2023 Blog Stats

HeadlinesLike last year, the number of people who came to read something increased—the highest number in five years. (More about this in Looking Ahead.) I posted more often—86 posts so far, including this one—though a number of these were brief and informational: notices of appearances, links to new reviews, and so on. For the first time in a while, I did a handful of Snippets posts.I did quite a few long and detailed posts, about everything from the real story of our wedding to in-depth looks at various aspects of Menewood, for example, this one about Menewood as an Object d’Art.Countries2023

Image description: Map of the world showing density of visitors by country. The USA is coloured dark pink, the UK and Canada medium pink, and the rest of the world pale pink—with some countries (mainly in central Africa) showing blank.

As you can see, people come from a lot of countries. The Top 6 countries from where my readers log on haven’t changed at all from last year, but the next four were a bit different, with China and Ireland being displaced by Italy and Spain:

USUKCanadaAustraliaGermanyFranceSpainIndiaItalyNetherlands

Spain of course is not surprising, given the recent publication there of Spear.

2012 – 2023

If you compare this year’s map to one below of the last 12 years—when this iteration of my website began—you’ll see that I’ve been visited by readers (or bots or trolls) from almost every territory on earth. There are eleven exceptions: Turkmenistan, North Korea, Svalbard, and eight in Africa (Eritrea, Djibouti Western Sahara, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Chad, and the Central African Republic). So if you’re reading this, and planning to visit any of these places, why not log onto my blog for a minute while you’re there? It would give me a lot of satisfaction to say, straight-faced, “My platform blankets the earth.”

Image description: Map of the world showing density of visitors by country. The USA is coloured dark pink, the UK and Canada medium pink, and the rest of the world pale pink—with some countries (mainly in Africa) showing blank.Popular Posts 2023

This year I didn’t talk much about the cats—there was too much other stuff going on. I did post photos of them a fair bit on social media. I also returned to writing Snippets posts—bulleted paragraphs of miscellaneous items I find interesting. This is something I used to do a decade or two ago when I blogged at least once a day. I don’t see myself returning to that kind of frequency but I’d forgotten how much enjoy doing this kind of not-about-me-just-interesting posts.

Top 10 New Posts

Of the Top 10 New Posts or Pages in 2023, most were book-related—seven about Menewood and one about Spear—with just two that were purely personal: one about my horrible winter, and another about the real story (or part of it) of my two weddings with Kelley.

Menewood Hieme HorribilisNo Matter What: 30 Years and 10 Years, The Real StoryMenewood Cover Reveal!Spear Wins the Ray Bradbury PrizeInterview with Menewood Narrator, Pearl HewittHollowed By Sorrow and Filled With JoyThree Books, Seven Parts, 38 Chapters…Menewood Q&AEcce Hild! The Art and Craft—And Work, So Much Work—of Early-Medieval EmbroideryTop 15 Overall

The Top 15 most-visited posts or pages overall this year were mostly perennial favourites, with two—Lame is So Gay and Books About Women Don’t Win Big Awards—reappearing after last year when they dropped off the list for the first time since they were first written in 2011 and 2015 respectively. There were just three new ones* that made this year’s overall list:

Men Are Afraid Women Will Laugh At Them Spear Hild Menewood *AboutAbout the Real HildBooks About Women Don’t in Big AwardsHieme Horribilis*Lame is So GayNo Matter What: 30 Years and 10 Years, the Real Story*Fiction that passes the Fries TestSong of Ice and Fire Speculative MapAud BooksKitten Report #11: Seven months old So Lucky Looking Ahead

Headline: this blog is not going anywhere; I’m here to stay.

For several years, traffic to my post dropped steadily—and, for a few years, precipitously. Most obviously, though: readers stopped leaving comments. If I was not also on various social media platforms I might have felt as though I were shouting into the void. But what was happening was that people were talking about the posts, just not here. They left brief notes on Twitter, and Facebook, and—to a much lesser extent—Instagram. But three years ago, early in the pandemic, the number of visitors to this site stabilised and then last year started going up. This year the numbers are up again—the best since 2017 (though still a fraction of the early days). The number of comments has also stabilised, though—like the visitor numbers—are a fraction of what they were ten years ago.

My guess is that this is a reflection of what’s been happening with social media: a continuing fragmentation and loss of centre, plus the ever-increasing thicket of trolls and bot-based lifeforms, not to mention the barbed bramble of adverts blocking the path to conversation. Blogs like this, with no advertising, can be a haven of calm.

I’m relatively content with the new equilibrium. I enjoy writing the posts and people seem to enjoy reading them. So I’m not going anywhere. This blog is here to stay. This year’s Xitter debacle is just another demonstration of why we all, and creators in particular, need to own our own platforms. Even if I thought all those other social platforms really were being run as public utilities for the greater good (ha ha ha), I like being able to say things too long for Bluesky and Threads and not pretty enough for Instagram. This is the best place to do that.

Will I start a newsletter (or post on Medium or Substack)? No. For the simple reason that this blog functions as a newsletter. All you have to do is subscribe (in desktop view, just look at the top of the right hand sidebar; in mobile platforms, scroll right to the end of an individual post), and every new post will be delivered directly to your mailbox the minute it’s published. No muss, no fuss—just like any other newsletter, except that a) you don’t have to pay, you will never have to pay, b) I’ll never share your data with anyone for anything, c) there will be no adverts. Plus, on a blog you can talk back if you like, safe in the knowledge that I’m in full control of the comments.

There may of course be some changes. Right now I have no particular plans. I would like to get back to posting longer and more interesting things. When I last checked I had literally hundreds of posts partially drafted. Many are from years ago and so will no longer be relevant, but I’m guessing a few others might be worth revisiting. But even if I deleted them all tomorrow, I have a list as long as my arm of things I’d love to talk about. It’s just a question of how I have the heart—that mix of hope, health, energy, time, and bloody-minded thick-skin-ness that long-term blogging requires. But I like this blog; I’ve been doing this or something like this for nearly 30 years. So stay tuned.