I’m Not Complaining, Just Observing

I promise that this post is not me complaining or whining or bitching. I’m just a stats nerd and I notice stuff like this.

I watch the stats for this page. Always have. Back when I was using Blogger (from 11/08 through 12/12) I didn’t have stats available so I signed up for third party apps that kinda sorta let me view stats. One of the reasons I moved off of Blogger and onto WordPress.com was all of the visitor and page view stats.

In March of 2021 my view counts started to grow. I don’t know why, they just did. I always say this and I’ll say it now. When I talk about numbers on this page I am not talking about large numbers. I am not comparing viewer engagement here to any other site. This is not a real site and it’s not meant to pull people in. I tag and stuff, but that’s it. My numbers are teeny tiny compared to real blogs. I only compare my current numbers to my previous numbers. In March of 2021 I went from very few viewers to slightly more than very few viewers. Things grew steadily for a few months, then in February 2022 things started to sort of trend downward again. I don’t know why.

For some reason, unknown to me, last month’s numbers were super low compared to the prior year and a half. It wasn’t the lowest hit count for a month over that time period, but it was close. Similarly, this week my weekly numbers have been super low. I had one good day and every other day has been down to almost nothing. Today’s count right now (4:41pm) is less than what I would have woken up to at this time last year. I don’t know why and I don’t really care. This page is really just for me, you know? I have fun with it even when no one reads any of it. If my numbers were flat zeros (sorta like the film blog) I wouldn’t care.

The really interesting thing for me is, while the page view numbers seem to be evaporating steadily here, the view counts on Flickr have never been higher. I know why, theoretically at least. I am posting tons of stuff to Flickr and I am much more active on that site than I’ve been maybe ever. I joined in 2009 and at that time I was up to my eyeballs in the facebook and maybe up to my chin in the twitter, not to mention being a few months into the original Blogger page. Social media engagement wasn’t really the point of Flickr for me. Today though, Flickr is pretty much it for me as far as social media is concerned. I’m still using instagram a little, but I’m not really engaged with it. I post a pic a day and follow a bunch of photo and guitar centric users and I double tap on things that I see that I like, but mostly I just post the day’s picture and then leave. Over the last six months or so I have been posting photos to Flickr groups like crazy and then following up by viewing everyone else’s posts to those groups (within reason… I am not viewing everything that goes to the 10 Million Photos group, just a tiny fraction) and I have been viewing and faving and following tons of stuff on each day’s explore page. I should leave comments more often, but I never know what to say… sort of like real life, right?

What’s the point of this? There is no point. I post a ton to this page because I enjoy it. I post a ton to Flickr because I enjoy it. If people check my posts out then that’s great. If they don’t then I am still going to post a ton more. It doesn’t matter. I’m just a stats nerd and I feel the need to share my pointless observations. That’s all.

I mean really what it all comes down to is that we should all just prepare ourselves for season three of The Mandalorian, right? This is the way. I have spoken.

It’s November All Right

It’s November. In terms of weather and seasons that blows chunks. In terms of music… get ready to be bored to tears, boys and girls!

One song underway. 7/8 time and it has a keyboard part. I must be completely insane. Keyboards? Blah!

On the blogging nerd front, I mentioned about seven days ago that we broke the record for page views in a month with a whole seven days still to go. Well, those seven days are up now and did we ever destroy that monthly record. Boy howdy, did we ever! September broke the record at the time. The September count was 3% higher than the previous record. The October count though… holy shit, the October count was 31% higher than the September count. THIRTY ONE PERCENT! I don’t really know what happened. Sure I posted more than any other month, and sure I was bombing the universe with baseball playoffs and Red Sox panic. Still… a 31% increase? How the fudge did that happen?

Okay, I still have seven minutes of exercise to finish. I think I’ll get to it now.

In the immortal words of Bender Bending Rodriguez, it’s fun on the bun.

Stats Nerd

This is becoming like a thing around here.

Stats. Blog stats. WordPress.com doesn’t give us a lot, but what they do give us provides endless fun for a stat nerd like me. I assume I could be lamer if I tried, but I really don’t see the need. I am already pretty much as lame as it gets.

So last month we set the blog’s records for most unique visitors and for most page views. A couple of days ago October topped the unique visitors record and then earlier today October also topped the page views record. The interesting item of note here is that both stats have new records and there are still seven days left in the month.

Holy shit snacks, folks. Thanks for coming by! I assume a lot of it had to do with the Red Sox in the playoffs. Also, a lot of it may have something to do with the fact that this month is also going to demolish the record for most posts in a month. The goal here, when I started back in November of 2008, was to post once, maybe twice a day. Over the last few months I’ve been hitting more like six posts a day, and this month it’s even more than that.

I wonder… should I calm the fuck down a little? I probably should. I don’t think I will, but I probably should. Also, how much of the crap this month would have gone to facebook had facebook and I not decided to spend some time apart from each other? Red Sox-ily speaking, probably a lot of it. Otherwise, probably not a lot.

Oh well. I really do enjoy crunching the numbers they give us. All like… four of them. Also, I get to see which countries the IP addresses that visit the page come from. All sorts of fun and interesting places. Do I have regular viewers in far flung locales? Did I spell locale correctly? That would be cool. Do I have American viewers who are connected to VPN’s that show as coming from the farthest reaches of the globe, and if so are they spam? How many of the page views are russian bot farms trying to trick me into voting for trump in 2016? I’m guessing a few, at least. Not like twitter where it seems like 3/4 of the place is russian propaganda bots.

But what does it all mean in the end? Nothing. When all is said and done it means nothing. Do I care? Nope. I don’t. So why do I keep writing about it?

Ummmm… I haven’t got an answer to that one. Let me think on it for about a month and get back to you.

Stay at Home Day

Today is a simple pandemic shelter in place day. I am staying home and not going anywhere. The work day is 33 minutes away and I have a truck load of stuff to do today. After work I don’t go to my parents so I’ll make a big dinner for me and the love of my life and take the opportunity to get some stuff done at home.

One big focus will be evaluating the current lake asshole situation in the cellar. We are still getting enough rain that I can’t rule out the ground water level as the source of the mini floods, but at this point I am really leaning toward something inside leaking. Hopefully within the next week or so we can get someone out to take a look and see if they can find the root cause. Until then, wet vac plus dehumidifier equals a false sense of security.

I might try to get some musical therapy in tonight. Not sure. I actually had a 45-60 minute window last night where I could have done something/anything and I chose to watch an episode of Toast of London (I still have seven to go and it looks like today is the last day it’s on Netflix. I thought it was being removed today but I just refreshed my Netflix tab and it’s still there. Unless I’m just seeing the cache?) and play a video game. Star Wars: The Old Republic. On a scale of 1-10 I give it a four. Maybe a 3.5. I am playing a Jedi character and he doesn’t have a light saber yet. Maybe once I get that far in the story I’ll give it a higher rating. At my current point, still super early in the story, I do get to slaughter bad guys in an awfully un-Jedi like manner so… it’s okay. For music, I do know that I am currently slightly behind the pace I kept in the two years that I finished 50/90 as far as completed mixes goes, but I think I might be a smidge ahead overall. Who cares. I’m hoping to make a big push this weekend. We’ll see. Still lots of shite going on.

Want a blog stats update? Sure you do! Always remembering that if you have one of a thing and add another of that thing you can rightfully state that you have a huge, dramatic increase… know what I mean? When I talk of growing numbers, they are still very small numbers. Right? Right. I’ve mentioned in the past that my total page views per month stat took a huge jump at the start of the year. January blew away my previous monthly high, then May beat the record by a very tiny bit, then June shattered the record again. July didn’t beat it but it was so close that we can call it a virtual tie. How’d August do? Well, with 15+ hours to go… it shattered June’s record. I don’t know what I am doing to get people to visit, and I am pretty sure most of the page views are spam-related, but thanks for coming folks. I hope I am not boring you to death… I’m pretty sure I am boring everyone to death.

Okay, I am going to punch into work and get my day started. Happy Tuesday, everyone. Wear a mask, wash your hands, practice social distance, get the vaccine if you haven’t already. Be a decent human being and not a selfish, nazi shit.

Wasted Opportunity (Also, blog Stats Review)

I’m serving another 24 hour prison sentence. Dinner has been served to both of us, the doors have been alarmed so she can’t wander off without making a huge noise (I can’t either of course, but I know how to turn the alarms off so there’s that at least), her meds have been delivered, and my intermittent fasting period has been kicked off for another night (a little early, but that’s okay).

If I were smart I would be using my prison sentence to work on some 50/90, but the SyFy channel is running both parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and how can I not watch that? The only horcrux left is the snake.

We only have one more day in July, and lately that means I have been paying attention to the hit stats for this blog. I created this account in March of 2017 and the monthly counts for 2021 so far have (with one slight exception) destroyed every other month since the account was created. I’m not sure why (though I do seem to be posting more than ever before) but the numbers have been way up since last November and they skyrocketed starting in January. As always, please remember that skyrocketing monthly numbers for me look more like terribly bad afternoons for real blogs. All of you folks paying me visits are my new best online friends, but there aren’t that many of you, you know? Select company, right?

This is not my first wordpress.com account though. The first ran from December 2012 to July 2016. I was curious how my current stats compared to the old account’s. Turns out I am generally getting more hits now than I did then. Mostly. There were two months, December 2015 and January 2016, where the monthly hit count was higher than anything I’ve had with this account. Every other month was significantly lower than what I have been consistently getting in 2021. Why were those two months so much more popular than any other months since I started? No idea. I look at the summaries and I don’t see anything resembling a spike. There wasn’t one post that somehow, magically, drew in the people in droves. Nope, everything looks normal. I just had way more hits in those two months.

I set the record for this account last month, by quite a bit. This month has a chance to come close, but it’s going to take a crazy good night tonight and a really great day tomorrow to set a new record. Also, July has one more day than June so even if I do set the record it should have an asterisk. Roger Maris like a mutha, right?

Okay, I am going to ride out the rest of Deathly Hallows 2 for the next hour or so. Maybe I’ll try to write some lyrics, or a bass riff, or something. Anything, just so long as my mother doesn’t have a bad night.

Please don’t let her have a bad night. Pretty please.

Visits

So when I posted that little thing about Dunks and Letters to Cleo and Boston today it was one of those things that was funnier in my head than on the screen. That didn’t stop universehub.com from linking to it and giving me by far my busiest day page view wise since switching to WordPress.com. Thanks!

I put a link in the comments to the pictures I took on the night the Letters to Cleo live record was recorded. Here are a couple that received some love on Flickr, just because Cleo still rules the planet, even after being gone so long.

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