readership – Another Blog, Meanwhile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (9 February)
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (16 February)
Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (23 February)
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (2 March)
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (9 March)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistics Saturday: How 2021 Treated My Humor Blog

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

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

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

Statistics 2020: How Last Year Treated My Humor Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How December 2020 Treated My Humor Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (12 January)
Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (19 January)
Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy
(26 January)
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (2 February)
Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (9 February)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (8th of December)
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (15th of December)
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (22nd of December)
Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (29th of December)
Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (36th of December)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the reading.

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

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

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

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (10 November)
Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (17 November)
Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (24 November)
Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays)
(31 November)
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (38 November)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Country	Readers
United States	5,677
India	262
Philippines	144
Canada	142
United Kingdom	113
Australia	102
Colombia	51
Germany	49
South Africa	43
Sweden	42
France	35
Spain	33
Brazil	29
Norway	28
Finland	24
Italy	24
Sri Lanka	22
Netherlands	21
Chile	20
Japan	18
Kenya	18
Malaysia	15
European Union	14
Greece	14
Belgium	12
Thailand	10
Austria	9
Mexico	9
New Zealand	9
Singapore	8
Hong Kong SAR China	7
Switzerland	7
Trinidad & Tobago	7
Turkey	7
China	6
Croatia	6
Denmark	6
Indonesia	6
Poland	6
Tanzania	6
Costa Rica	5
Nigeria	5
Peru	5
Romania	5
Russia	5
Serbia	5
Argentina	4
Cook Islands	4
Pakistan	4
Egypt	3
Saudi Arabia	3
Slovenia	3
South Korea	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Algeria	2
Bulgaria	2
Czech Republic	2
El Salvador	2
Ireland	2
Kuwait	2
Portugal	2
Taiwan	2
Åland Islands	1
Bahrain	1
Bangladesh	1
Congo – Kinshasa	1
Curaçao	1
Georgia	1
Guatemala	1
Israel	1
Libya	1
Morocco	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Puerto Rico	1
Turks & Caicos Islands	1
Vietnam	1
Zimbabwe	1

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

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

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

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

Thank you all for reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Country	Readers
United States	3,108
India	223
Canada	149
Brazil	135
United Kingdom	114
Australia	103
Philippines	99
Sweden	38
South Africa	34
Germany	32
Norway	31
Italy	27
Finland	26
Spain	25
Japan	23
Netherlands	23
France	15
Denmark	14
Nepal	14
Trinidad & Tobago	14
Mexico	12
Indonesia	11
Belgium	9
Portugal	9
Argentina	8
Singapore	8
Turkey	8
Colombia	7
European Union	7
New Zealand	7
United Arab Emirates	7
Hong Kong SAR China	6
Ireland	6
Switzerland	6
Thailand	6
Chile	5
Honduras	5
Malaysia	5
Peru	5
Slovenia	5
Venezuela	5
Fiji	4
Greece	4
Hungary	4
Qatar	4
Taiwan	4
Austria	3
China	3
Czech Republic	3
Ecuador	3
Guyana	3
Israel	3
Kazakhstan	3
Kuwait	3
Myanmar (Burma)	3
Pakistan	3
Poland	3
South Korea	3
Vietnam	3
Bulgaria	2
Egypt	2
Guadeloupe	2
Kenya	2
Nigeria	2
Puerto Rico	2
Romania	2
Russia	2
Belize	1
Bolivia	1
Costa Rica	1
Croatia	1
El Salvador	1
Iceland	1
Jamaica	1
Maldives	1
Mauritius	1
Paraguay	1 (*)

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

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

Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (6 October)
Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (13 October)
Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (20 October)
Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (27 October)
Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (3 November)

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

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

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

If you’d like to be a regular reader here, please click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page. Or if you’d rather read without being tracked, add the RSS feed for this page to your reader. If you don’t think you have a reader, get a free Dreamwidth or Livejournal account. You can add RSS feeds to your friends page from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn as you like. And my @nebusj Twitter account announces posts. Don’t try to contact me through it, though. Safari often refuses to let me see Twitter. I don’t know why, and I don’t know what the pattern is. Am I going to make the surely slight effort it would be to clear up the problem? No, not this year. Why would I want to see more Twitter than I already do? In 2020? Thank you for your understanding.

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

With the month started out I’d like to look at last month. I’d especially like to see that lots of people read and appreciated my writing the past month. But I’ll settle for a day where the post is easy to write.

According to WordPress there were 4,281 pages viewed here in August. That’s the fifth-highest month on record, which is nice. Most of those records have been in the past year; only November 2015, with 4,528 views, is an old high. And that is above the twelve-month running average of 3,969.6 views per month.

There were 2,454 unique visitors, which I think is the fourth-highest I have on record. It’s above the twelve-month running average of 2,311.2 unique visitors, though.

There were 104 things liked in August, above the running average of 96.3 and the biggest month for likes since January. There were also 38 comments, again beating the running average of 23.3. That’s almost as many as in May, so while this is nowhere near the heights of January 2018, it’s at least getting chattier.

What posts were popular last month? A lot of people wanting to know about comic strip artists changing. Also that months-of-the-year-in-reverse-alphabetical-order thing. But the most popular posts from August last month? These:

Why does Pluggers look different? Did Gary Brookins stop drawing Pluggers?
Vintage Phantom: I can see Aunt Elsie’s point
Why does Shoe look different? Is someone new drawing Shoe? (No; Gary Brookins is still drawing Shoe, as of today. I don’t know when he’s retiring.)
What Your Favorite Polygon Says About You which is a kind of silly I wish I could write at least once a month.
The Mystery Of The Call To Customer Service

78 countries sent me any readers at all in August, down from July’s 82 no significant amount. There’d been 77 of them in May and June. 18 of these were single-reader countries, down from July’s 28 but in line with May and June’s 20.

Country	Readers
United States	3,080
United Kingdom	218
India	198
Canada	142
Australia	69
France	51
Brazil	39
Philippines	38
Spain	27
Finland	23
South Africa	23
Germany	21
Hong Kong SAR China	21
Italy	20
Norway	19
Sweden	18
Trinidad & Tobago	18
Indonesia	16
Malaysia	16
European Union	13
Vietnam	11
Belgium	10
Ireland	10
Poland	10
Mexico	9
Netherlands	9
Slovakia	9
Guadeloupe	8
Taiwan	8
Thailand	8
New Zealand	6
Russia	6
Singapore	6
Switzerland	6
Chile	5
Peru	5
Serbia	5
Egypt	4
Japan	4
Kenya	4
Nigeria	4
Romania	4
South Korea	4
El Salvador	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Argentina	2
Brunei	2
China	2
Colombia	2
Czech Republic	2
Denmark	2
Ecuador	2
Honduras	2
Hungary	2
Lebanon	2
Tunisia	2
Turkey	2
Uganda	2
Ukraine	2
Uzbekistan	2
Zambia	2
American Samoa	1 (*)
Austria	1
Bhutan	1
Caribbean Netherlands	1
Dominican Republic	1
Ethiopia	1
Greece	1
Guatemala	1
Iraq	1
Jordan	1 (*)
Liechtenstein	1
Lithuania	1
Paraguay	1
Portugal	1
Puerto Rico	1 (*)
Slovenia	1
St. Lucia	1
Uruguay	1

American Samoa, Jordan, and Puerto Rico were single-view countries last month too. Lebanon bowed out of single-reader status after six months.

Which story comics do I plan to cover the next several weeks? Subject to breaking news, of course?

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (8 September)
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (15 September)
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (22 September)
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (29 September)
Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (6 October)

Whatever I do cover, and any news about any of the story comics, I’ll have in a post at this link.

And my overall plan remains to have a long-form essay Thursday Evening, Eastern Time. Some kind of Statistics Saturday post Saturday evenings, my dad’s favorite feature. Sundays, Popeye cartoons from the 60s. And then What’s Going On In the story comics on Tuesdays. The rest of the week I stare at my scraps file, trying to figure out whether “palindromedome” could ever be a thing. It’s not looking promising.

From the dawn of time to the dawn of September I’ve posed 2,769 things here. They drew a total 183,846 views from 103,497 unique visitors. WordPress figures I posted 15,621 words in August, an average of 503.9 words per posting. My average post, year to date, had 536 words.

If all this has convinced you to read my blog regularly, please click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page. Or if you’d rather read without being tracked, add the RSS feed for this page to your reader. If you don’t think you have a reader, get a free Dreamwidth or Livejournal account. You can add any RSS feed to your friends page from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn as you like. And I do have my semi-accessible @nebusj Twitter account set to announce posts, although I don’t get to read it most of the time. Contact me here if you need me to read what you say. I’m sorry it’s like that but I just don’t want to deal with fixing Twitter’s issues. You understand.

Statistics July: how July 2020 treated Another Blog, Meanwhile

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

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

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

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

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

Why does Mark Trail look different? Did James Allen leave Mark Trail? which I actually wrote before the James Allen strips ran out because I figured people were going to start searching for exactly that question. This is as much search engine optimization as I know how to do, and it doesn’t work.
What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why is The Phantom destined for an unmarked grave? May – July 2020
It looks like we’ve run out of James Allen _Mark Trail_ dailies
Meanwhile interrupting my thoughts every forty seconds
In Which I Learn Something Of Great Importance and I’m glad other people are delighted by this recognition.
Hardly everything there is to say about The Story of Brick
Statistics Saturday: Visible Comets Of My Lifetime

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (11 August)
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (18 August)
James Allen and Jack Elrod’s Mark Trail (25 August)
Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (1 September)
Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (8 September)

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

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

Statistics June: How June 2020 Treated My Humor Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? What was The Phantom doing at Trafalgar? March – June 2020 which was the most popular piece of any kind published in June.
Thoughts which was the most popular thing that wasn’t recapping or reviewing some other pop culture piece.
We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files which was the most popular long-form essay of the month. It had the benefit of being the first thing published in the month; I suspect the face brick piece is going to have longer legs, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (7th of July)
Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (14th of July)
Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (21st of July)
Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (28th of July)
Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant
(4th of August)

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

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

Statistics May: How the past month treated my humor blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (9th of June)
Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (16th of June)
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (23rd of June)
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (30th of June)
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (7th of July)

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

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

Statistics April: How That Month Treated My Humor Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which Color Paas Tablet Is Purple? Which is Red? Which is Pink?

Why does Mallard Fillmore look different now? What happened to Bruce Tinsley?

Statistics Saturday: The Months Of The Year In Reverse Alphabetical Order

What Is Going On With Mark Trail?

Why does Mark Trail look funny? Did something happen to James Allen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (12th of May)
Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (19th of May)
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (26th of May)
James Allen’s Mark Trail (2nd of June)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Who Told Mark Trail ‘Fetish’ Was A Word He Could Say? May – July 2018 which, I confess, when I named I figured was a subject line that would have lasting popularity.
What Is Going On With Mark Trail? which was my very first plot recap, from way back in 2016 — remember 2016? — and has accumulated search rank relevance by simple age.
Statistics Saturday: The Months Of The Year In Reverse Alphabetical Order which is in the top five yet again for no possible reason I can make out.
Norm Feuti’s _Retail_ comic strip is ending since people come to me for comic strip news that I get from The Daily Cartoonist instead.
Why does Mallard Fillmore look different now? What happened to Bruce Tinsley? which, see above. No word yet on what happened to Tinsley, but it is confirmed that Loren Fishman is the new artist.

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

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

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

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (7 April)
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker
(14 April)
Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man
(21 April)
Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop
(28 April)
Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays)
> (5 May)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistics February: How the past month treated my humor blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Allen’s Mark Trail (8th of March)
Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (15th of March)
Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (22nd of March)
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (29th of March)
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (5th of April)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (16th of February)
Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (23rd of February)
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (1st of March)
James Allen’s Mark Trail (8th of March)

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:

S J Perelman: Insert Flap ‘A’ And Throw Away
Statistics Saturday: The Months Of The Year In Reverse Alphabetical Order and boy I hope everyone who was looking for that knew what they were doing.
What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What’s The Plan To Kill Heloise Walker? July – September 2018
What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Who Told Mark Trail ‘Fetish’ Was A Word He Could Say? May – July 2018
What’s Going On In Mary Worth? How can you scam a Mary Worth character? January – April 2019

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:

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp
(12th of January)
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker
(19th of January)
Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s The Amazing Spider-Man
(26th of January)
Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop
(Groundhog Day of February)
Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays)
(Orthodox Groundhog Day)

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:

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (8th of December)
James Allen’s Mark Trail (15th of December)
Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (22nd of December)
Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (29th of December)
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (5th of January)

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:

Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s The Amazing Spider-Man (3 November)
Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (10 November)
Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (17 November)
Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (24 November)
Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (1 December)

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:

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays), 6th October.
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D., 13th October.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp, 20th October
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker, 27th October
Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s The Amazing Spider-Man, 3 November.

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:

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy 8th of September
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley, 15th of September
James Allen’s Mark Trail, 22nd of September
Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth, 29th of September
Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sunday continuity) 6 October

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:

Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s The Amazing Spider-Man reruns, 11 August.
Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop, 18 August.
Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (weekday continuity), 25 August.
Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant, 1 September.
Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy, 8 September.

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.

Rabbit, rabbit. pic.twitter.com/qDmb7NJNso

— Joseph Nebus (@nebusj) August 1, 2019

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:

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth and will Estelle ever send riotously large amounts of money to a scam artist ever again?

[ Back to GRIFFY, on his quest --- he enters the MARY WORTH strip! ] Jeff, on the phone: 'What should I do? There's this oddly drawn guy here, looking for a missing girl!' Griffy: 'I need so see Mary!' [ Soon ] Griffy: 'Morning, Ms worth! I'm from th' Zippy comic! Can we talk?' Mary Worth: 'Young man, you need help, all right. Th'kind only a MENTAL HEALTH professional can provide!' (Griffy, thinking) 'Uh-oh! I'm frozen in place and unable to speak under th'withering gaze of Mary Worth!!' — Bill Griffith’s **Zippy the Pinhead** for the 19th of August, 2002. I’m seriously considering using the last panel of this as my icon for What’s Going On In Mary Worth essays. There’s a similar, though less great, panel for **Judge Parker** and a fair one for **Mark Trail**. The one for **Apartment 3-G** would be great but that strip exists only in Vintage form anymore.

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) and whether The Phantom is able to punch some animal smugglers given that Mark Trail’s busy poking for gold possibly where those cultists were poking around The Phantom’s remote and inaccessible pillar of rock.
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. and a fantastically un-seeable dog.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp and how the phrase “too cool for school” turned a high school into an even more terrible, vicious, clique-ridden viper pit, plus what this did to one teenage girl’s volleyball scholarship.
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker and what Judge Alan Parker is doing with himself in jail like that.

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.

Rabbit, rabbit. pic.twitter.com/EmablrYSbx

— Joseph Nebus (@nebusj) July 1, 2019

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:

Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (week of the 9th of June)
Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (week of the 16th of June)
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (week of the 23rd of June)
James Allen’s Mark Trail (week of the 30th of June)
Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (week of the 6th of July)

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.

Rabbit, rabbit. pic.twitter.com/WugGqox2PA

— Joseph Nebus (@nebusj) June 1, 2019

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:

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (week of the 5th of May)
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (week of the 12th of May)
Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man Reruns (week of the 19th of May)
Joey Alison Sayers and Jonathan Lemon’s Alley Oop (week of the 26th of May)
Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (weekday continuity) (week of the 2nd of June)

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:

Rabbit, rabbit. pic.twitter.com/JEp5kc8a4s

— Joseph Nebus (@nebusj) May 1, 2019

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:

I Don’t Know Who’s Officially Writing Spider-Man Now which was posted in November 2018, shortly after Stan Lee died. And hey, now I know.
What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What’s that weird Bangallan Navy ship? December 2018 – March 2019. I think people mostly wanted to know about that weird helicopter-bearing ship that looks to be Australia’s own Ocean Shield.
What’s Going On In Alley Oop? What are the new writer and artist doing to Alley Oop? December 2018 – March 2019 The first plot update with a new creative team is always exciting.
What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird? I’m surprised seeing this. It’s been almost a year now, and the new Nancy has become the darling of an enthusiastic set of Internet comic strip readers. I would’ve thought the word had gotten out
What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? Which was my first-ever plot recap for this comic strip. It goes back to when Peter Parker was facing down Ronan the Accuser and Rocket Raccoon.

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:

James Allen’s Mark Trail (week of the 7th of April)
Karen Moy ad June Brigman’s Mary Worth (week of the 14th of April)
Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom, Sunday continuity (week of the 21st of April)
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (week of the 28th of April)
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (week of the 5th of May)

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:

What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird? Well, everybody’s heard about Olivia Jaimes by now, right?
I Don’t Know Who’s Officially Writing Spider-Man Now It’s Roy Thomas, but he’s still credited as “Stan Lee”.
What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What’s The Plan To Kill Heloise Walker? July – September 2018 which has got to be mostly people who are looking for my planned-for-Sunday recap of the most recent three months of this story. It’ll be up here soon, unless some other story strip has major news requiring attention.
What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Does the ham radio guy know what kind of plane this is? November 2018 – February 2019 which is finally a moment of people looking for story updates and getting the right essay for them! Yay!
Is the comic strip Henry ending? Is the comic strip Hazel ending? Yes and yes, if by “ending” you mean “ended”.

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.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (week of the 10th of March)
Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (week of the 17th of March)
Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (week of the 24th of March)
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (week of the 31st of March)
James Allen’s Mark Trail (week of the 7th of April)

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:

Gil Thorp (11th of February)
Judge Parker (18th of February)
The Amazing Spider-Man (25th of February)
Alley Oop (3rd of March)

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.

	Joseph Nebus on Longtime Phantom writer who…
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	Joseph Nebus on What’s Going On In Mark…

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