Statistics December: How The End Of 2018 Looked Around Here

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

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

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

I could totally have had my computer at the ready to take this screen shot at 00:01 Universal Time on the 1st of January except that I couldn’t think of any reason I would want to. The reason is it looks slick when the “current month” bar is completely empty. Maybe I could have edited that out of the image.

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

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

• What’s Going On In The Phantom (weekdays)? What’s the shortest Phantom story ever? September – December 2018
• What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Who’s Now Dead In Judge Parker? June – September 2018
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What’s The Plan To Kill Heloise Walker? July – September 2018
• S J Perelman: Insert Flap ‘A’ And Throw Away

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

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

• Gasoline Alley (week of the 6th of January)
• Mark Trail (week of the 13th of January)
• Mary Worth (week of the 20th of January)
• The Phantom (Sunday continuity) (week of the 27th of January)
• Rex Morgan, M.D. (week of the 3rd of February)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistics Monday: What Was Popular Here In November 2018

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

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

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

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

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

• Is the comic strip Henry ending? Is the comic strip Hazel ending?
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Who’s Now Dead In Judge Parker? June – September 2018
• What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? And What Happened To Jim Scancarelli?
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Is Something Happening In Apartment 3-G Suddenly? March – June 2018

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

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

• Alley Oop (week of the 9th of December)
• The Phantom (weekdays) (week of the 16th of December)
• Dick Tracy (week of the 23rd of December)
• Gasoline Alley (week of the 30th of December)
• Mark Trail (week of the 6th of January)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistics October: How Good It Is For Me When Longrunning Comic Strips End

Given the choice, I’d rather comic strips not end. Oh, there are strips I don’t like, even ones I won’t read. But for the most part, I like comics. I like them carrying on. I love it when a new creator comes in and revives a moribund property. But even something that’s just marking time is this comfortable, familiar friend for whom nothing exciting is happening, but nothing bad is happening either. And that’s consoling, especially in the face of a terrifying world.

So I expected the ending of Hazel and then Henry to bring readers here, since who else writes anything about either? Besides actual comic strip news sites. Still, people did come. Partly from the comic strip news. Partly spillover from my mathematics blog, which hosted the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival at the end of September. Give that a try, please. You might find something delightful there. Here’s how the figures worked out, precisely:

Yes, I am thrilled to be back above three thousand page views for the first time in four months.

WordPress tells me of 3,070 page views in October. That’s way up from September’s 2,644 and August’s 2,848. These views came from 1,681 unique visitors, again way up from September’s 1,436 but basically level with August’s 1,619. Still, there were 173 likes submitted around here in October. That’s basically the same as September’s 174, August’s 180, and really every month going back to April. It’s been in a 165-to-180 range all this time now. I don’t know. The number of comments jumped, up to 67, the highest figure since March. September had 50 comments and August 39. I’m trying to be comfortable with people talking to me.

Comic strip talk made up the bulk of my readership. Part of this is comic strip endings or major changes. Part of this is story strips getting really confusing. Here’s the top five posts for October:

• Is the comic strip Henry ending? Is the comic strip Hazel ending?
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Who’s Now Dead In Judge Parker? June – September 2018
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Is Something Happening In Apartment 3-G Suddenly? March – June 2018
• What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Why Is He Making So Many Nerd Movie Jokes? February – May 2018
• What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?

Yes, none of them actually published in October. My most popular thing actually published in October was In Which I Am Distracted By Ziggy For Crying Out Loud, a cry of despair provoked by paying too much attention to the art one strip. I had a lot of well-liked short pieces, by the way, possibly because I got into this good groove of having an amusing trifle and being able to put it down in 150 words. My most popular long-form piece was, like, the 814th most popular thing around here last month. That was Regarding The Time When I Had Too Much Desiccant, showing that what really amuses people is me somehow having problems with petty stuff.

Here by the way is my schedule for upcoming What’s Going On In The Story Strip posts. Subject to change if some fast-breaking news breakfasts:

• The Phantom (Sundays), week of the 4th of November.
• Rex Morgan, M.D., week of the 11th of November.
• Gil Thorp, week of the 18th of November.
• Judge Parker, week of the 25th of November.
• The Amazing Spider-Man, week of the 3rd of December.

I also have another seven weeks of recaps of The Stan Freberg Show to run. Don’t think I’m not already panicked about what to write about after that.

Now for the running of the countries. There were 69 countries, if you count the European Union as one and Trinidad & Tobago as one other. And Bosnia & Herzegovina as another one. In August and September there were 60 such countries. In August and September there were 16 single-reader countries. In October? 17. So I’m clearly in a growth spiral here. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	2,329
Australia	140
Canada	96
United Kingdom	54
Spain	53
India	47
Italy	31
Philippines	26
Germany	24
Japan	19
Brazil	18
Mexico	17
Hong Kong SAR China	16
Netherlands	13
Romania	13
France	12
Saudi Arabia	11
Sweden	10
Belgium	9
Finland	9
Denmark	7
Sri Lanka	7
Colombia	6
Pakistan	6
South Africa	6
Ireland	4
New Zealand	4
Norway	4
Peru	4
Singapore	4
Taiwan	4
China	3
Czech Republic	3
Latvia	3
Malaysia	3
Slovenia	3
Thailand	3
Zimbabwe	3
Chile	2
Ecuador	2
European Union	2
Greece	2
Indonesia	2
Nigeria	2
Poland	2
Russia	2
Serbia	2
Slovakia	2
South Korea	2
Turkey	2
Ukraine	2
Vietnam	2
Argentina	1
Austria	1
Bahrain	1
Bangladesh	1 (*)
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1
Croatia	1
Curaçao	1
Cyprus	1
El Salvador	1
Estonia	1
Kazakhstan	1
Luxembourg	1
Madagascar	1
Maldives	1
St Lucia	1
Suriname	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1

Bangladesh was a single-reader country in September. No other countries were, though, and no country’s sent me a single reader each month for three months running now.

According to Insights, by the end of October I had published 195,599 total words in 304 posts for the year. This is 643 words per post total, on average. I had been averaging 641 words per post at the start of October. There were 18,418 words published around here in October, over 31 posts. That’s up a little bit from September’s total, although really only because there were only 30 September posts. Huh. Anyway, I’ve had 742 total comments for the year, as of the start of November. 2.4 comments per post this year up from 2.3 at the start of October. 6.1 likes, on average, per post, the same number as at the start of October. 1,844 total likes so far this year, by the way, if you wondered.

November opened with the blog having had a total of 102,048 page views, from 56,394 unique visitors. And yes, I reached my 100,000th page view this past month, and celebrated it with a special Statistics Saturday post.

If you’d like to follow Another Blog, Meanwhile, please do. You can add it to your WordPress reader. You can add it by RSS reader, using whatever tool you like to read my content, and maybe even get the versions with the dumb typoes and grammatical errors not corrected out. And if you’d like to see me on social media, that’s your business. But I’m @Nebusj on Twitter, so that’s an option. Choose wisely.

Statistics Monday: How September 2018 Treated Another Blog, Meanwhile

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

I mean, it’s not all a steady little decline. The views-per-visitor was 1.84, up from 1.76 in August. But it was 1.90 in July, so, yeah, maybe let’s not talk about that either. Anyway it’s always in the range from 1.75 to about 2.00 page views for each visitor.

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

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

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

• What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? And What Happened To Jim Scancarelli?
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What’s The Plan To Kill Heloise Walker? July – September 2018.
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Is Something Happening In Apartment 3-G Suddenly? March – June 2018.
• What’s Going On In Alley Oop? Did Alley Oop End? June – August 2018.

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

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

• Week of 8 October: Dick Tracy.
• Week of 15 October: Gasoline Alley.
• Week of 22 October: Mark Trail.
• Week of 29 October: Mary Worth.
• Week of 5 November: The Phantom (Sundays).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 10th September: Judge Parker
• 17th September: The Amazing Spider-Man
• 24th September: The Phantom (weekday continuity)
• 1st October: Prince Valiant

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

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

I used to track the views-per-visitor but I never knew what to do with the information. I guess it’s nice that on average people look at more than one thing around here, at least.

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

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

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

• What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Is The Rat Dead YET? May – August 2018
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Is Something Happening In Apartment 3-G Suddenly? March – June 2018 I’m getting back to this strip. The story’s reached the point where Francesco Marciuliano has kicked the board over and is deciding what if any pieces he wants in play.
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? And What Happened To Jim Scancarelli? And by the way, that roast-of-Little-Orphan-Annie has been revealed to be a cover story. It’s actually an Old Comics Home celebration of Walt Wallet on the occasion of his 4,338th birthday.
• What’s The Deal With The Comic Strip Graffiti? Nobody knows.

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

• Everything There Is To Say About The History Of Tying Shoes
• Everything There Is To Say About Landing On An Asteroid
• Everything There Is To Say About Making Art
• In Which I Offer To Help Fix Australia’s Political Crisis
• The Long-Term Forecast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 2018’s page view and unique impressions count. My big old bustling downtown is looking less prominent, but just because there’s a lot of towers about the same height now.

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

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

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

• What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? And What Happened To Jim Scancarelli? (And you can get the most recent Gasoline Alley updates at this link.)
• What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? (And this link will have the most recent plot recap.)
• Has the comic strip _Momma_ come to an end?
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Is Your Podcast’s Mattress Advertiser Grenade-Proof? April – June 2018. (And again, the most current updates for both weekday and Sunday continuities will be at this link.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I Could Not Possibly Give An Answer

While I would like to have a definite answer about whether to forego the free tier of WordPress accounts, and try to set up shop on my own blogs with my own domain names and chance to customize every blessed thing in the world on the site — there’s few people second to me in debating whether tiny variations in typefaces look better — I’m also still in my third week of wondering whether it would in fact, and not just in theory, be a good idea to print out a sheet of what those inscrutable laundry-care label symbols mean and laminate it and put it by the washing machine. I mean, yes, the whole “clean off the little wooden table next to the washer and dryer so there’s some working space” was the best use of 40 minutes of my time in years. And yes, we have the laminator and spare plastic laminating sheets. But what if that turns out to be the wrong decision? So given that, you can understand why hosting my own site is a much harder thing to decide to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Is Something Happening In Apartment 3-G Suddenly? March – June 2018 (my post for the 11th of June, and which I’ve switched to the default Judge Parker tag so that page gets a slightly better Google ranking.)
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? And What Happened To Jim Scancarelli? (as above and, yes, it looks to me that the strip is back in new production and I have a recap scheduled for this month, three Sundays from now)
• What’s Going On With Judge Parker? (people really want to know about this possible Apartment 3-G reappearance)
• What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? (I’m sure people want to know this. But I think I’m accidentally clickbaiting people who want news about Stan Lee’s personal crises. I do now know these in any detail. They all look complicated and unhappy. Last report I know of is an article at the AV Club that I mostly just looked at the headline of and then felt bad about.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

Statistics May: What Readership Around Here Was Like So Recently

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

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

Most boring game of Tetris on record. By the way, are they still going ahead with pretending they’re going to make a Tetris movie or have they given up on that? Or has the movie come out and we’ve forgotten it already? Were they ever planning to make a movie out of the game Candy Land? Doesn’t that seem like one that there should have been?

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

• Something For Fans Of Bad Stuff (Seriously, Kabibble Kabaret is still showing up and it’s not getting any less dire.)
• What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man?
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? And What Happened To Jim Scancarelli?
• What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?
• S J Perelman: Insert Flap ‘A’ And Throw Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It just looks so adorably like the Central Business District is building a whole mess of new skyscrapers. I think it’s got a better composition than last month’s chart had.

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

• I Don’t Know What’s Going On In Apartment 3-G Anymore
• What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?
• Comic Strip Piranha Club Ending; Nancy Possibly Ending; Bizarro Shifting Bizarreness Source
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? And What Happened To Jim Scancarelli? (This was February’s update about not knowing what’s happened to Jim Scancarelli, not April’s update about not knowing what’s happened to Jim Scancarelli.)
• So You Tell Me Funky Winkerbean Was Written By A White Guy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistics March: As Apocalypse 3-G Disappears From My Monthly Stats Report

November 2015 was a great time for that part of me that’s interested in being read. Thanks to the passingly insulting intervention of Joe Blevins at The Onion’s AV Club I got 4,528 page views in one month as people wanted to know my thoughts about the end of Apartment 3-G. That readership peak has now disappeared from the normal monthly page view report. It’s still on the slightly secret one you can get at by using the old statistics page, but that’ll be gone next month. I have to put away past glories and content myself with present ones, as if we had glories in 2018.

But if I haven’t hit the peaks of 4,500 readers, I have hit a remarkable consistency: for the third month running there’ve been over 3000 page views here. March 2018 had 3,773 pages viewed, a bit up from February’s 3,695 and close to January’s 3,902. These came from 1,197 unique visitors, down somehow from February’s 1,982 but up from January’s 1,671.

What I don’t understand is why my mathematics blog shows figures going back to November 2015 while this only goes to May 2016. There’s something ridiculous going on.

What are people interested in? Apartment 3-G showed me the way. What folks want to know about is comic strips ending. Or, if they’re not ending, at least a recap of what’s going on. The five most popular things around here:

• Comic Strip Piranha Club Ending; Nancy Possibly Ending; Bizarro Shifting Bizarreness Source
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? And What Happened To Jim Scancarelli?
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? (I changed the URL to the tag page that always shows the most recent essay, since people were finding the first-ever Judge Parker essay I’d written and they should get something more current.)
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.? (As above, but for Rex Morgan. Also Rex got six fewer page views than Judge, but they’re uncannily similar anyway.)
• Why Does Mary Worth Look Different?

I’m glad to be of use to people. And by the way, it sure looks like Nancy is just being left to rerun strips indefinitely since Guy Gilchrist stepped down. But who knows the future? Maybe Hy Eisman will come on to do new Sundays.

Eventually, yes, stuff that I wrote that was me trying to be funny turns up, although I admit way down the list. My most-read anything from March was My Excuse For Not Being Able To Get Anything Done Today, an exercise in realizing there’s something about my childhood memories that doesn’t quite add up. My most popular long-form piece was February’s Is Ray Davies A Normal Person?. I expected that one to have long legs. Most popular long-form piece from March was How To Know It All which again gratifies me, since that’s one I really loved writing. I mean, I like nearly all my writing, but some pieces just feel closer to my heart. Any time I can nerd-snipe over rules of succession I am a creature of boundless joy.

So past that, what’s reader engagement been like? I feel pretty well engaged with reader Ray Kassinger, of the Housepets! web comic, so that’s something. More quantitatively, there were 241 pages liked in March, up from February’s 207 and January’s 226. So not all the trend is just that there’s more days in March than in February. The number of comments drooped, down to 84 from February’s 121 and January’s 148. But that’s still going fairly well and I’m hoping to answer everything that needed answers soon. It’s been a busy weekend.

75 countries sent me readers in March, again allowing WordPress to decide what is and isn’t a country. That’s up from February’s 70. 25 of them were single-reader countries, up from 18. And here they are:

Country	Readers
United States	3,111
Canada	107
United Kingdom	80
India	51
Italy	41
Australia	31
Sweden	24
Brazil	19
Germany	19
France	15
Denmark	13
Philippines	13
Spain	12
Jamaica	11
Norway	11
Romania	11
Indonesia	10
Austria	9
Israel	9
Japan	9
Hong Kong SAR China	8
Poland	8
Portugal	8
South Africa	8
Netherlands	7
New Zealand	7
Turkey	7
Belgium	6
Nigeria	6
Serbia	6
Singapore	6
Ukraine	6
Bangladesh	5
European Union	5
Hungary	5
Ireland	5
Russia	4
Switzerland	4
Colombia	3
Ecuador	3
Finland	3
Pakistan	3
Argentina	2
Bulgaria	2
Czech Republic	2
Dominican Republic	2
Malta	2
Mexico	2
Puerto Rico	2
Uruguay	2
Albania	1
Angola	1
Armenia	1
Azerbaijan	1
Chile	1
Croatia	1 (*)
Estonia	1
Iceland	1
Iraq	1 (*)
Jordan	1
Kenya	1
Kuwait	1 (**)
Kyrgyzstan	1
Latvia	1
Lithuania	1
Madagascar	1
Maldives	1
Moldova	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1 (**)
Nicaragua	1
Paraguay	1
Saudi Arabia	1
Slovakia	1
Slovenia	1
Taiwan	1 (*)

Colombia’s single-reader streak ends after seven months! There were three whole pages viewed from there. (I just know two of those people were skimming without paying attention though.) Croatia, Iraq, and Taiwan are on two-month streaks. Kuwait and Myanmar/Burma are on three-month streaks.

April starts with a logged 80,772 visits, from an admitted 44,439 unique visitors. I’m sorry to have missed number 44,444, who was there sometime April Fool’s Day. The WordPress Insights panel tells me that so far I’ve published 63,923 words (which includes stuff through to the 3rd of April, when I checked this), with 650 likes and 206 total comments since the first of the year. This comes to an average of 2.2 comments per post. At the start of March that was 2.3. At the start of March I got an average 6.9 likes per post. At the start of April that’s smoothed out to 7. The average post around here was, last time I checked my numbers, 711 words. As I check them this time, it’s 687.3 words. Yes, I’m skimping. I’ve been busy.

I can’t offer you the chance to follow Another Blog, Meanwhile by e-mail right now. I got a sudden rush of people with obviously fake names and four-digit suffixes from outlook.com e-mail addresses signing up. I don’t know what this means, but I know it’s something I shouldn’t be encouraging. In the meanwhile you can keep reading this through WordPress Reader, if you have one: use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button in the upper right corner of the page. If you feel more comfortable adding this to your RSS reader, here’s a link to do it. I understand. RSS does a lot of good for the world. I’m @Nebusj on Twitter, and announce everything I post over there unless WordPress’s auto-publicize thing has broken and I’ve been too busy to deal with that. Thanks for being around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Is Ray Davies A Normal Person?
• Comic Strip Piranha Club Ending; Nancy Possibly Ending; Bizarro Shifting Bizarreness Source
• Why Does Mary Worth Look Different?
• Interestingly, I Need Help
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can’t lie: I’m going to be sad when my little AV Club boost back in November 2015 finally times out of the monthly statistics view. I have no idea how to get graphs from earlier months and I suspect it’s not even possible. Also, I’ve accidentally created a bustling city skyline where most of the skyscrapers are clustered together but there’s this one place fifteen blocks away from downtown where some developer imagined they were going to start a new core part of the city right ahead of the massive recession that left the city flooded with empty offices for 20 years.

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

• What’s Going On With Judge Parker?
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley?
• Statistics Saturday: Which Side Of The Road Various Countries Of The World Drive On
• Comic Strip Piranha Club Ending; Nancy Possibly Ending; Bizarro Shifting Bizarreness Source
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistics Friday: How Popular I Was In 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• What’s Going On With Judge Parker?
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• Why Does Mary Worth Look Different?
• What Is Going On With Mark Trail?
• What’s Going On In Prince Valiant?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope that makes things easier to understand.

Statistics Thursday: What Happened Around Here In December 2017

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

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

It’s very rare to find a rabbit who doesn’t mind showing you his care and instruction label like that. Also after this photo, if I remember right, he would scissor some of the longer strands of grass by biting them down, not to eat them, but just to have them trimmed down. He was peculiar. Yes, you’re right to want to fall into that shoulder fuzz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistics Monday: What November 2017 Did For My Readership

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

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

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

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

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

• What’s Going On With Judge Parker?
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• Why I Call This ‘Another Blog, Meanwhile’
• Has the comic strip _Momma_ come to an end?
• What Is Going On With Mark Trail?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I Call This ‘Another Blog, Meanwhile’

My father mentioned how he likes my blog even if the doesn’t understand it, and how he sometimes skips the e-mail notices because he forgets what this “Another Blog, Meanwhile” is. Also one of his best friends mentioned he has no idea what the name means. So I thought I’d maybe best explain it some.

When starting out here I needed a name. You can’t just go out leaving your WordPress blog nameless, because their servers hate dealing with “[ eventually, a small cough ].wordpress.com”. But I didn’t have any good names. I didn’t know what the tone and focus of the blog would be. My guess was I’d have some idea after writing it a while. A catchy name picked too early wouldn’t fit. And it’s not like my actual name lends itself to any wordplay. Go ahead, try and think of wordplay based on “Nebus”. The only one that has ever existed was way back when I was an undergraduate at Rutgers, and the inter-campus buses had a blizzard of lettered routes. So you could try to do something with the E-bus, the EE-bus, or maybe the B-bus.

At that, when I was at Rutgers, the humor editors for the unread leftist weekly I was on named their section “about herring”. The title was drawn from a section header in the Joy of Cooking and more self-confidence than I have ever had. Whimsy is dangerous. My only whimsical touches I ever think work are the ones nobody else even notices. I don’t want to pick a fight with my readers about whether the blog has a funny name. I’m too busy trying to insist there’s something funny comparing when things happened to the Battle of Manzikert.

So I went with “Joseph Nebus’s Sense Of Humor”. As a title it’s boring, but at least it’s not interesting. And nobody could say I was posting something outside the character implied by the title. Except my father, who’s also a Joseph Nebus, but it turns out we mostly find the same stuff funny anyway. And I figured if I found the blog’s true identity I’d know it.

The real focus of things around here developed when Apartment 3-G dissolved into the aimless, plotless wandering of shabbily drawn faces on random backgrounds occupied by lamps. I was fascinated. I got into explaining how much nothing was happening in Apartment 3-G. And when the comic strip was finally, mercifully, put down The Onion AV Club recapped the bloggers who were talking about the strip. Joe Blevins, a guy I knew back in the days we had a Mystery Science Theater 3000 community, mentioned my blog twice without ever actually saying my name. He started one mention of it by saying “Another blog, meanwhile, used the death of Apartment 3-G to speculate on the future of newspaper comics in general” and went on to quote a whole paragraph. It drew thousands of people to my blog, all of whom left shortly after.

But look at that start of “Another Blog, Meanwhile”. It’s dull enough that it never gives a hint that it’s an obscure joke. And it’s a daily reminder that the moment I got noticed by the Big Time they only kind-of noticed and didn’t even get my name in. It’s perfect. I had my blog’s identity, and it was talking about the story strips people just assumed had been cancelled in Like 1984. From this, I had my name. It isn’t much, but it’s something I don’t have to think about often, and that’s what I truly need.

Statistics October: How That Slice Of 2017 Worked Out For Me

I shouldn’t complain about my readership in October 2017. It was up a little bit from September and August, for one thing. There were, WordPress says, 2,151 page views the past month here. This is up from September’s 2,126 and August’s 1,965. 2151 is also special for being one of the years named on-screen in Star Trek, although to be fair, only Enterprise. The number of unique visitors rose to 1,337, from September’s 1,089 and even August’s 1,301. I thought that 1337 was a promising number too, what with it being the year of Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, but of course that was 1381. I have no idea how I made such a dumb mistake and I apologize for the inconvenience.

The popular stuff continues to be comic strip stuff and things by great humorists who weren’t me. The top five essays in October were:

• What’s Going On With Judge Parker?
• What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? July – October 2017
• Mark Twain: Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• Has the comic strip _Momma_ come to an end?

I understand people coming to me in search of plot recaps for the story strips. That’s just practical, especially for comics that haven’t drawn their own commentary community the way Funky Winkerbean or Mark Trail have. I am surprised by the number of people looking up Momma is all. I mean, what’s going on in story or semi-story strips is a question people can reasonably wonder many times over. Whether Momma is still being made a person would wonder once after the strip goes into eternal reruns. Maybe twice if you allow for forgetting the original answer.

The most popular piece of my own original-brand humor was the Statistics Saturday piece, Some TV Show Episodes I’m Still Angry About Decades Later (I imagine everybody has a list like this). The most popular long-form piece of my own creation last month was Why I Am Not A Successful Urban Fantasy Writer, a bit of a surprise to me since that one was published the 27th. I’d have figured one of the goofball writing posts from earlier in the month more likely to take the lead, just because they probably all have about the same audience and would have several times as long to draw readers.

I make out there having been 70 countries sending me readers in October. That’s up from 65 in September and 68 in August. There were 21 single-reader countries, down from September’s 24 and up from August’s 20. And which were all these places of wonder and readers? These.

Country	Readers
United States	1,516
India	69
Canada	67
United Kingdom	65
Brazil	51
Italy	26
Germany	25
Australia	22
Philippines	21
Netherlands	20
Spain	19
Ukraine	15
New Zealand	13
Romania	13
Vietnam	13
Russia	12
South Africa	12
Poland	11
Singapore	9
Sweden	9
France	8
Greece	8
Finland	7
Hungary	7
Argentina	6
Czech Republic	6
Hong Kong SAR China	6
Thailand	6
Mexico	5
Pakistan	5
Serbia	5
Turkey	5
Bangladesh	3
Denmark	3
Japan	3
Kuwait	3
Lebanon	3
Malaysia	3
Slovakia	3
Armenia	2
Cambodia	2
Estonia	2
Ghana	2
Indonesia	2
Ireland	2
Kenya	2
Lithuania	2
United Arab Emirates	2
Uruguay	2
Belgium	1
Bulgaria	1
China	1
Colombia	1 (**)
Cyprus	1
Egypt	1
Georgia	1
Haiti	1
Israel	1
Laos	1 (*)
Norway	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Paraguay	1 (**)
Peru	1
Portugal	1
Qatar	1
Saudi Arabia	1 (*)
Slovenia	1
South Korea	1
St. Kitts and Nevis	1 (*)
Trinidad and Tobago	1

Laos, Saudi Arabia, and St-Kitts-and-Nevis have been single-reader countries two months in a row now. Colombia and Paraguay have been for two months in a row. And Cambodia snapped a five-month streak as a single-reader country by sending me two page views. That’s something!

November starts with a total of 65,163 page views, from 35,411 unique visitors. Are you one of them? Maybe. If you use the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ button on the upper right corner of this page you can have it appear in your Reader page, if you’re on WordPress, and then I’m not sure if it ever counts your reading my posts here. If you use the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile Via E-Mail’ button underneath you can get these e-mailed to you, and then I’m almost sure I won’t know anything about it except that my father tells me sometimes I wrote something hilarious two months ago.

WordPress figures I’m starting November with 782 followers on the site. It figured I started October with 780 so, hm. This is savings-account levels of growth rate. I guess that’s better than when I put my readership in a CD for six months. (It was a Jelly Roll Morton album, so it’s not like anyone was unhappy with it, but six months is a long time to spend in just seventy minutes of music.) And there’s 252 people following me on Twitter, many of them not search engine optimization bots, so please join me over at @Nebusj if you’d be so kind.

Statistics Monday: How September 2017 Treated My Humor Blog

So the first thing is readership was up again, back above the 2,000-pageview mark. WordPress says I had 2,126 pages viewed in September, back from August’s 1,965 to about July’s 2,132. This seems to be roughly my level, now that I’ve made “summarizing the plots of the story strips” a regular feature around here. The regular monthly page view count is just about what it was in October 2015, shortly before the espers completed the final demolition of Margo, Lu Ann, and I suppose there must have been another woman living in Apartment 3-G.

If there is a troubling sign, and I can find a troubling sign in anything, it’s that this reading comes from fewer people. WordPress says there were 1,089 unique visitors in September, noticeably down from August’s 1,301 and July’s 1,349. But there is a good sign, and I can find a good sign in anything, it’s that the number of pages viewed per visitor rose. So at least enough people went archive-binging to change the views-per-visitor average. It’s usually around 1.4 to 1.6 page views per visitor; for September, it was 1.95.

The long, long secular decline of “likes” took a pause. 143 things were liked around here in September, as opposed to August’s 137 and July’s 154. Nothing like the heady days of summer 2015, but still, any delay in my unavoidable collapse is welcome. Comments rebounded, happy to say, to 38 in September. They’d been at 19 in August and 11 in July. This one’s easier to explain: Roy Kassinger, of the fun web comic Housepets!, is in that happy stage between discovering me and discovering he’s seen about all of my tricks. I’m going to enjoy that while it lasts. You might enjoy the comic; please, give it a try.

My most popular readership day has switched to Thursday, when 17 percent of page views were logged in September. The long-form pieces that I put the most effort into I post on Fridays, per the WordPress clock, so I’m going to cling to how 17 percent isn’t really that much more than 1/7th to tell myself that’s all right. The most popular hour is that starting 12 am, WordPress time, which is when I set stuff to post anyway. That hour saw 13 percent of page views. Last several months it had seen 12 percent.

Now for the Running of the Countries: How many page views went to each country, per WordPress’s statistics, plus that European Union entry that’s there for the reasons:

Country	Readers
United States	1550
Canada	77
United Kingdom	62
India	60
Brazil	43
Spain	32
Australia	21
Mexico	20
Philippines	19
Romania	16
New Zealand	15
Germany	14
Russia	14
Ireland	13
Norway	11
Italy	10
South Africa	10
Sweden	9
Malaysia	8
Vietnam	8
France	7
Ukraine	7
Argentina	6
Bangladesh	6
Netherlands	6
Turkey	6
Finland	5
Switzerland	5
European Union	4
Indonesia	4
Poland	4
Chile	3
Hong Kong SAR China	3
Pakistan	3
Belarus	2
Denmark	2
Iceland	2
Lithuania	2
Peru	2
Singapore	2
Thailand	2
Armenia	1 (*)
Cambodia	1 (****)
Colombia	1 (*)
Croatia	1
Hungary	1
Jamaica	1
Jordan	1
Laos	1
Latvia	1
Luxembourg	1
Malta	1 (*)
Nepal	1
Nicaragua	1
Nigeria	1 (*)
Oman	1
Paraguay	1 (*)
Saudi Arabia	1
Serbia	1 (*)
Slovakia	1
St. Kitts & Nevis	1
St. Lucia	1
Taiwan	1
Uruguay	1
Venezuela	1

WordPress there were 65 separate countries sending readers in September. In August there were 68, and in July 69. World politics is complicated. There were 24 single-reader countries, up from August’s 20 and July’s 17. Armenia, Colombia, Malta, Nigeria, Paraguay, and Serbia were single-reader countries last month too. Cambodia’s been a single-reader country for five months now. I’m curious what gets read.

So what were the most popular posts around here? Like I said, my recaps of the story strips. The specific top five were:

• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• What’s Going On With Judge Parker?
• S J Perelman: Insert Flap ‘A’ And Throw Away
• What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? June – September 2017
• What Is Going On With Mark Trail?

So this shows me what I should do to keep growing ever-more-popular: talk about Rex Morgan and republish public-domain pieces from the great humorists of the 20th century. My most popular bit of original, written-by-me, stuff was Statistics Saturday: Some Chemical Elements Whose Names Sound Fake, which caused my love to learn, and disapprove, of the existence of “Tennessine”, with which I can’t argue. My most popular bit of long-form original writing was How To Clean A Thing, part of my little theme of how-to pieces that I stumbled into by accident over September. (And let me tell you: having a specific theme like that makes it so much easier to write stuff.) I suspect this is going to have what the trades call a “long tail”, as it resembles a rat or maybe Marsupilami. People would always like to know about how to do stuff, since that saves us the pain of actually doing stuff.

October starts with my page here having gotten 63,019 page views from an admitted 35,074 unique readers. Hi, whoever was number 35,000. It says I’ve got 780 followers on WordPress, which is sixteen more than I supposedly had at the start of September. Hi, people who I suppose are watching on my Reader page, then.

Do you think you might enjoy reading Another Blog, Meanwhile? Why, you’re doing it already. Why, I don’t know. But if this feels like the sort of thing you could do indefinitely, please, consider the button to Follow `Another Blog, Meanwhile’ that’s in the upper right of the page here. You can also get the essays delivered by e-mail, like my father does. He enjoys reading my stuff, when he remembers who this mysterious `Another Blog, Meanwhile’ that keeps sending him e-mail is. You, too, can enjoy this sort of fun!

On Twitter I’m @Nebusj. On tumblr I’m a confused visitor, screaming at pictures of kinda neat stuff comments like, “WHO POSTED THIS?” and “HOW DO YOU FOLLOW A COMMENTS THREAD?” and “WHAT ARE THINGS EVEN?” It’s not a social medium I understand is all. Thank you, won’t you? On to October.

But seriously, why is it always Rex Morgan and Mark Trail people want to know about? Other story strips come and go, but these two seem like they’re always on my most-popular list.

Statistics Friday: How August 2017 Liked Me

Well, I dropped below 2,000 page views for August 2017. It was a good run of two months above 2,000 page views, but I knew it couldn’t last, not with the end of my amusingly un-engaging Another Blog, Meanwhile Index project. After 2,118 page views in June and 2,132 in July, WordPress says it recorded 1,965 page views for August. The number of unique readers dropped also. It was 1,501 in June, and 1,349 in July, but a mere 1,301 in August. At this rate, oh, I don’t know. I suppose I’ll sputter to no more viewers than my father, checking in to see why he keeps getting e-mails from something called “Another Blog, Meanwhile” now and then.

The number of likes drifted down after July’s bump. There were 122 likes here in June, 154 in July, and then 137 in August. I’m kind of hoping that I’ve reached some kind of minimum; the figure hasn’t changed much in the past year, although I can still see in the distant past when it would be triple that. Comments popped back up again, although they’re still anemic. 19 comments got posted in June, 11 in July, and 19 again in August. There’d be more but I ran out of time to answer a couple this past week. That figures.

My most popular pieces continue to be What’s Going On In updates on the story strips. Really I could shut down everything else and just do the story strip updates. My most-liked piece that wasn’t comic strip reporting or commentary was The Chuckletrousers Decades, rediscovered by some of the refugees from alt.fan.dave_barry who’ve gone over to Facebook, where I happen not to be. My most popular long-form humor piece — the thing that, originally, I thought would be the center of this blog — was Thanking You For Listening, last week’s explanation for why I don’t have a pop-culture hangout podcast.

So what was tops in popularity here? About what you’d expect:

• What Is Going On With Mark Trail?
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• S J Perelman: Insert Flap ‘A’ And Throw Away
• What’s Going On With Judge Parker?
• What’s Going On In Prince Valiant?

Plainly, I have to post more (public domain) S J Perelman pieces. But they’re all so long and kind of stuffy in that S J Perelman way.

On to the list of countries. I make out readers from 68 separate countries, which compares to July’s 69 by being a slightly different number. It’s also slightly different from June’s 67.

Country	Readers
United States	1375
Canada	80
India	79
United Kingdom	45
Brazil	41
Australia	40
Germany	39
Philippines	23
France	14
Russia	14
Romania	12
South Africa	12
Argentina	11
Vietnam	11
Italy	10
Sweden	10
Ukraine	9
New Zealand	8
Hungary	6
Netherlands	6
Spain	6
Bangladesh	5
Japan	5
Mexico	5
Switzerland	5
Hong Kong SAR China	4
Indonesia	4
Pakistan	4
Poland	4
Singapore	4
Austria	3
Ecuador	3
Finland	3
Ghana	3
Laos	3
Lithuania	3
Maldives	3
Norway	3
Barbados	2
Denmark	2
Georgia	2
Greece	2
Iceland	2
Ireland	2
Israel	2
Jordan	2
Latvia	2
Venezuela	2
Albania	1 (*)
Armenia	1
Belgium	1
Bulgaria	1
Cambodia	1 (***)
Cape Verde	1
Colombia	1
Czech Republic	1
El Salvador	1
Kuwait	1
Madagascar	1 (*)
Malta	1
Moldova	1 (*)
Nigeria	1
Paraguay	1
Qatar	1
Serbia	1 (*)
Slovakia	1
Thailand	1
United Arab Emirates	1

There were 20 single-reader countries, whereas in July there were 17. In June there were 26, pointing out that there’s something like six countries just gone missing over the summer. Weird. Cambodia has been a single-reader country four months running now. Albania, Madagascar, Moldova, and Serbia have been single-reader countries just two months in a row.

Monday broke Sunday’s streak for the most popular readership day around here. It took 16 percent of page views, like is always the case all the time. The midnight hour was the most popular one for reading with 12 percent of page views coming the hour I have stuff scheduled to post. Last month that hour also got 12 percent of page views. This section is starting to sound like some kind of fix is in.

August starts with 60,912 page views from a suspiciously even 34,000 unique visitors. Ah, thanks, visitor 34,000, and please claim your prize from the concierge station. I also start August with 764 followers on WordPress, ten more than had me on their Reader pages at the start of July. I’m sure they’re all reading on their Reader page, where I can’t detect them.

If you’d like to join this band of readers, please do. There’s a button to Follow ‘Another Blog, Meanwhile’ in the upper right of this page. If you prefer, you can get it delivered by e-mail. The e-mail might be more convenient if you don’t routinely check WordPress accounts to read things, and it means you’ll get to see my posts before I notice the glaringly obvious typos that have to be fixed two minutes after posting. Try it out, won’t you? It’s fun.

Those on Twitter know me as @Nebusj. Those on Skype know me as a hoax, because I haven’t got an account there. Thank you, won’t you?

Statistics July: How The Month Treated Another Blog, Meanwhile

Time for the regular and not even slightly comical review of my readership in these parts. There were slightly more pages viewed in July than there were in June — 2,132 rather than 2,118, or for that matter 1,944 in May. They came from slightly fewer people, 1,349 unique viewers in July compared to 1,501 in June or 1,291 in May. I credit archive-binges by people. It’s the fourth-greatest number of page views I have on record. Not quite at the high points of the Apartment 3-Gocalypse, but stable.

Are readers engaged with my content distribution model? Tougher to say. I felt bad asking the question. The ‘likes’ recorded had a little uptick, to 154 from June’s 122. That compares well with May’s 167. It’s still not many; July 2015 drew in 349 likes from a mere 1,126 page views. And comments continue to die; there were 11 of them in July, compared to 19 in June and 10 in May. Again, two years ago: 76. Not sure what’s going wrong. It didn’t seem like there was so much comment back then.

The most popular content around here, by far, continues to be explaining story strips. These were the five most popular pieces in July:

• What’s Going On With Judge Parker?
• What’s Going On In Prince Valiant?
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• What Is Going On With Mark Trail?
• S J Perelman: Insert Flap ‘A’ And Throw Away

I don’t have any of my long-form creative pieces in the top ten posts of the month; the closest, about vacuum cleaners, is somewhere around fourteenth. I should do something to better focus my energies. Also I should keep track of how the story strips people are looking for change over time. It seems like more people look for Prince Valiant updates than I would have guessed.

69 countries sent me readers in July. This compares to 67 in June and 58 in May in the sense of being larger. Here’s what they were:

Country	Views
United States	1,454
Canada	96
India	63
Mexico	58
United Kingdom	49
Australia	41
Philippines	36
Brazil	34
Netherlands	23
Norway	23
Romania	14
South Africa	14
Argentina	13
Germany	13
Italy	13
France	11
Sweden	11
Ukraine	11
Ireland	9
New Zealand	9
Russia	9
Spain	8
Hungary	7
Indonesia	7
Austria	6
European Union	6
Bangladesh	5
Poland	5
Belgium	4
Colombia	4
Malaysia	4
Chile	3
Israel	3
Pakistan	3
Panama	3
Singapore	3
Slovakia	3
Taiwan	3
Vietnam	3
Angola	2
Belarus	2
Georgia	2
Hong Kong SAR China	2
Japan	2
Kenya	2
Kuwait	2
Myanmar (Burma)	2
Nicaragua	2
South Korea	2
Switzerland	2
Thailand	2
U.S. Virgin Islands	2
Albania	1
Bhutan	1
Cambodia	1 (**)
Denmark	1
Finland	1 (*)
Iceland	1 (*)
Lebanon	1 (*)
Lithuania	1
Macedonia	1
Madagascar	1
Moldova	1
Peru	1
Puerto Rico	1
Saudi Arabia	1
Serbia	1
St. Kitts and Nevis	1 (*)
Venezuela	1

There were 17 single-reader countries, down from June’s 26 and back to May’s figure. Finland, Iceland, Lebanon, and St Kitts and Nevis were single-reader countries in June also. Cambodia is on a three-month single-reader streak.

Sundays were again the most popular day for posts around here, with once again 16 percent of page views coming on Sundays. But that’s about what you’d expect if people were equally likely to read every day. 12:00 am was once again the most popular hour for reading, with 12 percent of page views coming between 12:00 and 12:59 (inclusive) (I assume). That’s so steady and expected I’m starting to get suspicious of it.

The month started with 58,925 page views from 32,684 unique readers. And, says WordPress, 754 followers who have me on their Reader pages. I’m sure they’re all out there, reading. If you’d like to be among them, now that you’ve read this report about what you might be reading, you can. In the upper right corner of the page is a strip to Follow ‘Another Blog, Meanwhile’ in your WordPress reading tool. And below that is a strip to get the blog by e-mail. Also I know how to put the – in “e-mail” in that strip, too.

I’m @Nebusj on Twitter, and try not to post eight hundred things a day, so I think I’m a good person to follow. Would you please, if you like? At least give it a try? Thank you.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

So the index fell 14 points, but in the last minute Lisa came back, not admitting to anything about how her Tiny McMasions pilot is working out, but ostentatiously dropping two points into the bucket. She hasn’t said anything, but we all know she’s begging us to ask her about it, and I’m not going to give her the satisfaction after all this.

361

Statistics June: Or What Was Popular Around Here

Now, finally, I’ve run out of excuses and will talk about my popularity around here as measured by WordPress’s statistics page. June was my second-most-popular month this year, based on readers. There were 2,118 page views, up from May’s 1,944 and April’s 1,765. I credit this to people wanting to understand what was going on in Judge Parker, which has seen a lot of stuff going on the past couple weeks worth keeping track of. There were 1,501 unique visitors in June, my second-best count of unique visitors ever. That’s the highest it’s been since the Apartment 3-Gocalypse, when The Onion A.V. Club casually mentioned my existence and people checked to see that I do indeed exist.

This surge in popularity did nothing about the long-term decline in the number of likes: there were only 122 of them in June, the lowest total in years. Comments were up to 19 from May’s 10, but that’s still below April’s 26 and it’s meager in any case. I need to find somebody I can banter with and force them to say something every post, I think is the problem. I am a little surprised the story comic review posts don’t inspire more responses. Maybe I’m giving off vibes that I have said everything I can imagine ever saying about Gasoline Alley so nobody feels the desire to see if I could maybe say a little more.

The most popular postings in June were all comic strip stuff:

• What’s Going On With Judge Parker?
• What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? April – June 2017
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? March – June 2017
• Writer Tony DePaul Quits The Phantom

You have no idea how much it bugs me that I took so long to decide between “What’s Going On In” and “What’s Going On With” the various story strips. I’d go back and change the inconsistent ones but I feel somehow like making a change like that now would be falsifying my historical record, unless I put in a note saying what I had changed and why, in which case I’d still see it every time. And the URLs would have the old, inconsistent titles anyway.

And as you can see, I could probably shut down everything I do around here besides the comic strip story summaries and not lose that much readership. The only original-writing piece of mine to crack the top ten was a couple words about how impractical an idea for a supervillain I had. The most popular long-form piece I wrote came in 11th, How To Program (Computers). Perhaps I do need to yield gracefully to what people are telling me they like.

So where am I getting readers from? According to WordPress my page views for June came from:

Country	Views
United States	1669
India	73
Canada	53
United Kingdom	44
France	27
Australia	23
Brazil	18
Germany	14
Philippines	12
Romania	12
Russia	12
Sweden	12
Mexico	10
New Zealand	10
Austria	9
Poland	9
Kenya	7
Bangladesh	6
European Union	6
Norway	6
South Africa	6
Argentina	4
Japan	4
Portugal	4
Denmark	3
Hungary	3
Italy	3
Netherlands	3
Pakistan	3
South Korea	3
Spain	3
Thailand	3
Afghanistan	2
Chile	2
Colombia	2
Georgia	2
Indonesia	2
Jamaica	2
Nepal	2
Puerto Rico	2
Ukraine	2
Armenia	1
Belgium	1 (*)
Bosnia and Herzegovina	1
Bulgaria	1
Cambodia	1 (*)
China	1
Croatia	1
Curaçao	1
Egypt	1
Finland	1
Ghana	1
Greece	1
Iceland	1
Laos	1
Lebanon	1
Malawi	1
Malaysia	1
Mozambique	1
Nicaragua	1
Panama	1
St. Kitts and Nevis	1
Taiwan	1 (***)
Turkey	1 (*)
US Virgin Islands	1
Vietnam	1 (*)
Zambia	1

I honestly believe that to be 67 countries, up from May’s 58 and April’s 51. I also make out 26 single-reader countries, up from May’s 17 and April’s 13. Belgium, Cambodia, Turkey, and Vietnam were single-reader countries in May, also. Taiwan is on a four-month single-reader streak.

The month started at 56,793 page views, from something like 31,335 unique viewers. Sundays were the most popular day for reading around here, with 16 percent of page views coming that day. In May it was Fridays that got 16 percent of page views. That’s so close to one-seventh of the readership that I suppose it shows no date is particularly tredy around here. The most popular hour was that from 12 to 1 am, which is also the hour I set most things to post. That got in 12 percent of page view, just like in May.

I failed to check how many people were subscribed via WordPress at the start of the month. There are 744 right now, and two of them have been around fewer than eight days, but that doesn’t tell me anything about who might have unsubscribed between the 1st of July and today. It’s somewhere around 742 readers that I started the month with, anyway, up from 736 at the start of June.

If you’d like to be a subscriber, please use the blue “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” strip on the upper right of the page here. If you’d rather get this delivered by e-mail, there’s a “Follow Blog Via Email” box just underneath that. And I’m on Twitter as @nebusj if you’d find that more fun.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose nine points today when the adoptable pet of the day turned out to be two puppies even if they only had a picture of one. Traders are willing to suppose in the existence of puppies they haven’t seen. Aren’t so many of us like that?

224

Statistics May: How The Last Month Treated My Humor Blog

I’d meant to look at my readership back on Friday but then we got some breaking news about The Phantom in. And then the usual routine stuff filled up scheduled slots and that’s why I’m getting to my monthly readership report a week into the new month.

Well, I didn’t break 2,000 page views last month. Came close, and I thought it was almost sure when I checked a couple days before May ended. But according to WordPress I finished May with 1,944 page views. That’s up from April’s 1,765, and about two busy days below March’s 2,085. I shall be lobbying to extend May to a 33-day month sooner or later. The number of unique viewers was up again, to 1,291. In April it had been 1,099; in March, 1,308. So May was almost as busy as March around here. I can cope with that.

The secular decline in ‘likes’ around here had a temporary pause in May. 167 pages got liked by someone or other, up from April’s 147 and March’s 154. Probably won’t last. Comments, now, those were typically dismal. Only ten comments made around here in May, down from April’s 26 and below even the 12-comment doldrums of March. This does coincide with a useful discovery, though. I switched back to the old style of making links to other posts here, one that generates on the page referred to a link to whatever makes the reference. These get sent to me for approval as comments. They don’t affect the comment totals, though; I certainly had more than ten internal cross-reference links in May. Since using links this way makes it easier for people to find relevant stuff in their archive binges and it doesn’t mess up the comments count I’ll stick to doing that. Still don’t know why WordPress insists I approve links from my blog to my blog, though.

Meanwhile, my conversion of the blog to a full-time report on the story strips is basically complete. The five most popular posts around here in May were:

• https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/2017/01/09/whats-going-on-with-judge-parker/
• https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/2017/02/20/whats-going-on-in-prince-valiant/
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? December 2016 – April 2017
• Quick Little Update As Mary Worth Changes *Everything*!

Well, at least I can be of use to people who want to understand the ongoing Mary Worth plot without having to actually read the comic. (She’s doing the tourist areas of Cozumel Island while the special guest Bland White Guy is sneaking cigarettes behind the cruise ship’s school gym, and that’s about it.) My most popular long-form humor piece is the review of Python Anghelo’s bonkers concept document for the Popeye pinball game from the early 90s. If you haven’t read it, I’d be flattered if you did read my summary, but I really am just painting the lily that is nine pages in which the least daft part is H Ross Perot helping Popeye launch the Glomar Explorer into space. My most popular recent long-form piece was about my new computer and why I needed one.

Well: on to the roster of the nations. Where did my readers come from in May?

Country	Views
United States	1495
Canada	63
India	60
United Kingdom	47
Australia	25
South Africa	23
Brazil	21
Germany	18
Romania	17
Sweden	13
New Zealand	12
Denmark	9
Netherlands	8
Poland	8
Austria	7
France	7
Italy	7
Ireland	6
Malaysia	6
Spain	6
Switzerland	6
Russia	5
Singapore	5
Hong Kong SAR China	4
Indonesia	4
Peru	4
Philippines	4
Trinidad & Tobago	4
Ukraine	4
Czech Republic	3
El Salvador	3
Finland	3
Japan	3
Mexico	3
Argentina	2
Bangladesh	2
Belarus	2
Bulgaria	2
Chile	2
Croatia	2
Norway	2
Angola	1
Belgium	1
Cambodia	1
Dominican Republic	1
Estonia	1
Georgia	1
Libya	1
Macedonia	1
Nepal	1
Pakistan	1 (*)
Portugal	1
Serbia	1
Taiwan	1 (**)
Thailand	1
Turkey	1
Venezuela	1
Vietnam	1

Pakistan was a single-reader country last month. Taiwan’s been one for two months. I make out visitors from 58 countries, up from April’s 51 and March’s 55. There were 17 single-reader countries, up from April’s 13 and March’s 14. This seems to suggest middling-readership countries are drying up. I hope they’re all right. Somebody write in they know what’s going on.

WordPress figures I started the month at 54,678 pages viewed from 29,834 distinct visitors. It also figures I have 736 followers on WordPress, up from 729 at the start of May. That seems like quite the jump, considering how these things grow. You can join them, if you like, by clicking the link on the upper right side of the page to Follow on WordPress. There’s also the chance to follow by e-mail that’s another link at the upper right side of the page.

According to Insights, my best-read day around here was Friday, which had 16 percent of page views. Friday is the date I normally publish the long-form piece of the week, but 16 percent is so close to 14 percent that I can’t believe there’s any significant difference. The 12 am hour is the most popular reading time; 12 percent of page views came then. So, stuff gets read by people who notice it’s just come up. Good to know, but I can’t say that’s revelatory.

Thanks all of you for reading, and for putting up with my meager self-examinations like this. Back to whatever it is I do tomorrow.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose nearly eight points today on words such as “bound”, “kurtosis”, “melange”, and “patina”.

190

Statistics April: What Was Popular-Ish Around Here

So, my conversion of this blog from miscellaneous humor stuff into comic strip review goes well. According to WordPress’s statistics I had some 1,765 pages viewed from 1,099 distinct readers in April. That’s down from March’s 2,085 pages from 1,308 visitors. But it’s near enough January’s 1,837 views from 1,093 visitors that I’m not going to go fretting nonstop about that. If nothing else, April’s “What’s Going On In” comics were about stuff like Gil Thorp and Alley Oop, which people don’t find as ironically fascinating as Mary Worth or Rex Morgan. Oh, I had Judge Parker, surely a perennial, but also Spider-Man which has too strong a narrative drive to really confuse people.

No, what I’ll fret about if you don’t mind is the number of pages liked. There were 147 ‘likes’ clicked around here in April. That’s not far off March’s 154 or February’s 169. But WordPress increased the range of months I can see on the chart. That’s made me realize the ‘likes’ around here have been trending downward, like some exponential decay, since about March of 2015 when there were 443 likes. I haven’t dug in to see how what I wrote differed back then from what I write now. But I wonder. Wouldn’t you? If you’re reading this far into my data moping here, you wonder at least a bit.

You can actually see me grow less likable!

Comments have a similar-looking decline. Oh, they were up in April, to 26 from March’s 12 and February’s 15. That still shows a steady decline, though. I won’t bother with a picture of that over the course of months. Sometime last year — I forget when — I shifted the way I link to old stuff. The new way doesn’t show up as a comment on the linked essay, so that I have a truer count of how many things people are saying something about. On the other hand, this does mean the page referred to doesn’t show that it’s been referred to by anything else. Maybe I should go back to the old way; that might help people archive-binging find other interesting stuff. If you know anyone who’s archive-binged my little thing … uh … thank you. I’d like to hear what makes it easier, though.

The top articles around here the past month? Mostly comic strip plot summaries. I suspected this would happen, and accepted it. I’d like to be known as a sometimes-absurdist humorist plainly in the Robert Benchley tradition, but if my ability to pay attention to Gasoline Alley is of more use to the world, fine. Nobody ever gets famous for what they want to be famous for.

• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• S J Perelman: Insert Flap ‘A’ And Throw Away
• Why Does Mary Worth Look Different?
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? 1 January – 8 April 2017
• Why Do Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean Look Different?

The most popular creative thing I wrote was my Statistics Saturday post Some Now-Obscure Professional Baseball Players Given Nicknames Anachronistically which is just the sort of slight, over-researched thing that I like. The TV installation thing was my most popular long-form original piece, which shows the power of giving a title drawn from one of the Buggles’ other songs. (They have more good songs than you realize.) And my talk about Mystery Science Theater 3000 and me (part one, and part two, and part three) placed well, which is comforting considering how hard it is sharing feelings and all.

Now on to a big old list of countries and readers! Everyone likes those, unless they go unlisted. In which case it’s something they could fix themselves, isn’t it?

Country	Views
United States	1341
Canada	78
India	78
United Kingdom	74
Romania	17
Germany	13
Australia	12
Netherlands	11
New Zealand	11
Spain	11
Italy	9
Poland	8
Sweden	8
Philippines	7
South Africa	7
Hong Kong SAR China	5
Indonesia	5
Mexico	5
Brazil	4
Finland	4
France	4
Turkey	4
Chile	3
European Union	3
Ireland	3
Singapore	3
Argentina	2
Denmark	2
El Salvador	2
Greece	2
Japan	2
Malaysia	2
Qatar	2
Russia	2
Switzerland	2
Thailand	2
Trinidad & Tobago	2
Uruguay	2
Bolivia	1
Czech Republic	1
Egypt	1 (*)
Kenya	1
Madagascar	1
Norway	1 (*)
Pakistan	1
South Korea	1
Sri Lanka	1
Taiwan	1 (*)
Turks & Caicos Islands	1
Ukraine	1
United Arab Emirates	1

I make that out to be visitors from 51 countries, down from March’s 55 and April’s 61. There were 13 single-viewer countries, down from March’s 14 and February’s 22. Egypt, Ukraine, and Taiwan are the only three countries that were single-reader countries in March also, and March was a complete single-reader turnover from February.

I start May with 52,737 page views from 28,546 distinct visitors, I’m told. WordPress says the most popular day, with 16 percent of views, is Wednesday, just as it was in March. It says the most popular hour, with 13 percent of views, is once again 12 am. That’s down from 15 percent the previous month.

WordPress figures I start the month with 729 readers here, up from 725. I’m flattered to see any follower that hasn’t two days later had their blog closed or made private or whatnot. You bloggers who follow your statistics obsessively know what I’m talking about. If you’d like to join them there should be the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button off on the right side of the screen. Or you can follow by e-mail, joining a group of elites such as my dad. And I’m also @nebusj on Twitter, where I supposedly have 237 followers, and won’t try to scare any of them off. Thank you, won’t you?

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index gained a point when investors were sweeping out the corners like they’ve been promising to all week and saw one had rolled under there, raising hopes for what might happen if they ever do that proper whole-floor mopping they’ve been talking about since March.

121

Statistics Wednesday: How March 2017 Liked Me Or Didn’t

I finally have some time to review my WordPress readership statistics for March 2017. So, thank you and good day.

There were 2,085 page views in March, says WordPress’s statistics page. That’s gratifyingly large, above February’s 1,837 and close to January’s 2,340. This came from 1,308 unique visitors in March, up from 1,093 in February and down slightly from January’s 1,361. That’s pretty close to the Apartment 3-Gocalypse highs, back in October and November in 2015.

This dovetails nicely with my transition to being a blog that updates people on the story comics, plus some other stuff the rest of the week. Exaggeration? Here’s the five most popular posts for March:

• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• What’s Going On With Judge Parker?
• Why Does Mary Worth Look Different?
• Oh Yeah, One Thing I Didn’t Understand About Rex Morgan
• Has the comic strip _Momma_ come to an end?

I’m doing my very best not to be hurt that my original-compositions aren’t more liked. Well, I’m honestly not hurt, and one of my long-form Friday pieces is in the top ten, and at least I’m relieving people’s anxieties by more or less knowing what Rex Morgan, M.D. is up to.

So here’s the report on the number of views per country for March:

Country	Views
United States	1633
Canada	73
United Kingdom	73
India	60
Australia	27
Germany	22
Sweden	16
Argentina	12
Philippines	11
Romania	11
Israel	10
Hong Kong SAR China	9
France	9
Switzerland	7
Denmark	6
Belgium	5
New Zealand	5
Serbia	5
South Africa	5
United Arab Emirates	5
Madagascar	4
Malaysia	4
Netherlands	4
Pakistan	4
Croatia	3
European Union	3
Finland	3
Indonesia	3
Ireland	3
Italy	3
Kenya	3
Puerto Rico	3
Ukraine	3
Vietnam	3
Japan	2
Russia	2
Singapore	2
Spain	2
South Korea	2
Brazil	2
Mexico	2
Belarus	1
Bosnia and Herzegovina	1
Costa Rica	1
Egypt	1
Ethiopia	1
Ghana	1
Greece	1
Jamaica	1
Norway	1
Poland	1
Saudi Arabia	1
Taiwan	1
Trinidad and Tobago	1
Turkey	1

None of the single-reader countries were single-reader last month, which is I think the first time I’ve had a complete turnover like that. I make that out to be 14 single-reader countries, down from February’s 22 but matching January’s 14. That’s 55 countries represented altogether, down from February’s 61, but up from January’s 48. What does that signify? I do not know, but what the heck. It’s a number, I can report it.

Midnight remains the most popular hour for readership here, with 15 percent of page views coming in the hour after stuff gets posted. For March Wednesday was the most popular reading day, with 16 percent of page views then. This breaks the streak Tuesday was having. February saw Tuesday getting 19 percent of page views, and in January Tuesday got 18 percent of page views. Since one-seventh is just over 14 percent, I think that’s indicating no weekday’s really more popular than any other around here.

I am getting some more fun search terms bringing people here. Among them:

• what does funky winkerbean mean
• judge parker getting weird
• how many fleischer cartoons used 3d sets?
• is sally forth hyphenated
• has mary worth had plastic surgery

I’m curious how many 3-D sets the Fleischers did use in their cartoons. Funky Winkerbean just means for us all to feel worse about everything.

WordPress’s Insights page says I start the month with 725 followers on WordPress directly and a couple by e-mail. You can join them if you like by clicking on the Follow By WordPress tab in the upper-right corner, at least in the current theme.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index fell thirteen points following a report that Access World, the metal logistics arm of Glencore, has been find $1.4 million plus costs for falsifying documents related to the storage of zinc in New Orleans, which raises new questions about the warehousing records of the London Metals Exchange, which sure sounds like the sort of thing that ought to lose thirteen points. Considering, we’re lucky we didn’t lose fourteen.

121

Statistics Sunday: February 2017 In Review

OK, and now I should stop wasting time and look over what my readership was for February.

Oh, maybe I don’t want to look at that quite so much. Well, no, it’s all basically fine. Readership was down in February compared to January. But readership was still really high. WordPress tells me there were 1,837 page views from 1,098 distinct visitors in February. In January were there 2,340 page views from 1,361 distinct visitors. And back in December 2016 — remember 2016? — there were a mere 1,396 page views from 818 distinct visitors. In any way you mean to count that, that’s a popular month around here.

And there were 169 likes given around here in February, up from January’s 163 and December’s 137. The number of comments plummeted again, to only 15 from January’s 39, but that was a chatty month. December had 20 comments which is still .. really quite a lot more than February’s, on a percentage basis. I need to get better at writing stuff that invites comments. Or arguments, whatever.

I can come up with excuses for February’s drop. The big one is that February’s a short month. With only 28/31th as many days to get readers, even if I stay as popular, I’ll have fewer readers. But also I suspect that the story strips I reviewed the past month are at fault. Definitely the story strip recaps are the things drawing people in. Of the ten most popular posts in February six were “What’s Going On In” pieces and one of the others was about why Mary Worth looks different. Not part of the series, but kin to it. But the point is that the February strips included things like The Phantom, which is pretty clear about its narrative, or Gasoline Alley, which doesn’t capture people’s ironic and snarky imaginations the way Mary Worth does. Or which hasn’t gotten wildly crazy like Judge Parker or Rex Morgan. Also, these are comic strips that haven’t recently undergone major changes in writing or art or tone or general level of craziness.

This does imply dire things for my readership now that I’ve gone through all the major story strips, but perhaps I’ll just keep it going by going around the circle of story comics again.

For the record the five most popular pieces for February were:

• Mark Twain: Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance
• Why Does Mary Worth Look Different?
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• What’s Going On In Prince Valiant?
• What’s Going On With Judge Parker?

Yes, it drives me crazy that I wasn’t consistent about “What’s Going On In” versus “What’s Going On With” versus, in some essays, “What Is Going On”. Also how is Mark Twain my top author for another month? I don’t know.

It seems likely that this month I’ll record my 50,000th page view around here. That’s neat as this coming week, if I keep to my post-a-day schedule, I’ll record my 1,500th consecutive daily post. WordPress says the most popular day for reading here is Tuesday, with 19 percent of page views. Last month it was also Tuesday but at only 18 percent. It’s always Tuesday for some reason. Midnight’s the most popular hour, but for February it saw 12 percent of page views, rather than the mere eight percent of previous months.

Now the roster of countries and page views, that’s likeable for the reasons:

Country	Views
United States	1386
Canada	64
United Kingdom	62
Germany	61
India	55
Australia	32
Philippines	21
France	11
Hong Kong SAR China	9
Italy	8
Norway	8
Singapore	7
Japan	6
Romania	6
Sweden	6
Netherlands	5
South Africa	5
Portugal	4
Spain	4
Brazil	3
Finland	3
Greece	3
Ireland	3
Mexico	3
New Zealand	3
Poland	3
Argentina	2
Bangladesh	2
Belgium	2
Denmark	2
Indonesia	2
Jamaica	2
Kenya	2
Malaysia	2
Moldova	2
Panama	2
Serbia	2
Trinidad & Tobago	2
Ukraine	2
Algeria	1
Barbados	1
Chile	1
Colombia	1
Croatia	1
El Salvador	1
European Union	1(*)
Fiji	1
Hungary	1
Israel	1
Kazakhstan	1
Luxembourg	1
Madagascar	1(*)
Northern Mariana Islands	1
Peru	1
Russia	1(*)
Slovenia	1
South Korea	1
Switzerland	1
Thailand	1
United Arab Emirates	1(**)
Uruguay	1

The European Union, Madagascar, and Russia were single-reader countries last month too. The United Arab Emirates are on a three-month streak. I make out that there were 22 single-reader countries, up from January’s 14 and December’s 18. I also make out that there were 61 countries altogether, so I’m spread out over more of the world than in January (48 countries) and December (42).

There were, it appears, 716 followers by WordPress. Six by e-mail. I’m sure they’re all sending me to the spam bin. It still counts. Interested in being any of them? Go for it: there should be a button to follow the blog on your WordPress device in the upper-right cornere here. There should be one to follow by e-mail just below that, although given that following by e-mail really isn’t a thing maybe I’ll go move that to somewhere less obvious. You can follow on an RSS reader too, if you have one of those, and why don’t we have more of them? RSS is so good at stuff.

So what do you think? Should I go back around to reviewing the story comics and how they’ve updated since I got to them a couple months ago? That might be doable.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped two points as Matthew got a rental car that has one of those key fobs where there’s nothing to put in anywhere to get the car working and he had to spend twenty minutes in the parking lot of the rental place trying to figure out how to get the engine started, and he’s got some harsh words to say to whoever wrote the index to the car’s owner’s manual.

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Statistics Tuesday: What January Meant For My Humor Blog

And now, just a little late, I get around to reviewing my readership numbers for these parts (and parts of parts) for January (for 2017). It was a well-read month for Another Blog, Meanwhile. It may have shown me my true blogger-calling.

So in January 2017 there were, WordPress says, soem 2,340 page views from 1,361 distinct visitors. That’s way up from December 2016’s 1,396 views from 818 visitors, and November’s 1,219 views from 708 visitors. It’s my most-read month since the Apartment 3-Gocalypse and that time I got named in The Onion AV Club. (This is the sort of complicated, obscure thing I think is a good joke. The AV Club article didn’t name me, even though the article was written by a guy I knew from Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfic-writing, but I used his offhand description of me to give this blog its name. Now that I have explained this you understand why it is appropriate to be amused.)

That fact, and the list of the five most popular articles this past month — four of which got over a hundred page views each! — tells me something important in what people like from me. January’s most-read articles:

• What’s Going On With Judge Parker?
• Popeye Space Ark 2000 Pinball … I Don’t Even Know
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• Mark Twain: Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance
• Why Does Mary Worth Look Different?

Mark Twain I imagine popped up because it’s a pretty good piece people might have heard about but not known where to find. I’m happy to keep them from learning about archive.org if it’s any good to me. The Popeye pinball reappeared because a thread on pinball site Tilt Forums about awful, awful games referred to it. Popeye has a really crazypants backstory you have to see to believe, and then not believe.

But the rest is all me explaining story strips. Just like my Apartment 3-G narration. All told six of the ten most popular essays were explaining story strips. People want to know what’s happening in the story comics, without actually reading the story comics, for which I can’t blame them. I mean, I enjoy them, but they are a lot of padding and reaction shots and repetitions of what was already established and sometimes you just want to know why everyone is all tense today. I’m glad to discover this need and my ability to fill it. It’s just a shame I figure I’ve got two weeks before I run out of newspaper-syndicated story strips. I don’t figure to move on to web comics. There’s too many of them, for one thing, and nothing in Endtown needs explanation until that point two-thirds of the way into a story when it’s impossible to guess what’s going on or why.

Now to page views per country, so far as WordPress tells me anything:

Country	Views
United States	1926
Canada	64
United Kingdom	57
France	35
Germany	35
India	29
Australia	23
Ireland	11
Mexico	11
Hong Kong SAR China	10
New Zealand	10
Philippines	10
Italy	8
Spain	8
Sweden	8
Vietnam	8
Netherlands	7
Singapore	6
Trinidad & Tobago	6
Finland	5
Israel	5
Japan	5
Argentina	3
Austria	3
Bangladesh	3
Cambodia	3
Norway	3
Portugal	3
Brazil	2
Egypt	2
Kuwait	2
Poland	2
South Korea	2
Tunisia	2
Armenia	1
Denmark	1
Ecuador	1
El Salvador	1
European Union	1
Kenya	1
Madagascar	1
Mongolia	1
Pakistan	1 (*)
Puerto Rico	1
Russia	1
Serbia	1
Uganda	1
United Arab Emirates	1 (*)

Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates were single-reader countries in December also. No countries are on a three-month single-reader streak. My “European Union” visitor is back, or replaced. I make this out as readers from 48 countries, with the United States strikingly dominant there. 14 single-reader countries. In December there were 42 countries listed altogether, 18 of them single-reader. So I suppose despite appearances the world is getting a little better, at least by that measure.

What else is there to measure … oh. There were 163 pages liked around here in January, up from December’s 137 and November’s 134. There were 39 comments, which doesn’t sound like many for the number of page reads, but that’s better than December’s 20 or November’s 14. I think the secret is to say wrong stuff about the comics and then people will come in to try fixing it.

February started with the page here having got 47,049 page views from some 25,045 distinct viewers or other. And WordPress claims I’ve got 711 followers on WordPress, plus six by e-mail. For at least the third month running the most popular day around here was Tuesday, which got 18 percent of page views. The most popular hour was midnight, 8 percent of page views, just like the last two months. I don’t know why Tuesday should stand out, but it’s only barely standing out.

Anyway, if you’d like to follow me, you’re probably reading this already. But there should be a ‘Follow This Blog’ link, for WordPress or for e-mail, somewhere around here. Probably on the upper part of the page, if I understand the theme right. We’ll see when someone complains I have it wrong.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose two points today and someone pointed out that could be called a “safety”. No dice. The moment is passed.

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The Eternal-Ish Question

Is it better when my mathematics blog is followed by some obviously non-mathematics-oriented site with a name like “CatsImitatingTerryThomas.WordPress.com” or when my humor blog is followed by some vaguely-STEM-looking site with a name like “ThermoplasticPhysics.WordPress.com”? Or does it matter since I know they’re just hoping I’ll follow them back and neither of us will ever read the other? Please reply care of my writing-advice blog, NebusForgottenNewJerseyHistory.WordPress.Com.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index fell seven points amid continuing bickering about who was supposed to put the leftover Rita’s Frozen Ice in the freezer and while there wasn’t all that much left over everybody had been making elaborate plans about how good it was going to be.

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Statistics Saturday on a Wednesday: December 2016 in my Statistics

So now I’ve had some time to look over my WordPress statistics for December 2016 and I can share them with you.

It was a busier month in December than in November and I have to credit my string of explanations of what’s going on in the story strips for that. You think of the story strips as the part of the newspaper comics nobody reads, but the Internet is so vast that even nobody is a lot of people. That came out to 1,396 page views from 818 distinct visitors. That’s up from November’s 1,219 views from 708 visitors. It’s down from the October figures, though, of 1,507 views from 974 visitors. I have no explanation for all that.

The number of likes was 137, barely up from November’s 134, and down from October’s 160. There were only 20 comments, which seems like an undercount. But that is up from November’s 14. And down from October’s 32. September had 69; I’ve got to go back and figure what the heck went on there. I don’t know.

As I say, what really brought people in for December was talking about comics. I’m a little surprised since it isn’t hard to find comics snark out there. But maybe just catching people up on what they’ve missed is of reliable interest. We’ll know when I try to explain what the heck is with Gil Thorp anyway.

December’s most-read pieces were:

• Why Does Mary Worth Look Different? which got 111 page views! I didn’t realize she was that popular all of a sudden.
• S J Perelman: Insert Flap ‘A’ And Throw Away with 58 page views and maybe people were looking for relief after assembling Christmas stuff? I don’t know. Its busiest day was the 25th.
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.? and I should sometime mention the developments in poor little Sarah’s recovery.
• Has the comic strip _Momma_ come to an end? Yes, for new strips; no, for reruns; I don’t know, about newspaper publication.
• What Is Going On With Mark Trail? and I just realized I was inconsistent about using “What Is” or “What’s” for my story-strip explanation posts and don’t think that isn’t going to drive me crazy for the rest of my life. Augh.

Now for the ever-popular list of countries. There were 18 single-reader countries in December, down from 21. There were 42 countries listed altogether, down from 50. My readership in Singapore dropped 50 percent. C’mon, guys, I thought we were friends? Well, here goes.

Country	Readers
United States	1160
India	40
Canada	36
United Kingdom	24
Germany	21
France	18
Philippines	15
Australia	7
Italy	6
Mexico	6
Japan	5
Brazil	3
Ireland	3
Saudi Arabia	3
South Africa	3
Chile	2
China	2
Ecuador	2
Finland	2
Greece	2
Netherlands	2
Russia	2
Singapore	2
Vietnam	2
Argentina	1
Bangladesh	1
Belgium	1
Colombia	1 (*)
Croatia	1 (*)
Hong Kong SAR China	1
Malaysia	1
New Zealand	1
Nigeria	1
Pakistan	1
Poland	1
Portugal	1
Spain	1
Thailand	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Turkey	1
United Arab Emirates	1
Zimbabwe	1

Colombia and Croatia were also single-reader countries last month. Nobody’s on a three-month single-reader streak. No sign of the mysterious “European Union” viewer.

The month started with my blog having 44,707 page views from 23,682 viewers. I didn’t keep track of how many people were following on January 1st and I’m feeling too lazy to work out how many added or dropped since then because guh who could? The Insights page … I’m not sure how to get the statistics for December alone. Right now it’s saying Tuesday was my most popular day, with 19 percent of views, a slight increase from November’s lead for Tuesdays. The most popular hour remains midnight, 8 percent of views, but that’s about what you’d expect if every hour of the day.

If you’d like to follow this blog, by WordPress or by e-mail, there’s buttons in the upper-right corner of the page to do that. They’re just underneath the search bar. My Twitter feed, @nebusj, is also sitting in the upper-right corner. Yes, I finally turned my vague and unfocused dissatisfaction with the “Truly Minimal” theme into actual switching to the “Twenty Sixteen” theme. This is because everybody loves when web sites just change their look. But I like what it does with comics images better. Oh, wait, it does different stuff based on how wide your web browser is. I didn’t know that. Well, it doesn’t seem to do anything bad yet. Will have to think about this more.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index rushed upwards nine points, nearly making a first down, before being pushed back down three points by an aggressive ground game. Must admire the spunk on the opposing team, though. Good sportsmanship all around.

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Meanwhile As I Scrutinize My E-Mail Like Every Five Minutes

I’m starting to suspect WordPress isn’t going to send me that “look how your 2016 was!” report with the animated picture of fireworks going off for every post and talking about how many people from what countries read my blogs. I hope it isn’t because of something I did, like keep on using the old-fashioned way of entering new posts. I tried, I really tried, using the new system but it’s designed the way web sites are done anymore, where everything is a bunch of floating loose islands and they’re all colored borderless rectangles and there’s no guessing what’s a button and what’s a label and what’s done automatically and what you have to find and press a button to do. I don’t want to sound prematurely old. It’s just that when I look at a web site and wonder if they’re trying to gamify my user experience I feel like I have to wash my hands. And I already do that like 260 times a day which should be enough except it never is and maybe I should go do it again. Anyway I liked the fireworks thing.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index dropped back below 100 again, daring people to insist that it’s a psychological barrier or in fact any kind of barrier at all. “Ha, ha,” say traders, “we can go anywhere we want as long as it isn’t below 90 again,” and then curled up on the floor sobbing and declaring there’s no such thing as 89, there’s no such thing as 89.

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