relatively, until you consider the twelve-month running average was 45.2 comments per month. So 22 in June is noticeably down.

I am not sure the diagnosis here. What I make of this, and my own feelings, is that the blog is stagnating. That I need to invite in new readers, and that I need to find new kinds of things to write about. This is all quite easy to say I need to do. The problem is to find a fresh approach, and to find fresh readers for it.

Grant that the readers were here. What were they reading? 401 separate pages got at least one viewer, besides the Home Page which, naturally, drew the greatest number. (There were 377 pieces that got at least one page view in May.) 154 pages got a single reader in June. But the particular pages which drew the greatest number of views in June were:

And that is another clean sweep in favor of comic strip explanations around here. My most popular thing that was my own attempt to be funny came in a three-way tie for 20th most popular post, Statistics Saturday: Things That Non-Vegetarians Think The Rest Of Us Need To Hear. I’m glad to have that piece thought of. I had fun writing it. My most popular long-form piece was down in 31st place, Everything There Is To Say About The History Of Gas Prices. And that … really? Huh. Not disputing anyone who enjoyed reading it. It felt to me like a piece that should have been better than it was. Maybe I accidentally search-engine-optimized the headline or first paragraph.

It all indicates, though, that very many people would like the deal with Edward’s Dog explained. Also that they feel superior to the characters in Mary Worth, which, I mean, I guess, take your self-esteem where you can get it?

So that’s what people read. Where did they read from? There were 69 countries sending me readers in June. There had been 75 in May, and 66 in April. This is the full roster:

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in the deepest red, and then the rest of the Americas, mostly, in a fairly uniform pink. Western Europe too, as well as the Mediterranean coast of Africa. Plus India, some of Southeast Asia, and Australia and New Zealand.
I continue to be baffled by the number of page views I got from Scandinavian countries, but I’m not looking to chase anyone off or anything. Also a mystery: why so many Peruvian readers? I feel like I must have said something about guinea pigs that people made too much of? Is that possible?
Country Readers
United States 2,268
India 177
Canada 100
Peru 71
Sweden 65
United Kingdom 61
Australia 49
Hong Kong SAR China 47
Spain 29
France 23
Brazil 18
Italy 17
Germany 15
Philippines 15
United Arab Emirates 11
Finland 10
Mexico 8
Netherlands 8
Turkey 8
El Salvador 7
Portugal 7
Indonesia 6
Japan 6
Romania 6
Singapore 6
Ireland 5
New Zealand 5
Norway 5
Russia 5
South Africa 5
Austria 4
Colombia 4
Denmark 4
Malaysia 4
Nepal 4
Switzerland 4
Taiwan 4
American Samoa 3
Egypt 3
European Union 3
Argentina 2
Belgium 2
Cyprus 2
Ecuador 2
Guatemala 2
Jamaica 2
Panama 2
Serbia 2
South Korea 2
Sri Lanka 2
Venezuela 2
Algeria 1
Bermuda 1
Bolivia 1
Greece 1 (*)
Hungary 1
Iceland 1
Iraq 1
Kazakhstan 1
Kenya 1
Kuwait 1
Libya 1
Luxembourg 1
Qatar 1 (*)
Réunion 1 (*)
Saudi Arabia 1
Trinidad & Tobago 1
Vietnam 1
Zambia 1

Greece, Qatar, and Réunion were single-reader countries in May. There were 19 single-reader countries in May and 18 single-reader countries in June.

So that is what people have been reading and where they’ve been reading from. What can they expect to read in the next couple weeks? I’m trying as ever to do a long-form comic piece once a week, posted Thursday evening, Eastern Time. And a Statistics Saturday post, every Saturday evening, Eastern Time. Sunday evenings I try to post plot recaps for the story strips. My schedule for that for July is:

From the start of 2019 through the start of July 2019 I’ve published 179 posts, for a total of 106,178 words. This was a surprisingly few 13,906 words in June. And that’s a mere 463.5 words per post, on average. My year-to-date average post has had 593 words, down from 614 at the start of May. Those little Wednesday bits are really helping. That and having a couple things that were just photos I could post.

There were 239 comments through the start of July, an average of 1.3 comments per posting. At the start of June the average had been 1.4 comments per posting. There’ve been an average 5.3 likes per post this year, through the start of July. Through the start of June the average had been 5.5. See what I mean, above, about having maybe stagnated and needing to find new audiences?

July started with my having made 2,341 total posts. They’ve attracted 128,455 page views from 71,471 unique visitors. 401 pages got at least one view, up from May’s 377, down from April’s 565. I don’t know yet what the normal range of fluctuations should be.

If you would like to read Another Blog, Meanwhile, at your convenience and without my being able to tell you do it, please add it to your RSS reader tool using this link. Or you can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on the upper right corner of this page. And on Twitter I’m @Nebusj, and I found another rabbit to photograph for the start of the month.

This one was going about having an afternoon snack at the Fantasy Island amusement park near Buffalo, New York. It was a very rainy day, part of a very rainy weekend, in a very rainy week, of a very rainy month. We got on all the roller coasters.

Statistics May: How The Past Month Was Read, And For What


Deep down, I knew I wouldn’t repeat April’s four-thousand-plus page views. Not that my readership doesn’t seem to have risen to a new plateau since Roy Kassinger discovered me. (I don’t see a reason they should be connected, but the correlation is there.) Just that April saw a couple weird spikes of readership that I think were freak events.

There were 3,414 page views in May 2019. That’s down from the 4,033 of April and 3,565 of March. It’s still a bit above the twelve-month running average, though. (That was 3128.2 page views, for the curious, which will be ‘me in one month’.) There were 2,058 unique visitors, down from April’s 2,418 and March’s 2,165. It’s above the twelve-month running average of 1781.6, anyway.

Four and a half years of monthly readership statistics. The readership jumped up by about a thousand people per month from the start of 2018.
I had been feeling all good that I grabbed a snapshot of my statistics just as June started, so that there wasn’t this embarrassing final column with a couple of page views on it. And then two days later remembered I could fiddle with the date range so as to show four and a half years of statistics, which gives so much a better sense of change over time. So, here you have it, with that embarrassing final column.

The number of likes resumed its dwindle; there were 133 things liked around here in all of May. There’d been 233 likes in April, and 176 likes in march. And that’s certainly below the twelve-month running average, which I won’t name here because every other month had more likes. It was 172.8. Which sees odd since I had at least one piece that really hit a nostalgic sweet spot, according to the comments I got about it. Comments were a bit more common, 24 in May. There were 10 in April and 24 in March. The twelve-month running average (this is going to become a new obsession, isn’t it?) was 47.7.

In all, 377 of my posts got some view in May. (The Home Page also drew views, but that’s not counted as any specific post.) The most popular posts were about what I would have guessed:

I expect comic strip plot recaps to be my most popular thing. And something posted near the kalends of a month has the best chance to get readership counts. But I am surprised people didn’t just get the joke with Edward’s Dog of un-depictable ugliness. Maybe I’ve been better-primed to expect that joke.

And while it wouldn’t make the top five, one of my long-form essays was finally reached the top ten. Everything There Is To Say About Programming A Computer In The 80s was really well-liked, and I’m glad. It may not actually have a specific big laugh, but I think it has got that sort of humor that comes from knowing someone actually thinks like this.

Mercator-style map showing readership mostly in the United States, but also in most of the Americas, Eurasia, and Australia. For a wonder there's even a reader from China.
I realize that it’s just one viewer who possibly didn’t even know what they were looking for but, wow, someone from Mauritania looked at something I wrote this past month? How did that come about?

75 countries, or country-like polities, sent me readers at all in May. That’s up from April’s 66 and March’s 69. That feels nice to see. 18 of them were single-reader countries. That’s more than April’s 16 and March’s 14. Here’s the full roster:

Country Readers
United States 2,607
Canada 119
India 103
United Kingdom 90
Sweden 55
Brazil 46
Australia 43
Japan 35
Hong Kong SAR China 24
Netherlands 19
Malaysia 18
France 17
Germany 17
Mexico 15
Philippines 13
Romania 9
Denmark 8
Indonesia 8
Ireland 7
Finland 6
Hungary 6
Italy 6
Peru 6
Spain 6
Turkey 6
Colombia 5
New Zealand 5
Nigeria 5
Portugal 5
Singapore 5
United Arab Emirates 5
Uruguay 5
American Samoa 4
Argentina 4
Kenya 4
Russia 4
South Africa 4
South Korea 4
Switzerland 4
Taiwan 4
Bangladesh 3
El Salvador 3
Kuwait 3
Norway 3
Serbia 3
Thailand 3
Venezuela 3
Austria 2
Israel 2
Jordan 2
Kazakhstan 2
Liberia 2
Nepal 2
Poland 2
Sri Lanka 2
Ukraine 2
Albania 1
Belgium 1
British Virgin Islands 1
Bulgaria 1
China 1
Ecuador 1
Greece 1
Guam 1
Iraq 1
Jamaica 1
Macedonia 1
Mauritania 1
Moldova 1
Myanmar (Burma) 1
Paraguay 1
Puerto Rico 1
Qatar 1
Réunion 1
Uganda 1

This is a complete turnover in single-reader countries: none of those sent me exactly one reader in April. This is my first complete single-reader turnover in a long while. Possibly since I started paying attention to these things. And, of course, I am happy that anyone might read and, I dearly hope, enjoy what I write. I’m just curious why I should have so many readers in Sweden, Brazil, or India. Again, I’m happy to have you. I just feel like … really? I say anything relevant to you? I’d like to know what it is.

So my story strip recaps. All the story strip recaps should appear at this link. I do have a plan for the next several Sundays, if nothing happens that shakes up the orderly world of the twelve threads I follow. My plans are for:

Between the start of 2019 and the start of June 2019 I’ve published 149 pieces for a total of 92,272 words. 19,030 of these words were published in May. So, that’s 614 words per post on average in May — April had been 644 — and, year to date, an average of 619 words per post. At the start of May it had been 610 words. I told you those Wednesday little things weren’t working.

There’ve been 204 comments overall on the year, for an average of 1.4 comments per posting. That’s the same average as at the start of May, at least. 820 total likes, for an average of 5.5 likes per posting in 2019. At the start of May this average had been 5.7. But at the start of April the average was 5.5 again. Hm.

June began with my having made 2,311 posts. They’ve gathered 125,314 views from 69,657 unique visitors. And as mentioned, 377 posts got at least one view in May. 565 posts got some view in April, and 420 in March. I have no idea what these fluctuations signify. Most likely nothing. If I’m actually interested in how much of my archive is being read any month, I should probably look at, say, the number of posts that get at least five page views. Or some threshold that suggests it wasn’t just a mistake.

If you don’t think reading me is a mistake, thank you. You can be a regular reader by adding the Another Blog, Meanwhile feed to your RSS reader. Or you can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button in the upper right corner of the WordPress page. I’m on Twitter as @Nebusj, but I won’t feel jealous if you follow other people too.

And if it helps you decide whether to follow me, I try to start each month with a pair of rabbit pictures.

Statistics April: What, if Anything, was Liked Around Here All Month


The most-read month I ever had around here was November 2015. This was at the height of the Apocalypse 3-G, when I was doing weekly updates on how nothing was happening in the comic, and even the Onion AV Club noticed, although not enough to mention my name. I got 4,528 page views from 2,308 people, many of whom just trusted the AV Club that I had something to read. I figured, well, that’s great. That’ll never happen again, though.

I’ve still not drawn the attention of AV Club, or any other significant blog reviewer. But I’m starting to believe I might someday reach that popularity peak on my own right. Or, at least, my own right with the assist of Roy Kassinger, who I think single-handedly added a thousand page views a month around here.

So that all brings me to the readership report for April 2019. Things had been on an uptick: February saw a weirdly low, for these days, 2,428 page views from 1,429 unique visitors. March saw a more normal-for-now 3,565 page views from 2,165 unique visitors. April?

Several years' worth of monthly readership numbers. It's mostly a gradual waving pattern, the peaks of the waves getting noticeably taller at the start of 2017 and at 2018 again. The exception is the big peak in November 2015, higher than even the April 2019 peak.
So it turns out those little arrows on the far left and right of ‘Stats for April 2019’ will let you move the month under focus, including off to the left from the leftmost of the months. This is how I learned to get the larger ranges like I’m showing here.

That was 4,033 unique views — the first time I’ve been above four thousand page views — in a month since the AV Club mention. And from 2,418 unique visitors, beating the Apocalypse 3-G high. That’s astounding. That’s … the doing of Apartment 3-G, once again. A message board I never heard of before got to reminiscing about the comic strip, and how bad it got, and so I got mentioned. I’m never so successful as when comic strips are failing.

So that was popular. An average of 134 pages viewed per day, the greatest number since November 2015’s average of 151, only this with a smaller variance.

There were 233 things liked around here in April, up from March’s 176 and February’s 156. I think I was also helped by someone mentioning the Popeye pinball game fiasco, over in one of the big pinball web forums. But the number of comments fell: there were only ten around here all April. There had been 24 in March, and 34 in February. 10 is the fewest comments in a month here since May of 2017. And that’s weird. It’s hard for me to imagine, but the statistics pages are there: in December 2014 I got 138 comments in the month. I know sometimes WordPress has counted pingbacks, links from one blog entry to another, as comments. But still. I don’t link to myself that much, and nobody links to or reblogs me. (And not because I don’t like it. I love the attention! I think I just have the sort of writing that people don’t care to reblog.)

And for popular articles? Well, my conversion into a full-time chat-about-comic-strips blog may as well be complete. If I ever need some time off — and I’ve been thinking about it — I may just set everything but the weekly story comic update on repeat. But the things people wanted to read most:

For non-comic-strip stuff my most popular thing in April was Which Color Paas Tablet Is Purple? Which is Red? Which is Pink?. I knew this would be popular. I did not know Paas had changed the formula so you could put tablets into vinegar or not as you like so it doesn’t matter which is which so much.

For non-comic-strip, original, long-form essay stuff, you know, the thing I originally thought this blog was about with everything else just propping it up? My most popular thing was .. uh … hang on … it must be here somewhere. All right. Yes. Tied for the 68th most popular posts: Everything There Is To Say About Hurt Feet Except For What I Forget To Say, and In Which I Imagine Having A Job I Would Be Very Bad At, and finally All Kinds Of Thoughts About A Bucket Of Water And The Universe. Goodness but I’m such a nerd.

Mercator-style projection map of the world. The United States is the darkest red, and India the next-darkest. Much of Europe, southeast Asia, and the Americas are a similar light pink.
So this map makes me wonder, what is my personal Pole of Inaccessibility, the point on the planet Earth farthest from any country that sent even a single reader to my blog in April? And this is why I am a humor blogger rather than a popular humor blogger.

66 countries sent me readers in April, down from March’s 69, and up from February’s 65. 16 of them were single-reader countries, compared to 14 in March and 15 in February. Here’s the full roster:

Country Readers
United States 2,981
India 341
Canada 116
United Kingdom 87
Australia 67
Sweden 43
Brazil 34
Germany 29
France 22
Hong Kong SAR China 22
Italy 21
South Korea 21
Norway 15
Philippines 14
Spain 14
Netherlands 13
Denmark 12
Finland 12
Malaysia 12
Portugal 10
Singapore 10
Chile 9
Russia 9
United Arab Emirates 9
South Africa 8
Japan 7
Pakistan 7
Thailand 6
Ireland 5
Israel 5
Belgium 4
Indonesia 4
Mexico 4
New Zealand 4
South Sudan 4
Taiwan 4
Trinidad & Tobago 4
European Union 3
Nepal 3
Austria 2
Bangladesh 2
Colombia 2
Greece 2
Hungary 2
Jamaica 2
Jordan 2
Kenya 2
Montenegro 2
Poland 2
Turkey 2
Argentina 1
Bahrain 1
Bulgaria 1
Cameroon 1
Egypt 1
El Salvador 1
Estonia 1
Ghana 1
Isle of Man 1
Latvia 1
Mongolia 1
Nigeria 1
Romania 1
Saudi Arabia 1 (*)
Serbia 1 (***)
Sint Maarten 1

I’m happy to have readers from anywhere. I do feel like, for how much all my writing reeks of generic American white guy, it’s weird that I had so many readers from India and from Sweden this month. Finland, Norway, and Denmark too. Not intending any offense but is it possible the Scandinavian countries have mistaken me for someone else?

Saudi Arabia was a single-reader country in March. Serbia has been a single-reader country four months in a row now. Nowhere else has a streak like that going, though.

My plan for story strip recaps for the coming month — subject as ever to change for breaking news — is this:

All story strip recaps should appear at this link. If one doesn’t, it’s because I messed up a tag. Let me know and I’ll fix something.

From the start of the year through the start of May I’ve posted 120 things around here. That’s made for a total of 73,242 words. This implies I published 19,339 words in April, a bit more than the 18,577 of March. Hm. That’s slightly over 644 words per post, so that to date my average post is 610 words. That’s up from the start of April’s average of 599. So I need to work harder on those dumb little bits of wordplay for Wednesdays. Maybe I need to post more pictures alone.

I’ve gotten 166 total comments on the year, for an average 1.4 comments per posting. At the start of April it had been an average 1.6 comments per posting. 689 total likes, as of the start of May, for an average of 5.7 likes per posting. At the start of April it had been an average 5.5 likes per posting. Hm.

I start the month with a total of 2,280 posts, and 121,901 views from a supposed 67,592 unique visitors. 565 posts got at least one viewer at all in April. This seems like a large number, but I’ve only got the March 2019 data to compare it to. That month had 420 pages viewed by somebody.

And with all that said, I’d be glad to have you as a regular reader. You can do that by reading things off the RSS feed. Or if you want me to get data that I fail to analyze about what you read, use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button in the upper right corner of the page. And I’m also on Twitter as @Nebusj. If you’re not sure about that, I try to start each month with a pair of pictures of rabbits, eg:

So there’s that to look at.

Statistics March: My Humor Blog Had A Ridiculously Nice Month


I like starting months with a look at how popular my humor blog is, since I like to think it is. And I like sharing that with my readers, as part of my plan to keep myself from being too popular. I joke, which is a good sign. As best I can tell, these review posts are at least as popular as everything else I write. I’ll have to just make up a “monthly” review like this sometime when I’m out of ideas.

If you do like my writings, I’m glad to have you as a reader. You can get these pieces to appear in your WordPress reader by using the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button in the upper right corner of the page. Or you can use the RSS feed to get all the page’s content without being tracked. I’m also on Twitter as @Nebusj, for those of you who like being tracked. Now on to how many of you did get tracked in March.

Bar chart of monthly readership for the past two years, roughly. March was abnormally well-read by a great number of unique visitors, and had an average of 1.65 views per visitor.
So it turns out if I hack the URL for the statistics page, changing the ‘startDate’ parameter, I can get an equivalent chart like this for like four and a half years’ worth of months in one page view. Now I’ll need a new excuse for not remembering how to do this a month from now.

It was a well-read month. I credit this to all of March’s comic strip news. People have found I know more about Gasoline Alley than normal mortals do. But here we go. There were 3,565 page views in March 2019. That’s far more than in February, when only 2,428 pages got attention here. And it’s even better than January, when 3,343 pages got viewed. March had my greatest number of page views since April of 2018.

The unique visitor count was astounding, though. There were 2,165 unique visitors, says WordPress. That’s well above February’s 1,429, or January’s 1,830. Indeed, it’s more than any single month in 2018. That is not quite at my all-time record high — the 2,308 unique visitors from November 2015, the final collapse of Apartment 3-G. Also this month I figured out how to get visual representation of more than the last two years’ worth of readership statistics. I might even remember for the start of next month.

There were 176 likes given to various pages here in March. That’s better than February’s 156, in line with January’s 183, and really back to the 165-to-180 range that I was in most of 2018. So that all seems good. Where things did drop was in comments. There were 24 comments given around here in march, down from February’s 34 and January’s 70. It was the slowest month for chatting around here since October 2017. Hm.

I always say that what people want around here is comic strip news. Here’s the five most popular articles from March. They are so much comic strip news. If I were smart, I’d just do comic strip talk, but I keep going on trying to do at least some original writing too. It’s hard resisting what your audience is making clear are your strengths, but I’ll do it. The top articles in March:

Of stuff that isn’t just me writing about other things? The most popular piece I had was Statistics Saturday: The Months Of The Year In Reverse Alphabetical Order. I don’t know. It’s always the weird little trifles that get to be long-lasting. I have the fear someone’s taking this list seriously. I mean, it’s correct, if you figured out the joke, but I don’t say what the joke is so are people understanding that the order is not what any normal person would mean by “reverse alphabetical order”? It was my most popular non-comic-strip piece last month too.

The most popular long-form piece that I wrote and that wasn’t about other people’s work was Everything There Is To Say About Grinding Coffee Beans. I’m glad to offer something of use into the world. We have gotten a replacement for our broken coffee grinder. I hope this settles the rampant speculation about why I had this essay to share.

Also if WordPress has this right, there were 420 separate pages that got at least a single view this month. Huh. I never thought to look at this figure before, so I don’t know whether it’s representative. I’ve had 2,250 posts in total, as of the start of April, for what that’s worth.

There were — all right, a certain number of you are going to think I’m making this up. There were 69 countries sending me page views in March. There, yes. I swear I didn’t make up these numbers and I’ll share the raw data with anyone who wants to look them over. I admit to telling hack jokes sometimes, but not like that.

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States colored in dark red, and most of the Americas, Western Europe, Russia, and Southeast Asia in a more uniform pink.
Again, I don’t find it mysterious that Africa for the most part doesn’t care what I’m writing about Mary Worth. I’m honestly more curious that Nigeria shows any interest in my writing. And, like, Bangladesh? I worry that whatever my Bangladesh readers were looking for, they got to this page by accident. I hope it wasn’t anything important they wanted.

Anyway, here’s the countries roster.

Country Readers
United States 2,646
India 147
Canada 100
United Kingdom 98
Australia 85
Brazil 42
Hong Kong SAR China 41
Spain 38
Philippines 35
Norway 32
Germany 25
Sweden 20
Italy 18
Mexico 15
Belgium 14
Turkey 14
France 12
Denmark 11
Argentina 9
Finland 9
South Africa 8
Japan 7
United Arab Emirates 7
American Samoa 6
Ireland 6
Malaysia 6
New Zealand 6
Peru 6
Taiwan 6
Trinidad & Tobago 6
Netherlands 5
South Korea 5
Indonesia 4
Portugal 4
Singapore 4
Switzerland 4
Thailand 4
Dominican Republic 3
Guatemala 3
Iraq 3
Jamaica 3
Nepal 3
Nigeria 3
Puerto Rico 3
Romania 3
Russia 3
Ukraine 3
Bangladesh 2
Greece 2
Israel 2
Mongolia 2
Pakistan 2
Poland 2
Uruguay 2
Vietnam 2
Bermuda 1
Bolivia 1
Bulgaria 1
Colombia 1
Cyprus 1
Czech Republic 1
European Union 1
Honduras 1
Hungary 1 (*)
Lebanon 1
Lithuania 1
Saudi Arabia 1
Serbia 1 (**)
Slovenia 1 (*)

Anyway there were 65 countries sending readers in February and 68 in January. There were 19 single-reader countries in January, 15 in February, and 14 in March. Hungary and Slovenia were single-reader countries last month, and Serbia has been one for three months running now.

I should share my story strip plot recap schedule. This is subject to change if a comic strip has some big event, and I realize I need to hurry up writing about it while people still want to know anything about, say, Judge Parker. But my planned schedule is:

And all my story strip plot recaps should appear at this link. If one’s missing, it’s because I tagged something wrong.

In all I posted 18,577 words here in March. This brought me, as mentioned, to a total of 2,250 posts. There were 117,868 page views from a total 65,179 unique visitors as of the start of April. There’ve been 141 total comments, for an average of 1.6 comments per post, in 2019. That’s holding at the start of March’s average. There’ve been 491 likes in total, for an average of 5.5 likes per posting. That, too, is the same as the start of March’s average. I’ve posted a total of 90 things in 2019 up to this post, and 53,903 words in total. That’s an average of 599 words per post, which is exactly what my average words-per-post was at the start of March. So it’s lucky I posted that thing meant to bring my average-words-per-post count down. Also but goodness six hundred words is a lot to write on the average day. I should be more careful. 1,423 words.

Statistics February: How The Past Month Treated My Humor Blog


I still like doing these start-of-the-month looks at my statistics. Somehow taking a big pile of numbers and sharing them with people who aren’t responsible for them appeals to me. At least it’s one essay each month that’s easy to think of what to write. Actually writing it is another thing.

And please remember you can follow this blog regularly by using the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ link in the upper right corner of this page. If you want to read without being tracked, counted, numbered, or spindled, please use the RSS feed. RSS is a great solution and the web should use it more. If you do feel like being indexed, briefed, and debriefed, you can follow me on Twitter as @Nebusj. Every new post gets a mention there. Also the “publicity widget” that posts notices on Twitter is also supposed to put notices on Google+. It is very concerned that I understand why that’s going away. I have not checked, but I believe I have in total gotten zero views from Google+, so, you know, it can relax a bit there.

So what happened with the number and variety of readers I attracted in February 2019?

Bar chart of about two years' worth of monthly readership statistics; February's is about three-quarters the size of January's, and noticeably smaller than those for most of 2018.
Oh, yes, so, 1.70 views per visitor in February 2019. There had been 1.83 views per visitor in January, and 1.76 in December. So my average thing gets people three-quarters of the way interested in reading something else. That … seems about right.

OK, so, that’s a bit of a drop. 2,428 views in February, compared to 3,343 in January and 2,866 in December 2018. I’d like to attribute this all to February’s shortness. But the average-per-day views plummeted in February: 87, says a WordPress panel I’m not going to bother including a screenshot of. In January there were 108 views per day on average. December had 92 views per day, which isn’t too far off February’s. But still: I haven’t had that few views-per-day since December 2017. Not sure what happened there. My best guess is that Roy Kassinger was very busy with things.

The number of unique visitors dropped too, although not quite so precipitously. There were 1,429 unique visitors recorded in February, versus 1,830 in January and 1,632 in December. That’s about the same number of unique visitors per day in February as in December, anyway. The number of likes fell to 156 from January’s 183. But that’s up from December’s 137 and is at least within striking distance of the 165-to-180-likes average most of 2018 showed. The number of comments dropped to 34 from January’s 70, and December’s 44, but comments are such a scattershot thing around here anyway. This is more talky than I was managing in 2017, anyway.

What was popular here in February? What’s always popular here, every month? The top five:

My most popular non-comic-strip related thing was Statistics Saturday: The Months Of The Year In Reverse Alphabetical Order and … uh … huh. All right. I haven’t thought about this one since it posted four years ago and I needed a moment to get the joke. I hope it has inspired people to have extremely Internet fights about the question.

My most popular long-form essay was one from this month. That’s always flattering. It was Some Things To Understand About The 1980s. Nicely enough that’s also the essay I’m happiest with from this past month. It’s got a strange tone for me, but a tone I like. I shall have to think about how I got into the mood to write this piece. I still think there should be something more to do with the concept of Muppet Babies Kids.

Still, the story strips remain my most popular thing, and the thing that draws readers in. Here’s my plan for story strips to recap through to April. This may change if a strip has some big event, like new writers or artists or a reboot or something that makes people wonder if the comic is still being made.

And all my story strip plot recaps should appear at this link. If you see one that doesn’t, please let me know. It likely means I just tagged something wrong.

65 countries sent me readers in February. There had been 68 such in January, but 61 in December. This all seems pretty stable then.

Mercator-style world map with the United States in the darkest red. Canada, Mexico, most of Western Europe, Russia, India, South Africa Australia, and New Zealand, are a roughly uniform pink. And I've got readers in Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, and Chile somehow. Plus several other countries. Read the table if you really want to know everyone.
I’m not one to turn down readers, but I’m surprised to see so many readers from Peru and American Samoa. I mean, American Samoa I would imagine has about the same interest in Mary Worth that people on the mainland do. I don’t know what I write that might speak to a Peruvian person’s experience, though. I don’t fool myself into thinking I write to universal experiences. I barely write to my own experiences. If anyone wants to say, I’d be glad to hear.

Ooh, 1766 readers from the United States. This seems neat to me because 1766 is the year that my undergraduate school was founded. So, you know, my making that association right away shows why everybody treated me like that in middle school.

Country Readers
United States 1766
India 98
Canada 95
United Kingdom 77
Australia 66
Italy 23
Peru 20
Mexico 19
Germany 17
South Africa 15
Sweden 14
Brazil 13
Philippines 13
Netherlands 12
Singapore 12
Spain 12
Finland 11
American Samoa 9
France 9
Israel 7
Japan 7
New Zealand 7
European Union 6
Hong Kong SAR China 6
South Korea 6
Chile 5
Indonesia 5
Turkey 5
Georgia 4
Ireland 4
Romania 4
Switzerland 4
Malaysia 3
Nepal 3
Norway 3
Russia 3
Taiwan 3
United Arab Emirates 3
Belgium 2
Bosnia & Herzegovina 2
Greece 2
Jamaica 2
Malta 2
Poland 2
Portugal 2
Puerto Rico 2
Saudi Arabia 2
Slovakia 2
Trinidad & Tobago 2
Ukraine 2
Cameroon 1
Denmark 1
Estonia 1
Hungary 1
Kazakhstan 1
Kenya 1
Mongolia 1
Montenegro 1
Pakistan 1
Serbia 1 (*)
Slovenia 1
St. Martin 1
Tunisia 1
Venezuela 1
Vietnam 1

There were 15 single-reader countries in February. There had been 19 in January, but the only country in common both months was Serbia. And wow, I was this close to a complete new slate of single-reader countries. That’s exciting to be. But see above comment about why everybody treated me like that in middle school. There had been 12 single-reader countries in December.

I averaged 599 words per post, in the 59 posts made from the start of the year through the end of February. That rose from my end-of-January arithmetic mean of 590. I published 17,036 words in February, bringing my total for the year to 35,326 words. I don’t know if that counts things like captions to images or the alt-text for images. For the year to date I’m averaging 1.6 comments per post, down from 1.7 at the end of January. I’m averaging 5.5 likes per post, down from 5.7 at the end of January. Hm.

What’s not decreasing is the total number of posts I’ve made: 2,219 at the end of February. Oh, so I failed to mention then that yesterday’s Alley Oop recap was post number 2,222. Neat. As of the start of February I’ve had 114,303 total views, from 63,017 unique visitors. My most-read day ever remains the 24th of November, 2015. That when some of my writing about the collapse of Apartment 3-G got mentioned on The Onion AV Club and old Usenet pal Joe Blevins gave my blog its name. That’s probably not going to ever change. I wonder if there’s a way to get data on my third-most-read days.

Statistics January: What Was Popular And Why, Here, Last Month


I like starting the month with a look back at what things were popular around here, and how much I got read, and all that. It’s a nice long article and it doesn’t take me being all that creative or anything. I don’t know. It works.

By the way, if you’d like to follow my blog, please do. You can do it in a way that doesn’t show up in my statistics by adding it to your RSS reader. For methods I know a little more about, you can use the button on the upper right corner of the page. Unless I do try out a new page theme and that button moves. Also, I’m also @Nebusj on Twitter. Each new posting gets a mention there, at least.

So what was readership like around here the first month of 2019?

Bar chart of about 30 months of readership; January is a high point after several months of fluttering but gradually declining readership.
Fun fact: somehow my views per visitor is always either 1.83, 1.76, or 1.90. No exceptions! I have no idea what makes a fact ‘fun’.

It was a busy month, with the greatest number of page views around here since June. 3,343 page views from 1,830 unique visitors. There’d been 2,866 page views from 1,632 visitors in December, and 3,077 page views from 1,732 visitors in November. I haven’t had this many unique visitors since May 2018. To what do I credit this? The obvious thing to credit is a couple mentions in the Comics Curmudgeon. Not on the main page, but from commenters who used my plot recaps to help people confused by the story strips.

Maybe I should push my story recaps more at these sites. It feels intrusive to mention someplace I don’t regularly comment, though. Also many of the commenters have less patience for the story strips than I have. But maybe commenters would forgive story strips more if they could see, like, that something which seems out of nowhere was set up months ago and they just forgot or missed it.

Still, the number of likes rose to 183, just barely more than I’d had any month back to March 2018. I’d been in this 165-to-180 zone most of last year, dropping to 150 in November and 137 in December. The number of comments was up to 70, from December’s 44, and November’s 88. There’s clearly no pattern anymore except that there’s not a lot to talk about.

What were the popular posts around here in January? Nothing posted in January, for one. What did make the cut:

  • What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What’s The Plan To Kill Heloise Walker? July – September 2018
  • What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?
  • Who’s Writing and Drawing Alley Oop Now? Who Is Li’l Alley Oop?
  • What’s Going On In Alley Oop? Did Alley Oop End? June – August 2018
  • Is the comic strip Henry ending? Is the comic strip Hazel ending?

    • This suggests what I ought to do this year is go through all the syndicated newspaper comic strips, write a post “Is the comic strip Mother Goose And Grimm ending? Why does Funky Winkerbean look weird?” (or whatever) and watch the page views roll in.

    My post popular piece actually published this past month was What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Who Are These Guys Mark Trail Is Punching? October 2018 – January 2019. This is a good lesson in how important it is to track who Mark Trail is punching. My most popular long-form piece was In Which I Cannot Honestly Say I Dodged A Bullet Here. This is a good lesson in how important it is that I just point at stuff that’s happening and call that humor.

    Map of the world with the United States in a deep pink, India in a less deep pink, and then a surprising amount of Europe and South America colored in at all. Most of Africa, China, and former Soviet republics besides Russia are not colored in at all.
    I admit I’m not surprised that all my talk about Mark Trail does not resonate with the people of Kyrgyzstan.

    There were 68 countries sending me readers in January. There had been 61 in December and 66 in November. So I’m in a sixties mood. But here’s the country list:

    Country Readers
    United States 2,460
    India 173
    United Kingdom 96
    Canada 92
    Australia 67
    Germany 42
    Sweden 27
    New Zealand 24
    Italy 22
    Philippines 22
    Denmark 18
    Norway 17
    American Samoa 16
    France 15
    Mexico 15
    Poland 15
    Spain 15
    Finland 13
    Romania 12
    Taiwan 12
    South Africa 11
    Thailand 10
    Croatia 9
    Japan 8
    Malaysia 8
    Netherlands 8
    Singapore 8
    Switzerland 8
    Slovenia 7
    Brazil 6
    Czech Republic 6
    European Union 6
    Hong Kong SAR China 6
    Ireland 5
    Uruguay 5
    Argentina 4
    Chile 4
    Israel 4
    Russia 4
    Indonesia 3
    Portugal 3
    South Korea 3
    Turkey 3
    Armenia 2
    Cambodia 2
    Georgia 2
    Hungary 2
    Puerto Rico 2
    Ukraine 2
    Bangladesh 1 (****)
    Bulgaria 1
    Colombia 1
    El Salvador 1 (*)
    Greece 1
    Guernsey 1
    Iraq 1
    Jamaica 1
    Kuwait 1
    Latvia 1
    Lithuania 1
    Malta 1
    Nepal 1
    Nicaragua 1
    Nigeria 1
    Saudi Arabia 1
    Serbia 1
    Slovakia 1
    Tanzania 1

    There were 19 single-reader countries in January. There had been 12 in December and 16 in November. El Salvador was a single-reader country last month. Bangladesh is on five months now for being a single-reader country. Huh.

    The Insights page tells me I start February with 111,870 page views total, from 61,588 unique visitors. In January I published a total of 18,290 words. I’d had an average 590 words per post (my 2018 average was 639 words per post). There were an average 1.7 comments and 5.7 likes per post.

    And the important material. All my story strip plot recap posts should appear at this link. The comics I expect to summarize over the coming month — barring some surprise or fast-breaking news which bumps something — are:

    I am expecting there will be comments made about Alley Oop, when I get there.

    Statistics Saturday: Most Popular Posts Of The First Ten Years Here


    This weekend’s the anniversary of when I started this blog! So I thought to look back over its popular stuff again.

    Reference: A History of Modern France, Alfred Cobban.

    What Was Popular Around Here In All Of 2018


    So I like taking nice big kalend-y events as a chance to look back on what I’m doing and why. Mostly that’s the monthly blog review. It used to be WordPress also gave us a cute little animated representation of the year, showing each post made as fireworks, and somehow representing how popular posts were by how dazzling the firework was. That’s been gone for years. I don’t know why or whether it’ll ever come back. So I’ll do my own little version instead.

    2018: 39,130 views, 20,889 visitors, 1.87 views per visitor, and 365 posts published.
    Aw, only 870 views way from an even 40,000 views. You know, this is going to sound silly, but all day the 28th of December last year I was thinking I should pull up some post of mine and hit ‘refresh’ over and over to drive up my statistics. But I didn’t, and now I suffer the consequences. Well, no great loss. I was only thinking to hit ‘refresh’ to juice my statistics about 565 times at most, so that wouldn’t make anything better.

    So, wow. 2018 was my biggest year by far around here. I don’t think it was entirely from Roy Kassinger discovering my writing and putting up comments on stuff from, like, five years ago that I’d forgotten existed. For the sake of putting things up in a format I can more easily lose later here’s exact numbers about how much I posted, and what kind of response it all drew:

    Year Posts Published Page Views Unique Visitors Likes Comments
    2013 335 3,874 1,869 1,188 305
    2014 365 8,621 4,422 2,279 746
    2015 365 17,729 9,094 4,134 879
    2016 366 14,484 8,297 2,259 481
    2017 365 24,695 15,187 1,886 305
    2018 365 39.130 20,889 2,177 830

    So that’s all an exciting-looking trend in growth, if we take for granted that growing is a good thing. Well, who doesn’t, if they’re trying to do something for a mass audience? The thing I can’t understand is the stuff I think of as measuring how engaged readers are. The number of likes offered, the number of comments offered. Both are below the 2015 high point. The number of likes in 2018 were about half those of 2015. The number of comments in 2018 was close to 2015’s total. But considering the growth in page views, and unique visitors, that’s a relative decline. 2015 was juiced, though: that was the year Apartment 3-G finally collapsed. I got many readers in looking to understand what was happening in it. And I got a huge burst, all at once, when Joe Blevins — who I thought was a friend from the MST3K fanfic community — mentioned me on the AV Club, giving my blog a name without actually mentioning me.

    I can tell you what was popular in 2018. Five of the ten most popular things were even published in 2018. But what people really like to find is my recaps of story strips. That’s fair enough. Every day there’s people discovering that, say, Alley Oop still exists, and wanting to be caught up. And some of the story strips have well-established and easy-to-find snarking communities. But if we’re not talking about Mary Worth or Mark Trail, then where should people go? Here’s where they did go, last year:

    So, I’ve learned how to write headlines that look like questions people might ask. That has to help readers figure out Nancy‘s deal. The S J Perelman thing is from a habit of mine that’s almost fallen by the wayside, where I’d post something from the public domain. I used to think this was a good way to show off some of what’s shaped my comic sensibilities and save me the effort of thinking up and writing something. It turns out that selecting a good piece and curating it, so as to make the case that something is worth reading, is at least as hard as being original.

    I’m glad that Is Ray Davies A Normal Person? made the top ten. I originally imagined this blog as a way to write one long-form, roughly 700-word piece, once a week, with everything else as little stuff to support the weekly essay. That’s drifted, so now the blog is basically stuff propping up my story-comic recaps. But the weekly essay is still the part closest to my heart. And most of my essays I come away feeling dissatisfied with: that I’m carrying out a good idea poorly, or that I’m making the best of a weak idea. The Ray Davies one was an exception. That felt like a good idea carried out well. So I’m glad that people seem to agree. Or they’re trying to learn about Ray Davies’s health and I’m getting in the way. Whichever. It all works.

    A Mercator-style map of the world, with most of the countries outside central Africa, Iraq, Greenland, and some of the former Soviet nations in pink; the United States is in a much deeper pink.
    I totally understand people in South Sudan having more pressing things to do than read my silly comments about Mary Worth or stuff like that. What I’m trying to understand is why French Guiana is snubbing me like this. What else you have to do there, launch a rocket? C’mon.

    There were 144 countries of the world sending me readers in all 2018. 29 of them were single-reader countries. 20 countries sent me more than 100 page views. And for I’m guessing the first time there were three countries sending me more than a thousand page views. That feels good. Here’s the whole roster:

    Country Readers
    United States 30,556
    Canada 1,275
    India 1,243
    United Kingdom 921
    Australia 716
    Germany 340
    Italy 317
    Philippines 244
    Brazil 228
    Sweden 200
    Spain 195
    France 155
    Netherlands 131
    Denmark 113
    Hong Kong SAR China 110
    Norway 105
    Finland 101
    Mexico 101
    South Africa 101
    Romania 100
    Singapore 95
    Portugal 91
    Japan 90
    Malaysia 84
    Indonesia 67
    Russia 59
    South Korea 53
    Austria 52
    European Union 52
    Ireland 51
    New Zealand 49
    Turkey 47
    Serbia 44
    Poland 42
    Israel 40
    Belgium 39
    Switzerland 36
    Argentina 34
    Peru 31
    Hungary 29
    Saudi Arabia 29
    Ukraine 29
    Czech Republic 27
    Pakistan 26
    Chile 25
    Jamaica 24
    Colombia 23
    Egypt 23
    Thailand 23
    Slovakia 22
    Greece 21
    Taiwan 21
    Trinidad & Tobago 20
    Bangladesh 19
    United Arab Emirates 19
    Nigeria 17
    Vietnam 17
    Venezuela 16
    Croatia 15
    Sri Lanka 14
    Bulgaria 13
    Kenya 13
    Estonia 12
    Puerto Rico 11
    Uruguay 11
    China 10
    El Salvador 10
    Georgia 10
    Slovenia 10
    American Samoa 8
    Ecuador 8
    Latvia 8
    Costa Rica 7
    Lebanon 7
    Macedonia 7
    Nepal 7
    Botswana 6
    Kuwait 6
    Iceland 5
    Jordan 5
    Myanmar (Burma) 5
    Bosnia & Herzegovina 4
    Brunei 4
    Guyana 4
    Honduras 4
    Iraq 4
    Kazakhstan 4
    Maldives 4
    Malta 4
    Morocco 4
    Paraguay 4
    Qatar 4
    Zimbabwe 4
    Côte d’Ivoire 3
    Cyprus 3
    Dominican Republic 3
    Kyrgyzstan 3
    Laos 3
    Lithuania 3
    Madagascar 3
    Mauritius 3
    Oman 3
    Panama 3
    Algeria 2
    Barbados 2
    Belarus 2
    Cape Verde 2
    Ethiopia 2
    Fiji 2
    Ghana 2
    Moldova 2
    Montenegro 2
    Namibia 2
    Tunisia 2
    Zambia 2
    Albania 1
    Angola 1
    Armenia 1
    Azerbaijan 1
    Bahamas 1
    Bahrain 1
    Belize 1
    Bolivia 1
    Cambodia 1
    Cook Islands 1
    Curaçao 1
    Gibraltar 1
    Guam 1
    Isle of Man 1
    Jersey 1
    Lesotho 1
    Luxembourg 1
    Malawi 1
    Mongolia 1
    Mozambique 1
    Nicaragua 1
    Palestinian Territories 1
    Papua New Guinea 1
    Sint Maarten 1
    St. Kitts & Nevis 1
    St. Lucia 1
    St. Vincent & Grenadines 1
    Suriname 1
    Uganda 1

    So this helps me focus my energies this coming year on being a bit more interesting to readers in Sint Maarten. I don’t know how to do this, but will make a halfhearted attempt a little too late to do anybody any good. It’s important to have a plan.

    The Insights page reports that I published 233,338 words over the course of 2018. Don’t think I’m not burned up that I didn’t publish five fewer, or 99,995 more. That comes to an average of 639 words per post. So, yes, when I started this out I figured I’d do one, roughly 700-word, essay once a week and then some quick little jokes in-between. Except for 2016, though, my average post length has been growing year after year. So I’m doomed, yes. But the challenging part is I need to embrace the doom.

    Statistics December: How The End Of 2018 Looked Around Here


    And now it’s a decent time to review my readership, as WordPress would tell me it looks, for December 2018. I’m thinking to also do a full year-in-review look at my readership statistics, for good reason. These are easy posts to write, since I know what they’re about, and they fill a day’s content hole. I’d rather be creative, but if just being there will do, I’ll be there.

    All the measurements of my readership dropped in December 2018, compared to November and even October. I’d like to claim that’s because everybody was doing holiday stuff rather than looking at my ramblings. But that’s unlikely. December in both 2016 and 2017 saw rises in my readership figures over the previous months. And, interestingly, both Decembers were preludes to much busier Januaries. I’m curious whether that trend will carry on at least.

    WordPress says there were 2,866 pages viewed here in December 2018, from 1,632 unique visitors. That’s down from the 3,077 pages and 1,732 visitors of November, a month that also had one fewer published piece. It’s also down from the 3,070 pages and 1,681 visitors of October, a month that did not have fewer published pieces than December.

    December 2018. Views: 2,866. Visitors: 1,632. Views per visitor: 1.76. Posts published: 31. The readership's dropped from the last few months, but 2018 is still noticeably higher than the previous years.
    I could totally have had my computer at the ready to take this screen shot at 00:01 Universal Time on the 1st of January except that I couldn’t think of any reason I would want to. The reason is it looks slick when the “current month” bar is completely empty. Maybe I could have edited that out of the image.

    The number of likes drooped again, falling to 137 from the 150 it had been in November. That’s also a drop from the 173 that I’d gotten in October and, basically, every month going back to April of 2018. There were 44 comments here in December, exactly half November’s 88 and the lowest number in a month since August of 2018.

    The most popular articles around here are comic strip plot recaps or news. If it can be called news by the time I notice it around here. But it’s such a striking readership tally. If I ever really need a vacation I could probably put the whole blog on hiatus apart from the story strip recaps and would probably not see the place be significantly less busy. The top five articles this past month were:

    Only the first of these was actually published in December 2018, but that’s all right. I am probably doing something good by search engines to follow the clear question of “what’s going on in [ story strip ]” with a question about some particular plot element. I’m annoyed when I can’t think of one for some comic.

    This coming list is my plan for the story strip recaps for the following month. It’s subject to change in case of major developments, usually regarding a comic strip’s writer or illustrator changing or the strip ending. Also, this coming Monday, Joey Alison Sayers and Jonathan Lemon’s first Alley Oop is scheduled to appear. I don’t figure to jump right into recapping that plot, not until it’s had a while to develop. Also, the Sunday Alley Oop is supposed to be its own separate setting, about “a new preteen version of Alley Oop”. I don’t know if that’s going to be a setting with continuity. If it is, I’ll add recaps of that story to the roster. If it’s just one-off gags, though, I won’t. There’s some thin point to my telling you what the plot was; there’s no point my telling you a joke you can read yourself as quickly. So, barring news, here’s what should appear Sunday evenings, my time, for the next couple weeks:

    The most popular long-form essay I wrote, and thing intended to be funny, in December was Every Other Thing There Is To Say About Decorating For Christmas. That was the third of the essays on the same topic that I did in December. I didn’t set out to keep writing about the same topic for the weekly long-form pieces. I just realized each week I had a couple more bits to say. And the hardest part of writing anything is picking a topic. So I wasn’t going to reject a potential essay for some reason as flimsy as “I wrote about it last week”. If it taxed readers’ patience — well, maybe that’s why I had two hundred fewer page views. Hm. But if I take it as a writing experiment, to see what happens if I go back trying to write new essays on the same subject repeatedly, then it’s worthwhile. I do think I ended up with a good comic observation, that decorating can produce many of the same stresses as moving. Maybe next year I’ll try rewriting this all to see if I can’t make a better essay around the thought.

    61 countries sent me readers in December. That’s down from 66 in November and 69 in October. Yeah, this all counts that mysterious “European Union” entry as a single country. Here’s the roster:

    Country Readers
    United States 2,111
    India 127
    Canada 93
    Australia 90
    United Kingdom 69
    Portugal 36
    Germany 28
    Philippines 26
    Brazil 21
    Sweden 20
    France 19
    Norway 15
    Hong Kong SAR China 13
    Slovakia 12
    Italy 10
    Malaysia 10
    Finland 9
    Indonesia 9
    Spain 9
    American Samoa 8
    Austria 8
    Denmark 8
    Israel 8
    Singapore 8
    Japan 7
    Hungary 6
    Argentina 5
    Czech Republic 5
    Netherlands 5
    New Zealand 5
    Romania 5
    Mexico 4
    Russia 4
    Thailand 4
    Belgium 3
    China 3
    Croatia 3
    Estonia 3
    Peru 3
    South Korea 3
    Switzerland 3
    Ethiopia 2
    Ireland 2
    Jordan 2
    Latvia 2
    Macedonia 2
    Poland 2
    Saudi Arabia 2
    South Africa 2
    Algeria 1
    Bangladesh 1 (***)
    Barbados 1
    Bolivia 1
    Cook Islands 1
    El Salvador 1
    European Union 1
    Kenya 1
    Pakistan 1
    Puerto Rico 1
    Serbia 1
    Uruguay 1

    This time around there were twelve single-reder countries. There had been 16 in November and 17 in October. Bangladesh has been a single-reader country for four months now. Nowhere else has been.

    The Insights page tells me that I ended December with a total of 108,530 page views, from 59,758 unique visitors. Over the course of December I published something like 20,361 words, an average of 657 words per posting. I’m tired thinking of that. For 2018 from January through December I averaged 639 words per post. Also I averaged 5.8 likes per post and 2.6 comments per post. At the end of November I was averaging 2.5 comments per post (up from 2.4 at the end of October). And at the end of November I’d averaged 6.0 likes per post, down from 6.1 at the end of October. This means something; don’t ask me what. The year closed on my 2,160th post, though. And I finished at 233,338 words, so don’t think it’s not just killing me that I couldn’t trim five words from something over the course of the year.

    If you would like to follow Another Blog, Meanwhile, regularly, there’s a button on the upper right of the page to add this to your reader. If you prefer an RSS reader, you can add my articles from this link. And I’m also @Nebusj on Twitter. Thanks for reading. I’ll let you know if something happens with Alley Oop that you need a response to.

    Statistics Monday: What Was Popular Here In November 2018


    I like taking a day near the start of the month to look over what WordPress tells me was popular around here. It’s usually a nice, low-key way to fill the content hole with a lot of numbers followed by a heap of other numbers, some of them including decimal points. It’s great.

    In September there were 2,644 page views around here. They came from 1,436 unique visitors, who left a total of 174 likes and 50 comments. In October there were 3,070 page views and I do so like getting above a big round number like that. 1,681 unique visitors, who left 173 likes and 67 comments. And for November?

    November 2018 statistics: 3,077 views, 1.731 visitors, 1.78 views per visitor, and 30 posts published.
    1.78 views per visitor is down from October’s 1.83, and September’s 1.84. But all this really suggests is I’m not seeing these deep archive-binges. (I’m not sure I have ever been archive-binged, but there have been months I had a whole 2.34 views per visitor.)

    I was surprised to have a very slight increase in page views, to 3,077. My mathematics blog had a drop in readers in November and I expect the two blogs to stay synchronized. (More accurately the mathematics blog had an extra readership boost in October.) The number of unique visitors rose more than slightly, to 1,681, more than I’ve had since this five-month streak in early 2018. Likes fell to 150, the first time in seven months that they’ve been outside the 165-to-180 range. The number of comments rose to 88, the fifth month of increase in a row and the greatest number since February 2018.

    As in October, all the most popular stuff here was comic strip updates. Also as in October, the most popular pieces weren’t actually published in this past month. At the top were:

    The most popular thing actually published in November was I Don’t Know Who’s Officially Writing Spider-Man Now. It is Roy Thomas, although Comics Kingdom doesn’t have his credit on the strip yet. They just list Stan Lee. My most popular long-form piece was In Which I Am Extremely Helpful Making Food For Thanksgiving, suggesting there might be some interest in me writing pieces that make me out as incompetent but well-intentioned. I had expected that to be well-received. Intellectual-amiable-fumbling in that Robert Benchley mode plays to my strengths. The most popular Statistics Saturday post was Questions Raised By Learning Kings Dominion Amusement Park Had A Wayne’s-World-Theme Area. There’s not really any reason that had to be a Statistics Saturday format, truth be told.

    Here’s the roster of the story strips I hope to explain What’s Going On In for the coming month. Subject, as ever, to fast-breaking news updates.

    And it won’t matter for December. But Alley Oop is scheduled to go into new strips the 7th of January. Alison Sayers is to write and Jonathan Lemon to draw. And apparently the Sunday strips are to be about “Li’l Oop,” a preteen version of Alley Oop. I have no idea if that’s going to be a separate storyline or just standalone gags.

    The country count: there were 60 countries sending me readers in September. 69 in October. For November there were 66 countries, if you count “European Union” as a single country. The exact roster:

    Country Readers
    United States 2,352
    India 113
    Canada 107
    Australia 66
    United Kingdom 53
    Italy 44
    Brazil 31
    Germany 27
    Philippines 22
    Denmark 20
    Hong Kong SAR China 18
    France 16
    Spain 14
    Finland 11
    Netherlands 11
    South Africa 11
    Peru 10
    Sweden 10
    Turkey 9
    Chile 8
    Mexico 7
    Russia 7
    European Union 6
    Japan 6
    Poland 6
    South Korea 6
    Malaysia 5
    Norway 5
    Romania 4
    Serbia 4
    Thailand 4
    Vietnam 4
    Belgium 3
    El Salvador 3
    Hungary 3
    Jamaica 3
    Nepal 3
    Oman 3
    Portugal 3
    Venezuela 3
    Austria 2
    Costa Rica 2
    Croatia 2
    Czech Republic 2
    Indonesia 2
    New Zealand 2
    Nigeria 2
    Singapore 2
    Switzerland 2
    Ukraine 2
    Bangladesh 1 (**)
    Colombia 1
    Egypt 1
    Georgia 1
    Guyana 1
    Honduras 1
    Ireland 1
    Malawi 1
    Maldives 1 (*)
    Mongolia 1
    Morocco 1
    Panama 1
    Papua New Guinea 1
    Qatar 1
    Saudi Arabia 1
    Sri Lanka 1

    There were 16 single-reader countries in September, 17 in October, and in November, 16. I guess I have my level, then. Maldives have been a single-reader country two months running now. Bangladesh, three months.

    According to Insights, for the end of November I had published 334 posts and a total of 212,977 words this year. That’s an average of 638 words per piece, up from an average of 634 from the start of November. It’s also by the way a total of 17,378 words over the 30 posts. So I’m doing really well at getting my Monday-Wednesday-Friday posts down to short, snappy pieces.

    As of the end of November I’m averaging 2.5 comments per post, up from 2.4 at the start of November and 2.3 at the start of October. And an average of 6.0 likes per post, down from 6.1 at the start of November and October. December opened with my having 105,666 page views total, from 58,125 unique visitors. And 2,129 total posts, by the way.

    I’m glad if you choose to follow Another Blog, Meanwhile. You can add it to your WordPress reader with the button that says you can add this to your WordPress reader. If you prefer an RSS reader, you can add my articles from this link. And I’m also @Nebusj on Twitter. Finally I’d like to thank everyone for my theme song and great music cues. See you next month.

    Statistics Saturday: Another Blog, Meanwhile Page Views Plotted Against Page Views


    This is a special Statistics post, commemorating the event of Another Blog, Meanwhile finally reaching its 100,000th page view, sometime during the 6th of October, 2018!

    I had hoped people would enjoy getting to look back at how the number of page views has grown, over time, until it’s finally reached a number literally higher than it has ever reached before.

    My thanks as ever to all the readers who looked at one or more of my pages, concluded that this was a strange lot of talk about mid-19th-century cabinet secretaries, and then went on to some other, popular blog.

    Linear plot of Views versus Views, a diagonal line, crossing through such points as (0, 0), (50 000, 50 000), and (100 000, 100 000).
    Now, the view-per-view ratio has stayed a pretty constant 1.00 throughout this blog’s history.

    Reference: Lilo and Stitch: Collected Stories from the Film’s Creators, Editor H Clark Wakabayashi.

    Statistics Monday: How September 2018 Treated Another Blog, Meanwhile


    Time again for my monthly review of how many people come around this blog, and what they seem to be coming for. I’m not sure what I expected. A decline, I suppose. I always feel like I’m fighting a battle against popularity. But now that Jim Scancarelli is back and producing new Gasoline Alley comics, there’s no reason for people to come around trying to understand what’s going on with the comic. People are curious about Alley Oop, but not as intently. People might come to miss Hazel and Henry, but … like … really? And Henry hasn’t quite stopped running yet. Anyway, here’s the big picture and it’s about as I expected:

    For September 2018: 2,644 views. 1,436 visitors. 1.84 views per visitor. 30 posts published.
    I mean, it’s not all a steady little decline. The views-per-visitor was 1.84, up from 1.76 in August. But it was 1.90 in July, so, yeah, maybe let’s not talk about that either. Anyway it’s always in the range from 1.75 to about 2.00 page views for each visitor.

    So I didn’t earn another two hundred or so page views last month. 2,644 views in September, down from 2,848 in August and 2,984 in July. Lost nearly two hundred unique visitors, too. 1,436 visitors in September, down from 1,619 in August and 1,569 in July. I had expected that going from cartoons — in the Betty Boop and Popeye two-reelers — to half-hour-long radio — the Stan Freberg Show — would hurt readership. A half-hour densely-written radio show seems harder to skim than a cartoon short. But there’s evidence I’m wrong about that, too.

    For all that I’ve got fewer readers, they’re staying involved, at least per capita. 174 things were liked around here in September. That’s basically the same number as were liked every month going back to April. It’s March since there was last a like-total outside the 165-to-180 range. There were 50 comments total in September, up from August’s 39 and July’s 36. It’s nice to have any month where there’s more than one and a half comments per day, anyway.

    OK. So which of the comic strip explanation posts were most popular in September?

    I’m really happy people are finding that Phantom Weekdays update, since for once they’re finding the most current update. And stuff is happening pretty fast and big right now.

    My schedule — subject to change to respect breaking news — for comics updates in October is:

    My most popular non-comic-strip thing was the recap of The Stan Freberg Show‘s second episode. The first episode was rather popular too. I’m wondering if I’m filling one of those gaps in Internet Knowledge by providing an episode guide for these. My most popular long-form piece was Yes, I Am Aware Of The Historical Irony. This makes sense. What’s more universally communicable than me geeking out over some tiny bit of local history?

    In August there were 60 countries sending me any readers at all. 16 of them were single-reader countries. How does this compare to September?

    Country Readers
    United States 2,039
    Canada 80
    India 74
    Australia 71
    United Kingdom 58
    Italy 34
    Germany 22
    European Union 19
    Romania 18
    Hong Kong SAR China 14
    Philippines 14
    Singapore 14
    Norway 13
    Brazil 12
    Austria 11
    Malaysia 10
    Spain 10
    France 9
    Japan 9
    Sweden 9
    Netherlands 8
    Mexico 7
    South Africa 7
    Russia 6
    South Korea 6
    Czech Republic 5
    Egypt 5
    Croatia 4
    Denmark 4
    Indonesia 4
    Uruguay 4
    Switzerland 3
    Taiwan 3
    Belgium 2
    Finland 2
    Greece 2
    Jamaica 2
    Peru 2
    Qatar 2
    Saudi Arabia 2
    Sri Lanka 2
    Thailand 2
    Trinidad & Tobago 2
    United Arab Emirates 2
    Bangladesh 1
    Belize 1
    Bulgaria 1
    Chile 1
    Colombia 1 (*)
    Fiji 1
    Honduras 1
    Iceland 1
    Iraq 1
    Israel 1
    Kenya 1
    Kuwait 1
    Macedonia 1
    New Zealand 1 (*)
    Poland 1
    Turkey 1 (*)

    Once again 60 countries sent me readers. Yes, I double-checked that I didn’t look at the wrong month’s data. 16 of them were single-reader countries. Yes, I checked again that I was looking at the correct month. Colombia, New Zealand, and Turkey were the only single-reader countries two months in a row. See? I have to be looking at the correct month. And yeah, 2,039 readers from the United States. Yes, I checked that I didn’t hit the Chuckletrousers number. Still weird. Looking at month-to-month totals it seems like half my readership decline was just people in India and Canada not coming around. Maybe I need to comment more about Australian politics to get them back?

    October started with my blog having reached 99,519 viewers, from 54,713 unique visitors. Yes, I’m excited by the idea of reaching 100,000 viewers too. When I do reach that I can start the countdown to the Fibonacci number of viewers, 112358. Won’t that be exciting? It will too.

    As of the start of October I’ve posted 273 things on this blog for 2018. There’ve been 177,181 words published total. That’s 18,197 total words published over the month, down from August’s 20,725. I’m averaging 641 words per post this year, down from 654 at the start of the month. There’ve been 641 comments total, for an average 2.3 comments per post this year. That’s the same average as at the start of September. There’ve been 1,671 total likes this year so far. That’s an average of 6.1 likes per posting, down from the start of September’s 6.2.

    You can follow Another Blog, Meanwhile by RSS, using whatever reading tool you like. If you’d rather put it in your WordPress Reader, use the button that says something about adding the blog to your reader. It should be at the upper right corner of the page. You can find me as @nebusj on Twitter. All my postings should be announced there as they happen. Thanks for reading.

    Statistics August: What People Liked Here Before Alley Oop Had News


    So I always try to start the month with a review of what’s popular and how popular it is. I find this out by checking WordPress’s page statistics. I can guess that September 2018 will have some relatively big numbers for me as people try to figure out the Alley Oop situation. But the news of that broke the 1st of September and so can’t do anything for me for August. I suppose I could do a review of what will be popular in September, but I haven’t written most of it. And most of it will be the story strip recaps. Which, if breaking news doesn’t force me to alter schedules should be this:

    Please plan how much you’re interested in the story strips accordingly.

    So here’s the readership chart for the months leading up to August 2018, plus a little bit of September so far:

    August 2018: 2,848 views; 1,619 visitors; 1.76 views per visitor; 31 posts published.
    I used to track the views-per-visitor but I never knew what to do with the information. I guess it’s nice that on average people look at more than one thing around here, at least.

    My slow secular decline continues! For another month the number of page views has dropped, to 2,848 from July’s 2,984. And down from June’s 3,454. I’m not sure but it looks like I’m drifting down something like 125 page views per month ever since that January 2018 high. The number of unique visitors bounced up, though, to 1,619. July had only 1,569. That doesn’t get back to June’s 1,791 but it’s a bit of a rally. We’ll see whether July or August is the fluke and which one is the trend.

    Those measures of reader engagement … eh. Technically the number of likes rose, to 180, from July’s 165. But there were between 172 and 177 likes from April through to June this year. It’s as good as fixed in place. The number of comments rose to 39 from July’s 36, but again, June saw 56 and May 54. There’s just not a lot going on here.

    What were the popular posts around here in August? About what you’d expect given that nobody was expecting Alley Oop to need explaining:

    My most popular long-form essay in August was Everything There Is To Say About Making Art, which I think is my favorite of the essays I posted in August. If you’d like to see the long-form stuff I did write — and I started out the blog figuring those were the important things, with everything else teasers to keep me in readers’ thoughts — here’s the roster:

    Now to the roster of countries that sent me any kind of readers. There were 60 countries sending me any readers at all, down from July’s 66 and June’s 71, so again, the word seems to be shrinking. 16 of these were single-reader countries, down from July’s 17. See gain, shrinking countries.

    Country Readers
    United States 2,193
    India 119
    Canada 112
    Australia 89
    United Kingdom 60
    Germany 22
    Brazil 19
    Italy 19
    Philippines 18
    Singapore 15
    Hong Kong SAR China 10
    South Africa 10
    France 9
    Russia 9
    Netherlands 8
    Mexico 7
    Spain 7
    Denmark 6
    Sweden 6
    Taiwan 6
    Czech Republic 5
    Finland 5
    Greece 5
    Japan 5
    Malaysia 5
    Romania 5
    Saudi Arabia 5
    Costa Rica 4
    European Union 4
    Indonesia 4
    Trinidad & Tobago 4
    Hungary 3
    Norway 3
    Peru 3
    Poland 3
    United Arab Emirates 3
    Argentina 2
    Austria 2
    Bulgaria 2
    Estonia 2
    Ireland 2
    Kenya 2
    Portugal 2
    Switzerland 2
    Brunei 1
    Colombia 1
    Ghana 1
    Israel 1
    Jordan 1
    Malta 1
    Morocco 1
    Myanmar (Burma) 1
    New Zealand 1
    Pakistan 1 (*)
    Serbia 1
    South Korea 1
    Sri Lanka 1
    Turkey 1
    Ukraine 1
    Venezuela 1 (*)

    Of all the world, only Pakistan and Venezuela have been single-reader countries two months in a row. Yes, I’d love to know what they read and why not any more, but that would take looking or something.

    I started September with 243 posts on the year to date, and a total of 558 comments. this averages to 2.3 comments per posting. There were 1,499 total likes, for an average of 6.2 likes per posting. This is the same comments and likes-per-post average as at the start of August. Well, here’s something different: at the start of August I’d published 158,984 words here so far this year. That’s 20,725 words over the month. For the year, through the end of August, I’ve averaged 654 words per post, up very slightly from the 652.2 at the start of August. I start the month having had 96,879 total page views from 53,279 unique readers. Yes, I should do something for the 100,000th page view, but I’ll never know when I reached it. I bet.

    If you’d like to read Another Blog, Meanwhile at your convenience here’s the RSS feed for every post, which is pretty convenient. If you’d rather put it in your WordPress Reader, use the button that says something about adding the blog to your reader. It should be at the upper right corner of the page. If you’d like to see me announcing the posts as they happen you can find me as @nebusj on Twitter. Thanks for following however you like.

    Statistics July: What Was Popular and How So Here, Recently


    If there’s anything that I know for the first week of a month, it’s that I look at the previous month. Usually with relief. But also so I can stare into what my readership looked like, and whether I had any. Maybe also to figure out what people like and what they don’t, in case I can capitalize on that. I already know the best reader response I got for last month, as my love burst out laughing while reading one of my pieces. So I should write more like that. It’s the hardest kind of thing to write, but then, if being a humor blogger were going to be easy I’d have already finished doing it.

    Enough padding. Let me look at what my readership figures were like and see how much this month looked like every month.

    July 2018, total views: 2,984. Visitors: 1,569. Views per visitor: 1.90. Posts published: 31.
    July 2018’s page view and unique impressions count. My big old bustling downtown is looking less prominent, but just because there’s a lot of towers about the same height now.

    Aw. My readership dropped below 3,000 page views for the first time this year. There were 2,984 page views, from 1,569 unique visitors. That’s well down from June’s 3,454 page views from 1,791 visitors, or May’s 3,227 views and 1,871 visitors. I’m not sure that I’m reading this right. It looks to me like earlier months I’d get a lot of page views from a mention in some high-volume forum or other. Doesn’t look like there was one in July. I just needed to log out and hit refresh on one of my pages sixteen more times is all. Still, this suggests I do get about three thousand page views even without any particular spikes or strokes of luck. There was a spike when the article about Gasoline Alley’s plot went up, and that’s likely a one-off. But it wasn’t that big a one.

    I got 165 likes in July. That’s not quite up to June’s 172 or May’s 175, but it’s not so very different either. There were 36 comments, another crash after, like, June’s 56 or May’s 54. Nothing like back in January (148!). But still a fair number, better than most months in 2017. It makes me wonder what would happen if I knew how to self-promote.

    So here’s the top postings from the past month. The top five are all comics posts.

    That Phantom update is the most popular thing I published from July. My most popular long-form piece from July was How To Have A Small Business, published mid-month.

    So now let me look at a bit list of countries with numbers set beside them. There were 66 countries sending me readers, compared to 71 in June and 78 in May. From this we can conclude the world is shrinking and some countries might have disappeared altogether. If anyone’s seen Paraguay recently please submit a note to that effect.

    Country Readers
    United States 2305
    India 143
    United Kingdom 89
    Canada 74
    Australia 48
    Philippines 43
    Malaysia 23
    Italy 22
    Finland 19
    Germany 18
    South Africa 16
    Brazil 14
    Romania 14
    Spain 11
    Norway 9
    Mexico 8
    Indonesia 7
    Sweden 7
    Colombia 6
    Israel 6
    Singapore 6
    Denmark 5
    France 5
    Japan 5
    Netherlands 5
    New Zealand 4
    Peru 4
    Portugal 4
    El Salvador 3
    Georgia 3
    Ireland 3
    South Korea 3
    Ukraine 3
    Argentina 2
    Austria 2
    Belgium 2
    Brunei 2
    Chile 2
    Egypt 2
    Greece 2
    Hong Kong SAR China 2
    Lebanon 2
    Namibia 2
    Serbia 2
    Switzerland 2
    Taiwan 2
    Trinidad & Tobago 2
    Turkey 2
    United Arab Emirates 2
    Croatia 1
    Czech Republic 1
    Isle of Man 1
    Jersey 1
    Kuwait 1 (*)
    Macedonia 1
    Mauritius 1
    Nepal 1
    Pakistan 1
    Paraguay 1
    Qatar 1
    Russia 1
    Saudi Arabia 1
    Slovakia 1
    Thailand 1 (***)
    Venezuela 1
    Zambia 1

    That’s 17 single-reader countries, down from June’s 22 and May’s 25. I told you countries were going missing. Thanks for spotting Paraguay for me there, though. Kuwait’s on its second month of being a single-reader country. Thailand’s on its fourth. And this seems like more Channel Islands sending me readers than I expect. But maybe I haven’t been paying attention. That list of fake Canadian provinces or territories didn’t do a thing for my Canadian readership. My French readership was down too after that list of imaginary eras in their history. This is wrong of both Canada and France. Just saying.

    August I started with 94,025 pages viewed from a reported 51,658 unique visitors. I’d had 212 posts to date, and a total of 488 comments. This works out to an average 2.3 comments per post, just like they were at the start of July. There were 1,318 total likes, for an average of 6.2 likes per posting. That’s down form 6.4 likes per post at the start of July. I published a total of 20,229 words (as they count words) over July, for a total of 138,259 words so far this year. That’s an average for the year of 652.2 words per post, rather close to the start of July’s 652.1. And it’s an average of 652.6 words per post in July, for whatever good that is. By the way when I started this I always figured 700 words was about what I could hope to do once a week for the long-form piece. So I have a lead about why I sometimes feel like I have run out of words to put to my own purposes.

    If you’d like to follow Another Blog, Meanwhile, I won’t stop you. Here’s the RSS feed so that you can read it in the manner you find most convenient. You can also add it to your WordPress Reader by clicking the button on the upper right corner of the page which promises to add it to your WordPress Reader. I’m @Nebusj on Twitter, ad if you spot me on Pinterest it’s because I looked for an image of something and now can’t get it, even though it’s right there. Thank you.

    Two people were searching for “mary worth snarks” here. While yes, I do snark on the story strips, I like to think I do that from a place of affection, and after taking the story with sincere interest. Someone (else?) was searching for “nebus hot” and thanks, my love, for that. Oh, wait, the Isle of Man is nowhere near any Channel Islands. I mean unless you’re comparing it to, like, how close Isla de los Estados, Argentina, is.

    Statistics June: What Was Popular Around Here, And How Much


    Since the month’s off to some kind of start I can try the one essay each month that I know exactly how to write and don’t have to do hard work for. Its problem: was anything popular here and, if so, how much? After several months in a row of pretty good-sized readerships I’ve been expecting a collapse, but that may just be that I got a cold this weekend and it’s left me in a fowl mood. But WordPress is the actual authority on readership data that I’m sure they don’t make up for any weird, inscrutable reasons. Let’s look.

    June 2018 views: 3,454. Visitors: 1,791. Views per visitor: 1.93. Posts published: 30.
    Readership figures from August 2016 through June 2018, with a little bitty stub of July 2018 poking into things. Also, since I’ve talked about having an ‘Insights’ tab, you readers who don’t manage your own WordPress blogs should at least get the chance to see that there is too such a tab and that I don’t just make up every single one of these numbers. Oh, hey, my views-per-visitor is up from May’s 1.72. That’s a good thing, right? I guess?

    OK, then, so the number of page views rose to 3,454, beating May’s 3,227. Not quite beating April’s 3,590. But still, that’s all year now that I could expect about 3,500 page views. Through 2018 I think the major pieces of my blog have been a story strip reviews on Sundays, the cartoon reviews Tuesdays, long-form pieces on Thursdays, and a Statistics Saturday with some silly little list then. Apparently, that’s a nice, stable writing plan. Now if I could do something for Mondays that anyone cared about.

    172 things got liked around here in June. There were 175 likes in May, and 177 likes in April, so I’m getting very marginally less likeable over time. This matches my experience with the dwindling number of people who visit me. But again, I’ve got a cold so it’s spoiled my whole attitude toward everything.

    56 comments through the course of June, which is up again; there’d been 54 in May and 43 in April. Also looking at the monthly reports tells me there were 148 comments in January and that’s so hard to imagine. I think so much of my writing here as being stuff that people look at, acknowledge as existing, and then get on without worrying further about. I need to leave more nerd-bait around so people will come in trying to correct my obvious mistakes.

    Recapping story-strips has been very good for my readership. The top essays in June were all comic strip explanations:

    Meanwhile my most popular bit of original non-review writing was The Great Lottery Experiment, which gratifies and surprises me. It’s a bit of microfiction and was a whim turned into four paragraphs. I should do more of those, but I didn’t expect the first one to happen, so who knows how to get more? My most popular long-form piece was Some Astounding Facts About Summer, and I’m glad for that too. I had fun with that piece.

    That’s enough fun. Now how about the running of the countries that sent me readers at all? There were 71 of them in June, down from May’s 78 and April’s 76. There were 22 single-reader countries, down from May’s 25 and up from April’s 21.

    Country Readers
    United States 2,643
    India 191
    Canada 96
    Italy 65
    United Kingdom 63
    Australia 56
    Germany 38
    Philippines 27
    Mexico 18
    South Africa 17
    Spain 13
    Brazil 12
    France 12
    Romania 10
    Singapore 10
    Sweden 10
    Egypt 9
    Finland 8
    Ireland 8
    Japan 6
    Malaysia 6
    Norway 6
    Netherlands 5
    Switzerland 5
    Turkey 5
    Jamaica 4
    Kenya 4
    Nigeria 4
    Saudi Arabia 4
    Argentina 3
    Austria 3
    Denmark 3
    European Union 3
    Hong Kong SAR China 3
    Pakistan 3
    Peru 3
    Poland 3
    Portugal 3
    Puerto Rico 3
    South Korea 3
    Belgium 2
    Bosnia & Herzegovina 2
    Bulgaria 2
    Chile 2
    Iceland 2
    Indonesia 2
    Israel 2
    Ukraine 2
    United Arab Emirates 2
    Algeria 1
    Bahamas 1
    Bangladesh 1
    Barbados 1
    China 1 (**)
    Colombia 1
    Ecuador 1 (*)
    Fiji 1
    Georgia 1
    Honduras 1
    Hungary 1
    Jordan 1
    Kuwait 1
    Morocco 1
    New Zealand 1
    Slovenia 1 (***)
    St. Vincent & Grenadines 1
    Taiwan 1 (*)
    Thailand 1 (**)
    Trinidad & Tobago 1
    Tunisia 1
    Vietnam 1

    So Ecuador and Taiwan have been single-reader countries two months running now. China, three months running, although there’s so many people there I would have thought a second would run across the site here just by accident. Thailand’s also a three-month single-reader country, but that’s got fewer people than China, based on a quick show of hands. Slovenia’s into its fourth month with a single reader each month. This is getting confusing. What happened to the months where there’s six countries on a two-month streak, one on a three-month streak, and then Colombia was a single reader for 18 months running? Also, I’m curious what the Slovenians are looking at. I’m also curious about the readership in India, which rose like fifty people from May. And hurt that my Canadian readership dropped by a couple dozen people. I hope that roster of Fictional Canadian Provinces or Territories will help put things right and that someone will send me a box of Wunderbar candies.

    Insights figures I started the month with 91,043 page views from 50,089 unique visitors and I apologize for missing visitor number 50,000. You were definitely a person there and I hope you enjoyed your visit! Also numbers 49,998 and 50,003. Number 50,006 I’m not so into because I know she was just checking in to see whether I was saying something snide about her.

    As of the start of July I’ve published 118,030 words here, so I look on course to have my most verbose year yet. There were 181 total posts, gathering 411 comments in total and accumulating 1,154 total likes. That’s an average of 2.3 comments per post, and an average 6.4 likes per post. I had been at 2.2 comments per post at the start of June. But I’d also been at 6.5 likes per post in early June, too.

    For the year so far I’m averaging 652.1 words per post, again down from the start of June’s 659.8 and the start of May’s 682.3. Yes, you wonder what I’m doing with all these saved words. I keep some of them in reserve against a wordage shortfall. And of course lend them out, when friends need. I’m happy to be able to help, when folks need.

    With all this in mind, are you interested in reading Another Blog, Meanwhile regularly? You can add it to your WordPress reader by clicking the button on the upper right corner of this page. Here’s the RSS feed, if you want to read this page without my ever knowing you’re doing it. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, here I am. I announce new posts for here and for my mathematics blog there. Sometimes I even talk with friends there, although not so much lately, because I’ve had a cold and been very tired and would like to go upstairs and sleep through to July now. … It’s already July? … well, through to next July then.

    …

    benchley re opera, 1. cartoon asian old men naked, 1
    This is actually from the description of things people searched for today, as I write this recap. But there’s so rarely anything interesting in the search terms that I have to notice when there is something peculiar in there.

    Why did I have someone searching for “cartoon asian old men naked” getting to my site here? The heck? What did you find? Was it what you hoped for?

    Statistics May: What Readership Around Here Was Like So Recently


    And now let me pause to figure out how many people read something or other on my humor blog in May. I’m guessing that the Nancy boom has worn off. You can’t count on exciting comic strip news like that every month.

    OK, so it’s wearing off slowly, at least. It was another month of more than three thousand readers. It’s dropped again, a little bit, but the readers are still around. There were 3,227 page views recorded, down from April’s 3,590 and March’s 3,773. This came from 1,871 unique visitors, down not so much from April’s 1,988 or March’s 1,917. There were 175 likes registered in May; in April there were 177. This does nothing to dissuade me from thinking WordPress is making stuff up. My humor blog had 73 likes in both March and April. I know, right? It was a slight bit chattier here in May than in April. 54 comments, up from 43, but down from March’s 84. I think comments are going to pick up, though. In the story strip summaries we’ve got Judge Parker and Spider-Man coming up this month. And Gil Thorp might well draw a response from someone, considering.

    Bar chart for the blog's readership, which was rising steadily to about 2,000 per month through December 2016 and then leapt up to the three-to-four-thousand range.
    Most boring game of Tetris on record. By the way, are they still going ahead with pretending they’re going to make a Tetris movie or have they given up on that? Or has the movie come out and we’ve forgotten it already? Were they ever planning to make a movie out of the game Candy Land? Doesn’t that seem like one that there should have been?

    So what all was popular in May? The biggest thing was me grousing about a truly awful footer to the vintage Thimble Theatre strips on ComicsKingdom. I suspect that somebody popular referenced my dazed and ironic reading of those awful Kabibble Kabaret alleged jokes that Harry Hershfield inflicted on a country already plunging into the Great Depression. The top five posts of the month:

    As happens, the Spider-Man and the Gasoline Alley posts were to specific essays and I’ve changed the URLs to the tag links. They’re from before May, it happens. The most popular thing I wrote in May was What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Muffins And Despair. February – May 2018. I’m glad. I liked writing that one, much as some of the subject matter got bad. My most popular original long-form piece was in there eventually, What They Found Inside City Hall. My hypothesis is that one found that sweet spot of being about something relatable, being much more true than people realize (there legitimately is a hole in an upper-floor bathroom from which you can peer down through many storeys), and got refreshed each Monday with some extra bit of preposterousness. The state’s spite building and the walled-off escalator are for real too.

    78 countries sent me readers in May. There were 76 doing so in April, and 75 in March, so I guess we’ve run out of countries in the world. Here’s that part of the world:

    Country Readers
    United States 2,491
    India 142
    Canada 136
    United Kingdom 72
    Germany 35
    Australia 33
    Spain 31
    Sweden 25
    Denmark 15
    Malaysia 15
    Finland 14
    Netherlands 12
    France 11
    Italy 11
    Brazil 9
    Japan 9
    Norway 9
    South Africa 9
    Mexico 7
    Botswana 6
    Hong Kong SAR China 6
    Philippines 6
    Poland 6
    Portugal 6
    Indonesia 5
    Singapore 5
    South Korea 5
    Chile 4
    Egypt 4
    Israel 4
    New Zealand 4
    Russia 4
    Austria 3
    Bangladesh 3
    Belgium 3
    European Union 3
    Ireland 3
    Puerto Rico 3
    Romania 3
    Turkey 3
    Argentina 2
    Bulgaria 2
    Colombia 2
    Croatia 2
    Czech Republic 2
    Macedonia 2
    Peru 2
    Serbia 2
    Trinidad & Tobago 2
    Ukraine 2
    United Arab Emirates 2
    Uruguay 2
    Vietnam 2
    Brunei 1
    China 1 (*)
    Cyprus 1
    Dominican Republic 1
    Ecuador 1
    El Salvador 1
    Greece 1
    Iceland 1
    Jamaica 1 (*)
    Kenya 1
    Latvia 1 (**)
    Lebanon 1
    Madagascar 1
    Malta 1
    Nepal 1 (*)
    Pakistan 1
    Palestinian Territories 1
    Panama 1
    Saudi Arabia 1
    Sint Maarten 1
    Slovenia 1 (**)
    Sri Lanka 1
    Taiwan 1
    Thailand 1 (*)
    Zambia 1

    There were 25 single-reader countries for May. That’s up from 21 in April and back to March’s 25. China, Jamaica, Nepal, and Thailand were single-reader countries in April. Latvia and Slovenia have been single-reader countries two months running now. The United States readership dropped a couple hundred people, and Canada’s a bit. But the India readership nearly doubled. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

    Insights says I start June with 87,587 total page views, from 48,298 unique visitors. It tells me that this year I’ve published 99,521 words through the start of June — so the 100,000th was somewhere in yesterday’s long-form piece. I’m not interested enough to figure out which word that was. But there’ve been, to the start of June, 151 total posts, which gathered 340 total comments and 982 total likes. This implies I had 16,968 words published since the last statistics review for the month, and that for May I averaged 565.6 words per post. (And add to that the 10,836 words I put on my mathematics blog and I’m writing at a rather good clip. And you see why I don’t feel guilty never making a NaNoWriMo attempt.)

    For the year I’m averaging 659.8 words per post. That’s down from the start of May’s 682.3 words per post. Good. I’ve needed to save the time. I’m now at an average of 6.5 likes per post for the year, down from 6.7. These decimal points are going to kill me. I’m still averaging 2.2 comments per post and there seems to be no affecting that.

    If you’d like to follow Another Blog, Meanwhile, I’d be glad if you did. You can add it to your WordPress reader by clicking the button on the upper right corner of this page. Here’s the RSS feed, if you want to read this page without my ever knowing you’re doing it. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, here I am. I announce new posts for here and for my mathematics blog there, and sometimes I even talk with friends. You know how that is.

    Statistics April: Nancy Turns Out To Be A Gift To Me


    All right, so, I have my reasons to suspect that the new artist doing Nancy will have caused strange things to happen to my readership statistics. Let me just check here.

    Yeah, OK, so that’s roughly what I figured. There were 3,590 page views around here in April. Down from March’s 3,773 but still. That’s four months in a row I’ve been above 3,590. This is going to go so to my head. There were 1,988 unique visitors as best WordPress can tell; that’s the greatest number of unique visitors since Apocalypse 3-G. Still hasn’t quite broken 2,000, though. There were 1,917 in March and 1,982 in February and there we go. I need to troll more obviously for unique readers.

    The reader-engagement stuff dropped again. A mere 177 likes in April, down from 241 in March or 207 in February. The number of comments plummeted to 43, down from 84 and in February 121. With this trend I can expect May to see eight comments. That sounds about right.

    Bar chart of readership figures, with four months in a row of total views between 3,500 and 4,000.
    It just looks so adorably like the Central Business District is building a whole mess of new skyscrapers. I think it’s got a better composition than last month’s chart had.

    So why do I say the new Nancy brought me readers? First, here’s the top five posts from the month:

    So I know some of what happened. The new Nancy is getting a lot of comment, including from the Onion’s AV Club. I expect that the AV Club articles about Nancy have as related posts Apartment 3-G talk, and that would bring some attention to my updates about how nothing was happening in the strip before the strip stopped happening altogether. A lot of the most popular posts after the top five were Apartment 3-G-related, or features of other comics. The most popular piece that wasn’t about comic strips was In Which My Calendar Wants Me To Do The Unthinkable, and that was like the 218th most popular posting in April. The most popular long-form original piece was If It Is Not The End Of The World, and that wasn’t all that well-liked. The most popular statistics piece was What Textbooks You Need To Major In Mathematics so at least amusing exactly myself works for some people.

    There were 76 countries sending readers here, which is way over March’s 75 or February’s 70. Of those countries 21 were single-reader ones, down from 25 but up from February’s 18. I don’t know what’s happening there. Still, here’s the roster of them:

    Country Readers
    United States 2,882
    Canada 148
    India 71
    United Kingdom 70
    Brazil 29
    Australia 27
    Germany 26
    South Korea 22
    France 19
    Singapore 18
    Italy 17
    Mexico 11
    Norway 11
    Denmark 10
    Finland 10
    Indonesia 10
    Russia 10
    Spain 10
    Sweden 10
    Switzerland 10
    Portugal 9
    Romania 9
    Hong Kong SAR China 8
    Netherlands 8
    Philippines 8
    Ireland 7
    Israel 7
    Serbia 7
    United Arab Emirates 7
    European Union 6
    Hungary 6
    Poland 6
    South Africa 6
    Chile 5
    Japan 5
    New Zealand 4
    Trinidad & Tobago 3
    Turkey 3
    Argentina 2
    Bangladesh 2
    Bulgaria 2
    Czech Republic 2
    Estonia 2
    Greece 2
    Kenya 2
    Laos 2
    Lebanon 2
    Lithuania 2
    Malaysia 2
    Pakistan 2
    Sri Lanka 2
    Taiwan 2
    Ukraine 2
    Venezuela 2
    Vietnam 2
    Austria 1
    Cambodia 1
    China 1
    Costa Rica 1
    Egypt 1
    Georgia 1
    Ghana 1
    Guam 1
    Iraq 1 (**)
    Jamaica 1
    Latvia 1 (*)
    Macedonia 1
    Mauritius 1
    Montenegro 1
    Myanmar (Burma) 1 (***)
    Nepal 1
    Puerto Rico 1
    Slovakia 1 (*)
    St. Kitts & Nevis 1
    Thailand 1
    Uganda 1

    I’m surprised to see how much the United States readership dropped (3,111 in March to 2,882 in April) and that other countries picked up most of the readership gap. Latvia and Slovakia were single-reader countries for the second month in a row. Iraq for the third. Myanmar/Burma is on its fourth month on this single-reader streak.

    Insights tells me that as of right now — the 1st of May, with that piece about old-time-radio-based movies being on TCM — I’ve had 121 posts so far this year, drawing 265 total comments and 812 total likes. My word total is up to 82,553, indicating I wrote 18,630 words for here. Add to that the 8,494 words I wrote for the mathematics blog and I ground out 27,124 words for my WordPress blogs. That sounds impressive until you consider how many of those words were either “well”, “just”, or “since”. (7,422 of them.)

    The Insights panel says my average post has been 682.3 words. At the start of April that was 687.3. The average post got 6.7 likes, down from 7. The average number of comments was 2.2 per post, same as through the end of March.

    I’d like to invite you to keep reading Another Blog, Meanwhile. I haven’t turned on the subscribe-by-e-mail option, although I’m considering it. You can add this to your WordPress reader by using the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button in the upper right corner of the page. There’s an RSS feed of articles that you can use too. There’s also an RSS feed of comments although I don’t know why that’s an option. I suppose for blogs that get to actually discussing things in depth. And finally over on Twitter I’m @Nebusj and I do try to announce new posts when they’re ready. Thanks for reading and whatnot, all not-quite-two-thousand of you.

    Statistics February: Comic Strips Ending And Pondering Ray Davies Is Still Good For Me


    February 2018 turned out to be my third-best-read month around here. I am always excited to see people reading stuff here. I tell myself that’s because they like what they find, but there’s really no way of my telling that apart from looking at the number of likes they leave. But it’s there.

    Anyway, in February there were 3,695 page views here. That’s down from January’s post-Apocalypse 3-G high of 3,902 page views. Still, well up from December 2017’s 2,427. (The end of Apartment 3-G had 4,528 page views in November 2015, and that high is just about to drop off WordPress’s little traffic-view page.) And yes, I checked. If February were three days longer and those three days were as busy as the 28 that actually existed, I would’ve had a busier month. I’ll be filing a stern note with Numa Pompilius in the morning. And that is the kind of calendar-nerd joke that explains why I’m most popular when I’m talking about Gil Thorp.

    It was a broadly distributed popularity, too. WordPress logged 1,982 unique visitors, up even from January’s 1,671 and December’s 1,409. That’s my second-highest total ever. (The AV Club-boosted Apocalypse 3-G had 2,308 unique visitors, well beyond what I’d get at this pace even if it kept up another three days.) And whatever brought this about? I wrote about Ray Davies.

    And, more amazingly, the Kinks fan site Kinda Kinks noticed, and added the post to its roster of Kinks news, and described it so generically (“here’s a blog post about Ray Davies”) that apparently hundreds of Kinks fans clicked to see what that might even mean. The Ray Davies post got 454 page views in February, enormously more than usual for even popular stuff. The second-most-popular post was about the comic strip Piranah Club ending and nobody really knowing what’s going on with Nancy,, and that drew about three hundred page views.

    So what was most popular, besides what I just said was? This was:

    (The Mary Worth report would definitely have made it to the top five had the month run a little longer.)

    It’s the rare month that any of my original long-form pieces are popular. Not sure I’ve had two of my pieces in the top-five since I began summarizing the story comics. But the Kinka Kinks boost is significant; that piece even got four votes in that little five-star rating thing. My typical post gets no votes. Maybe one. I’m not even sure why I have the five-star voting thing, but I see it on other people’s blogs and they always have around 80 votes and 65 likes per post.

    So, countries that gave me readers. The United States always sends the most. The United Kingdom sent more than usual, thanks to all that Kinks business. Here’s the whole roster:

    Country Readers
    United States 2805
    United Kingdom 194
    Canada 127
    India 68
    Germany 56
    Netherlands 45
    Australia 44
    Sweden 38
    France 19
    Philippines 19
    Spain 19
    Denmark 18
    Brazil 17
    Serbia 16
    Italy 15
    Norway 15
    Portugal 14
    Ireland 10
    Mexico 10
    Belgium 7
    Singapore 7
    Turkey 7
    Austria 6
    Indonesia 6
    Venezuela 6
    Finland 5
    Greece 5
    Japan 5
    Malaysia 4
    New Zealand 4
    Romania 4
    Slovenia 4
    South Africa 4
    Switzerland 4
    Ukraine 4
    Côte d’Ivoire 3
    Hong Kong SAR China 3
    Pakistan 3
    Poland 3
    Russia 3
    Slovakia 3
    Trinidad & Tobago 3
    Argentina 2
    Belarus 2
    Estonia 2
    European Union 2
    Guyana 2
    Hungary 2
    Israel 2
    Paraguay 2
    South Korea 2
    Uruguay 2
    Bosnia & Herzegovina 1
    Colombia 1 (******)
    Croatia 1
    Cyprus 1
    Egypt 1
    Gibraltar 1
    Honduras 1
    Iraq 1
    Kuwait 1 (*)
    Mauritius 1
    Myanmar (Burma) 1(*)
    Nepal 1
    Panama 1
    Puerto Rico 1
    Taiwan 1
    Thailand 1
    Vietnam 1
    Zimbabwe 1

    This was 70 countries all told, if we just let WordPress decide what is and isn’t a country. 18 of them were single-reader countries. In January there were 72 countries; there were 61 in December. There were 21 single-reader countries in January; 18 in December. Kuwait and Myanmar/Burma were single-reader countries last month. Colombia has been a single-reader country for seven months straight now. I’m curious to see how long that can last.

    Oh, yeah, for what people like: 207 things in February, a little below the 226 liked in January. Bit above the 182 things liked in December. Beats last summer’s doldrums, although it’s not really near how much stuff got liked as Apartment 3-G collapsed. (There were around 300 likes sent this way back then.) There were 121 comments in February, down a little from January’s 148, but that’s still a towering pile of reader engagement compared to December’s 59 or, like, last May’s ten.

    March started with the blog having gotten 76,999 unique visitors so some lucky person early on Thursday was the 77,000th and I didn’t even know it. There’ve been 42,522 unique visitors as of the WordPress servers’s start of March.

    The Insights panel says I’m still averaging two comments per post this year, and seven likes per post. That’s the same as January. To be more precise I’m at 2.3 comments and 6.9 likes per post and I’m not sure how close that is to January’s decimal points. I’ve dropped to an average 711 words per post from January’s 764 and let me tell you I am so enjoying the time saved in thinking of fifty unneeded words per day. I’m at 43,374 total words for the year so far, although that includes yesterday’s long-form piece which did come in at over 711 words.

    As traditional I’d like to remind you that I’m @Nebusj on Twitter. You can have Another Blog, Meanwhile sent to you by e-mail using the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile by e-mail” button at the center-right of the page. You can follow it in your WordPress reader by using the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button at the slightly-higher-center-right of the page. You can’t follow me on Vero because I don’t even know if that’s a thing. I just saw everyone on my Twitter telling me about how the company that runs it is despicable even by the standards of social media companies. I can’t keep up anymore. I’m going try to get the modern world to leave me alone and let me drink my tea.

    Statistics January: Cartoonists Dying Or Going Missing Is Good For My Readership


    I do like starting months with a recap of how many people read stuff around here the month before, and what was popular. I’m not sure I’ve ever used this to good ends, but it’s interesting reading when it’s there. So. I’m not precisely sure what happened, but January 2018 was my second-best month for readership — page views and unique visitors — ever. There were 3,902 pages viewed, and from 1,671 unique visitors. The only time I’d gotten more was in the Apartment 3-Gocalypse, when the Onion AV Club linked to me as “another blog, meanwhile” commenting on the sorry end of the strip. (Also last month I finally realized it would have been so much more graceful to call it Apocalypse 3-G. Ah well.)

    January 2018 readership: 3,902 views from 1,671 visitors; 227 likes; 148 comments. A weird outlying tower of readership that nearly but not quite matches November 2015 way at the other end of the graph.
    Can’t lie: I’m going to be sad when my little AV Club boost back in November 2015 finally times out of the monthly statistics view. I have no idea how to get graphs from earlier months and I suspect it’s not even possible. Also, I’ve accidentally created a bustling city skyline where most of the skyscrapers are clustered together but there’s this one place fifteen blocks away from downtown where some developer imagined they were going to start a new core part of the city right ahead of the massive recession that left the city flooded with empty offices for 20 years.

    It’s not hard to explain all this, given the most popular posts in January:

    So. Judge Parker has had an outburst of crazypants plot development and I’m a bit sad it’s so far down the rotation in my story strip review. Gasoline Alley has gone three months without a new daily strip, and a month without a new Sunday strip, and without any word from or about Jim Scancarelli and people are, naturally, nervous. (I’ve replaced the links for the What’s Going On In, which all went to my very first reviews of these strips, with the links for the category pages that always show the most recent recap or news, on the suspicion that’s what people are really looking for.) And then comic strips ending, or in the case of Nancy possibly ending, are always intriguing. Thinking About Mort Walker pretty clearly only missed the top five of the month because it had two days to attract readers. (My most popular original, long-form piece for the month was In Which I Discover A Way To Make A Modest But Respectable fondant Sum Of Money, all about the Peanuts page-a-day calendar that I still have not gotten, by the way.)

    I’m happy to pass on what I hear about the comic strips, especially the story strips, but I should emphasize that I don’t write any news about them. I just pass on what I hear from actually informed people. The story strip plot reviews I do, and I love doing them. But, like, it would take talking to a person to figure out what’s happened to Jim Scancarelli and I’m not up to that sort of work. I have a hard enough time not hiding from the clerk at fast-food places.

    And how about the listing of countries of the world? I’m glad to list them, because I’ve put together this nice little word-processor macro that makes the table all neat and pretty and I barely have to make any effort for it.

    Country Readers
    United States 3295
    Canada 99
    India 97
    United Kingdom 59
    Sweden 31
    Brazil 27
    Germany 25
    Philippines 22
    Australia 21
    Argentina 13
    New Zealand 12
    France 9
    Hong Kong SAR China 9
    Russia 9
    Italy 8
    Turkey 7
    Finland 6
    Indonesia 6
    Ireland 6
    Portugal 6
    Spain 6
    Japan 5
    Pakistan 5
    South Africa 5
    Thailand 5
    Ukraine 5
    Vietnam 5
    Austria 4
    Bangladesh 4
    Denmark 4
    Georgia 4
    Netherlands 4
    Norway 4
    Romania 4
    Hungary 3
    Kazakhstan 3
    Mexico 3
    Nigeria 3
    Serbia 3
    Venezuela 3
    Belgium 2
    Bulgaria 2
    Cape Verde 2
    Greece 2
    Jamaica 2
    Kyrgyzstan 2
    Lebanon 2
    Poland 2
    Slovakia 2
    Trinidad & Tobago 2
    China 1
    Colombia 1 (*****)
    Ecuador 1
    El Salvador 1
    Estonia 1
    European Union 1
    Guyana 1
    Kenya 1
    Kuwait 1
    Laos 1 (*)
    Lesotho 1
    Malaysia 1
    Maldives 1
    Moldova 1 (*)
    Montenegro 1
    Morocco 1
    Mozambique 1 (*)
    Myanmar (Burma) 1
    Saudi Arabia 1
    Switzerland 1
    Tunisia 1
    United Arab Emirates 1

    So that’s 72 countries altogether sending me readers. 21 of them were single-reader countries. There’d been 61 countries in December and 68 in November. There were 18 single-reader countries in December and 22 in November.

    Laos, Moldova, and Mozambique were single-reader countries in December 2017. Colombia has been a single-reader country for six months now and I’m starting to wonder who it is.

    Oh, yes, reader engagement. It was a good month for reader engagement, with 227 things liked around here, up from December’s 182 and November’s 165. Greatest number of likes since the boom times of 2015. It was also a very good month for engaging with comments, mostly Ray Kassinger: 148 comments all told, way up from December’s 59 and November’s 35 and the largest number of comments going back to September 2015, which is as far back as I can get out of WordPress. That’s like half the number of comments I got in all 2017. I like the trend, it makes me feel all pleasant and wanted and all that. Just tired thinking about it is all.

    Oh yeah, and I see on the Insights panel the report that for 2018, I’m averaging two comments, seven likes, and 764 words per post. And got to 25,217 total words so far. This all seems very high to me but they’re the ones with a computer, not me.

    February 2018 starts with Another Blog, Meanwhile having recorded 73,304 total page views, from 40,540 unique visitors. If you’d like to be one of them, good news: you are! And you can keep this up by hanging around here, or adding the Another Blog, Meanwhile to your WordPress reader to join the 811 who already had by the start of February. There’s the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button in the right column of the page here. Or you can follow by e-mail if you want to see what I schedule to post before noticing the weird, misplaced and unnecessary word that always turns out to be in the third paragraph. Thanks and we’ll see what turns up this month. And on Twitter I’m @Nebusj, and if you see me on Discord then at least one of us is hallucinating, since I’m not there and I don’t understand exactly what it is. Thank you.

    Statistics Friday: How Popular I Was In 2017


    WordPress used to make this nice little fireworks video to represent what blog readership was like over the year. It’d do a presentation with a firework for every post, spaced out the way your posts of the year were. And it’d compare your readership numbers and averages and peaks to the population that would fit inside various easy-to-understand concepts like baseball stadiums or buses full of people. If they did that for 2016 I missed the e-mail, and since I despair of them bringing it back this year I’ll just go ahead and report on the year’s statistics as I know them.

    2017 was the year that I embraced what Apartment 3-G coverage had taught me: people want story strips explained. So this year I did that, rotating among the twelve syndicated story comics that appear in actual newspapers as far as I know. I’m glad to do it. It gives me reason to pay more attention while reading my comics. I like writing summaries. I especially like doing that while keeping to a low-daisy diet. Avoiding reflexive, unconsidered snark while reviewing comics is good for my development as a writer. It’s probably better for the reader too. Not to dismiss snark; it’s a great rhetorical tool. It’s just reflexive snark that I want to avoid.

    I managed to post something each day in 2017 and I admit sometimes I had no idea how I would. That’s my fourth year straight posting something every single day, even if those somethings aren’t always big ones. Besides the What’s Going On In series I also stumbled into a review of all the available Talkartoons. I thought at first that might be a nice, easy, low-effort way to get something respectable posted once a week and that’s turning into a research monster eating me so, good work? I also brought the Another Blog, Meanwhile index to its conclusion after something like a year of drawing exactly two comments on it ever. One of them was from my love, who wanted to know what the heck it was even about. It was about me seeing how long I would find this random gibberish amusing. This turns out to be something like a year.

    In 2017 I got 24,695 page views, says WordPress. That’s way above my second-best year, 2015, when Apartment 3-G turned into such a fiasco. And both are better than 2016, when I resisted embracing my fate. You know, I’m probably going to want to find this in a convenient form later on so let me make a little table.

    Year Views Visitors Views Per Visitor
    2013 3,874 1,869 2.07
    2014 8,621 4,422 1.95
    2015 17,729 9,904 1.95
    2016 14,484 8,297 1.75
    2017 24,695 15,187 1.63

    2013 was the year I started the blog, in early February or so, and so that has a mere 335 posts. I’m curious about the steady decline in views per visitor, although I suppose with the large number of people apparently stopping in just to see what’s happening in one of the story comics there’s less reason for them to go archive-binging. That’s what I’m telling myself anyway.

    As I’d said, what people wanted to read around here was stuff about the story strips. What was most popular among that? I admit I was surprised. I guessed four of the comics that would be particularly asked about, but got one of the questions wrong. My top five essays, by page views, for 2017 were:

    Two of those essays were even posted in 2017! And yes, Has the comic strip _Momma_ come to an end? made the top ten. My most popular original-content longform piece of the year was Popeye Space Ark 2000 Pinball … I Don’t Even Know. Which I’m not sad about, since it’s funny. But it was more an act of recapping the crazypants backstory that pinball and video game artist Python Anghelo crated for the Popeye pinball machine. I didn’t have to bring much to it.

    If I haven’t missed something the long-form original piece from this year that got the most views was … nothing I would have guessed. It was Probably Not A Good Idea To Get Them Playing Diplomacy Though, based on a book I read about one of the earliest murders we have good, detailed investigative records for, the 1407 murder of Louis of Orleans. I guess that’s more naturally funny than it sounds like considering the whole affair ended in great national tragedy?

    Speaking of nations. I can do a list of countries by page views for the year. I make out that there were 128 countries sending me any readers at all. 22 of them were countries that sent out a single reader, and that was it, for the whole entire year. I wonder what I said to scare people off.

    Country Readers
    United States 18,672
    Canada 857
    India 742
    United Kingdom 658
    Australia 309
    Germany 309
    Brazil 254
    Philippines 189
    France 165
    Mexico 133
    Romania 133
    Sweden 122
    Spain 116
    New Zealand 112
    Italy 109
    Netherlands 101
    South Africa 99
    Russia 94
    Ukraine 68
    Norway 67
    Argentina 66
    Hong Kong SAR China 60
    Vietnam 59
    Ireland 58
    Poland 57
    Indonesia 54
    Singapore 48
    Japan 42
    Denmark 40
    Finland 38
    Hungary 36
    Malaysia 36
    Bangladesh 35
    Switzerland 34
    Austria 30
    Turkey 30
    European Union 29
    Israel 27
    Pakistan 25
    Belgium 22
    Greece 21
    Serbia 21
    Thailand 20
    Kenya 19
    Trinidad & Tobago 18
    Portugal 17
    South Korea 17
    Chile 16
    United Arab Emirates 14
    Cambodia 12
    Colombia 12
    Czech Republic 12
    Peru 12
    Lithuania 11
    Taiwan 11
    Armenia 10
    Georgia 9
    Madagascar 9
    Croatia 8
    El Salvador 8
    Kuwait 8
    Puerto Rico 8
    Slovakia 8
    Belarus 7
    Ghana 7
    Jamaica 7
    Laos 7
    Panama 7
    Bulgaria 6
    Egypt 6
    Estonia 6
    Iceland 6
    Lebanon 6
    Uruguay 6
    Moldova 5
    Nepal 5
    Nicaragua 5
    Venezuela 5
    Ecuador 4
    Guadeloupe 4
    Latvia 4
    Malta 4
    Paraguay 4
    Qatar 4
    Saudi Arabia 4
    St. Kitts & Nevis 4
    Tunisia 4
    Angola 3
    Barbados 3
    Bermuda 3
    Jordan 3
    Maldives 3
    Slovenia 3
    U.S. Virgin Islands 3
    Afghanistan 2
    Albania 2
    Algeria 2
    Bosnia & Herzegovina 2
    China 2
    Kazakhstan 2
    Luxembourg 2
    Macedonia 2
    Mongolia 2
    Mozambique 2
    Myanmar (Burma) 2
    Nigeria 2
    Bhutan 1
    Bolivia 1
    Cameroon 1
    Cape Verde 1
    Costa Rica 1
    Curaçao 1
    Cyprus 1
    Dominican Republic 1
    Ethiopia 1
    Fiji 1
    Haiti 1
    Libya 1
    Malawi 1
    Northern Mariana Islands 1
    Oman 1
    Palestinian Territories 1
    Réunion 1
    Sri Lanka 1
    St. Lucia 1
    Turks & Caicos Islands 1
    Uganda 1
    Zambia 1

    Won’t lie; I’m curious just what the single page some reader in Bhutan felt like reading. Also whether they were satisfied. I suppose not, or there’d have been more than the one page viewed.

    Oh, yes, and comparisons between page views and some easy-to-understand alternative. 24,695 pages is a lot of views. It’s more than the number of people who’d go on 8,231 Apollo-style lunar landing missions. It’s more than 69 times the number of people who flew on every space shuttle mission combined. It’s more than one times the number of people who lived in Rockaway Township, New Jersey, in 2010, although not so many as lived in Ridgewood, New Jersey. The 15,187 unique visitors is almost exactly equal to the 2010 population of Hopatcong, New Jersey, but not quite equal to that of Mantua Township.

    I hope that makes things easier to understand.

    Statistics Thursday: What Happened Around Here In December 2017


    And now I have just enough time and a free daily slot to review my readership figures from December 2017. It was a rough month for me, even by the standards of 2017, as our pet rabbit died partway through. We didn’t see any signs of it coming. And suppose our rabbit didn’t, either. It was also hard in that it came just shy of a year after our previous rabbit died. I gave serious thought to cutting down on posting and the reader sensitive to style might have noticed some trunk pieces pulled out to keep up my baffling schedule.

    Anyway, thanks for being here, and also thank you for kind words that I’m honestly not just trying to attract. I’m really properly here to look over how WordPress figures the blog here did.

    Grey Flemish giant sprawled out in the grass, with a harness and leash on him, peering from behind a few tall strands of grass.
    It’s very rare to find a rabbit who doesn’t mind showing you his care and instruction label like that. Also after this photo, if I remember right, he would scissor some of the longer strands of grass by biting them down, not to eat them, but just to have them trimmed down. He was peculiar. Yes, you’re right to want to fall into that shoulder fuzz.

    I start 2018 at 69,402 pages viewed, from what WordPress tells me are 38,869 unique visitors. That seems like a pretty good bundle of visitors. How many page views and unique visitors arrived in December 2017?

    2,427 of them, says WordPress. Page views, anyway. Which astounds me; that’s my highest monthly total since the Apartment 3-Gocalypse and my brief mention in the pages of the Onion’s AV Club. This came from 1,409 unique visitors, my third-highest total, after the end of Apartment 3-G and, for some reason, June of 2017. (There were a lot of people baffled by Judge Parker that month.) November 2017 had 1,805 page views from 1,049 unique visitors; October, some 2,151 page views from 1,337 visitors. My love mentioned bringing something I wrote up on a Facebook group, but I’m pretty sure hundreds of people didn’t follow that.

    The number of likes rose to 182, from November’s 165. That’s down from October’s 184. Still, the last three months are above the running average as I make it out. There were 59 comments, way up from November’s 35 and October’s 22. For that, it’s the fourth-greatest number of comments at least going back to August 2015. That, at least, I can explain: Roy Kassinger, of the web comic HousePets!, has been finding and commenting on articles I forgot were in the archive and I’m trying to not freak out thinking about what the heck I said when I gave the size of Rhode Island in football fields and stuff. I should probably do more of my posting from underneath the bed.

    What were the popular articles around here? Just about what you’d expect: explaining the story comics. Here’s what people wanted to read.

    • What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? and I’m using the URL that summons the most recent Rex Morgan, M.D. post because actually two separate articles for the comic were in the top-five and I should really be encouraging the Google Rank of the grouping that always points to the most recent essay.
    • What’s Going On In Judge Parker? and I’m putting in the URL that summons the most recent piece again, because I suspect people are going to be looking for the most recent entries.
    • What’s Going On In Mark Trail? and you know why I’m doing that again.
    • What’s Nude on Television which is one of those trifles that people really like and I don’t blame them.
    • Deflated which is all about that tire problem and that I’m glad people like because it was so ridiculous to live through.

    And what of the running of the countries? What places sent me how many readers? Fortunately, I’m told this, and can pass the news on to you:

    Country Readers
    United States 1973
    Canada 82
    India 51
    United Kingdom 45
    Australia 25
    France 18
    Germany 17
    Brazil 16
    Russia 15
    Spain 15
    New Zealand 8
    Romania 8
    Sweden 8
    Hungary 7
    Indonesia 7
    Norway 7
    Turkey 7
    Ukraine 7
    Vietnam 7
    Mexico 6
    Denmark 5
    Italy 5
    Japan 5
    Philippines 5
    Belgium 4
    Hong Kong SAR China 4
    Argentina 3
    Ireland 3
    Israel 3
    Lithuania 3
    Malaysia 3
    Singapore 3
    South Africa 3
    South Korea 3
    Armenia 2
    Bangladesh 2
    Finland 2
    Greece 2
    Malta 2
    Serbia 2
    Switzerland 2
    Taiwan 2
    United Arab Emirates 2
    Austria 1 (*)
    Cambodia 1 (*)
    Colombia 1 (****)
    Georgia 1
    Laos 1
    Latvia 1
    Lebanon 1
    Moldova 1
    Mongolia 1
    Mozambique 1
    Netherlands 1
    Nicaragua 1
    Paraguay 1
    Poland 1 (*)
    Portugal 1
    Réunion 1
    Trinidad & Tobago 1 (**)
    Tunisia 1 (*)

    That’s 61 countries, if I didn’t mess something up. Down from November’s 68 and October’s 70. 18 of them were single-reader countries, down from November’s 22 and October’s 21. I think this is a “long tail” thing.

    Austria, Cambodia, Poland, and Tunisia were single-reader countries in November. Trinidad & Tobago has been a single-reader country three months running. Colombia is going on five months with a solitary page viewed each month. Wouldn’t it be a kick if at this point they just check in once a month to see what I’m saying about Columbia, and I only say something about Columbia because they checked in? Anyway, they’ve now tied Cambodia’s streak from 2017 of single readership five months running. Yes, I find this interesting. I am also aware that I got a book about supermarkets for this past Christmas that is different from the book I got about the A&P supermarkets a couple Christmastimes ago.

    So one of my resolutions for this year is to get ahead of deadline on my writing here. And that’s looking good: I’ve got stuff planned for the next two weeks, not counting the Fridays when I put up some big piece and the Sundays when I post my Statistics Saturday pieces. If you’d like to join the 1,056 who’re subscribed to get this in your WordPress Reader, please use the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ link in the upper right corner of the page here. If you’d like to join the like two who get it by e-mail, please use the ‘Follow Blog Via E-Mail’ link in the not-quite-so-upper right. And if you care for Twitter, you could join the 251 people following me there as @Nebusj, where I’ve been trying to post more than just announcements of new essays here and on my mathematics blog. Thanks for visiting.

    Statistics Monday: What November 2017 Did For My Readership


    I apologize for running this so late, but I was dealing with car stuff Friday. I didn’t have the time, or the energy, or enough desire to not crawl into the gap where the old maple tree’s rotted away to curl up to go looking over my statistics. They’re probably close enough now.

    Might want to curl up again, though. My readership took a pretty big drop in November. I was below 2,000 page views for the first time in three months, and below 1,900 for the first time since April. It was nearly more dire than that: only 1,805 page views, compared to 2,151 in October and 2,126 in September. I’m curious what if anything explains this. I can’t imagine it’s the story comics rotating into a less-popular phase. November let me update people on the goings-on in Dick Tracy, Mark Trail, and Mary Worth. The first has lasting “did I miss something?” moments, and the other two are maybe the ironic-story-comics-reads now that Apartment 3-G has stopped happening.

    The number of unique visitors dropped too, to 1,049. This stays above the nice round number of a thousand, at least, although it’s the smallest monthly total this year. I guess it says good-ish things about the number of views per visitor, although I’m still startled by it.

    The number of pages liked was down, but not nearly so much: 165 likes were logged in November. There were 184 in October, but only 142 in September. This is still above the median for the year. The number of comments was up, too, to 35 from October’s 22. It’s close to September’s 38, and this is the third-highest total for the month. I know that’s juiced, though, by people sharing the origins of their blog names after I explained the title around here. I can’t do that every month, unless I start making things up. So now you know what next Monday’s bit is going to be.

    The most popular essays have been, as usual, comic strip coverage. Fair enough. None of my long-form pieces were even remotely popular in November. This was a bit startling. They were (nearly) all variations of the same premise, goofy this-day-in-history pieces, and apparently people weren’t having it. Well, I stand by the long tail, and that future generations will find them when looking up “historical events november 24” and wonder what the heck this is before going off somewhere else. And I rake in the page views. As for what was genuinely popular or even remotely wanted now:

    Those what’s-going-on posts are from the first time I thought to do a summary of recent plot developments in the strips. There’s a paragraph at the top of each to explain that more recent developments are covered at this other link, but I suppose it’s hard to resist the appeal of a subject line that exactly matches what people are asking the search engine. Kind of sorry I can’t just shuttle them right along to the page that’s probably more relevant to what they need to know, though. Maybe I need to retitle story strip posts as I supersede them.

    Now for the running of the big list of countries! I make out 68 countries sending me readers, if we accept “European Union” as one. There were 22 single-reader countries in November. And who were they? These:

    Country Readers
    United States 1354
    India 65
    Canada 60
    Germany 38
    United Kingdom 35
    Philippines 20
    Brazil 19
    Australia 18
    France 14
    Indonesia 14
    Sweden 12
    New Zealand 8
    Italy 7
    Netherlands 7
    Romania 7
    Russia 7
    Ukraine 7
    European Union 5
    Japan 5
    Mexico 5
    Turkey 5
    Denmark 4
    Guadeloupe 4
    Hong Kong SAR China 4
    Hungary 4
    Singapore 4
    Switzerland 4
    Vietnam 4
    Belgium 3
    Bermuda 3
    Estonia 3
    Ireland 3
    Malaysia 3
    Peru 3
    Portugal 3
    Argentina 2
    Armenia 2
    Chile 2
    Greece 2
    Israel 2
    Serbia 2
    South Africa 2
    South Korea 2
    Spain 2
    Thailand 2
    Algeria 1
    Austria 1
    Bangladesh 1
    Bulgaria 1 (*)
    Cambodia 1
    Cameroon 1
    Colombia 1 (***)
    Czech Republic 1
    Finland 1
    Jamaica 1
    Kazakhstan 1
    Kenya 1
    Nepal 1
    Norway 1 (*)
    Panama 1
    Poland 1
    Puerto Rico 1
    Slovenia 1 (*)
    Taiwan 1
    Trinidad and Tobago 1 (*)
    Tunisia 1
    United Arab Emirates 1

    October had 70 countries send me readers, and September 65. So, things are wobbling there. There were 21 single-reader countries in October, down from 24 in September. Again, wobbles.

    Bulgaria, Norway, Slovenia, and Trinidad and Tobago were single-reader countries last month too. Colombia’s been a single-reader country four months running now. I think they’re maybe going for Cambodia’s five-month record from this year.

    The month started at 66,974 page views, from something like 37,460 unique visitors. If you’d like to be among them, thank you, I’d be glad to see something unique out of you. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but, sheesh, the car thing is still dragging out. I don’t have the energy to be appealing.