Tag Archives: wordpress

State of the blog…

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Is it even the end of the year if we don’t take a minute to review some of the stats from 2022?

In a nutshell, we’ve had 251 posts weighing in at approximately 90,000 words, seen by 1,500 followers. It’s a nice round number and I’m not even going to ponder how many of those are bots. 

Total views were down this year to 14,140. That’s a drop off of 2,333 views from last year. 2021 was the high-water mark for views since I started at WordPress, so this year ends a 3-year trend of steady growth. By the time views for this post and tomorrow’s yearly book review are published, I’ll be slightly ahead of where the numbers stood in 2020. I won’t be gnashing my teeth about any of that. 

I don’t spend a lot of time looking at stats since they’ve never really drive what I do around here. That said, since I created this blog, it looks like there have been 117,885 views from 50, 507 visitors. In that time, those visitors have peeped at 3,804 unique posts. It feels like reasonable numbers for a nobody blogger mostly using it as a tool to scream into the void and hang on to his own sanity.

So, that’s where we’ve been. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll all come back a year from now and see if 2023 treats us better or worse. As always, I plan to walk into the new year with absolutely no expectations either way.

Not quite off a cliff…

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I never intended or made any effort to use this blog as a money-making venture. First and last, it’s been a project purely for me to vent angst and aggravation out into the universe. I’m told keeping it all bottled up is bad for you and this has been my now year’s long venue for getting it out of my system without picking fights or putting my career in too much jeopardy.

Even though I don’t make any editorial decisions based on them, WordPress is chock full of metrics that, if one were so inclined, could help tailor content and optimize its potential reach. Back in 2021 it was picking up a surprising amount of traction for a nobody blog with no particular focus and no stated purpose. Over the last year, those numbers have, if not quite cratered, then trended back towards the historical mean.

Maybe it’s an issue with algorithms or maybe it’s a case of “they’re just not that into you.” That’s fine. Just like I don’t find my self worth in my profession, I don’t look at my daily page views as anything more than they are – a snapshot of who happened to pass by on any given day. 

I don’t know how long the average blogger lasts, but having been at this since way back when Myspace was a thing, I’ve got to be one of the old timers by this point. The focus of blogging has certainty changed since I started tapping out my first proto posts is in 2006. The ones I come across now have a lot more marketing flare, topical focus, and longer form writing than they did back then. God save me from ever feeling the need to be slickly marketed or well put together.

It’s well that this is something I’m just doing for me. Here in a couple of weeks I’ll roll up the full year’s numbers and they’re going to look anemic next to last year’s “state of the blog.” I’m surprisingly ok with that.

I’m still here. I’m still writing. I’m still offering up thoughtful and not-so-thoughtful takes on whatever abject fuckery is going on in the world and manages to catch my attention. I’m doing, at least one these pages, exactly what I want to be doing. 

Three thousand…

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Managing the public archive has gotten significantly easier since I went through a mad tear of consolidating several different blog platforms into this one WordPress account. I can tell from the handy dashboard that shows me everything from daily views to most searched phrases and what keywords are likely to be bringing people here that the number of posts here has now swelled to 3,000.

It’s a nice round number. It’s the kind of milestone or way-marker I enjoy hitting. It shows me that regardless of that somewhat ephemeral nature of the internet, there’s a transaction record of sorts showing that I have, in fact, done a thing – even if that thing isn’t exactly the great American novel.

Sometimes I think I’d like to spend some time going back to the early days and do a bit of reading – sort of a look back at where it all started. I’ve got a bit of real curiosity about what may have changed over the last thirteen years. Or maybe I’m more likely to find that I’ve refined and expounded my ideas a bit since then, but many of them are still found firmly rooted in the soil from which they sprung originally.

From time to time someone asks why I do this. I’m not monetizing the site. In fact I pay a noiminal fee every year to prevent adds from appearing here at all. Like I wrote up there in the “About Me” section many, may years ago, anything written and posted here isn’t necessarily done with an eye towards an audience. It’s done almost exclusively to vent my own frustrations and petty annoyances. Knowing that, the fact that so many of you hang around for the ride is downright humbling.

The whole nine years…

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So today is the big day. We’re celebrating jeffreytharp.com’s 9th birthday. Well, I guess we’re not so much celebrating it as we are simply remarking on the occasion. Celebrating implies sparkly hats and cake and, frankly, sounds just awful.

Unless I’m reminded it’s easy to forget just how long I’ve been doing this. The first five years, of course, weren’t actually here at WordPress (although the whole archive now lives here permanently and you can access al those posts from the links along the left hand side of the screen). I wasn’t quite early enough to claim to be a blog pioneer, but I’ve been doing it for enough time that I feel like one of the surviving old timers. It helps that I didn’t start out expecting to set the world on fire, or turn it into an income stream, or ever really want it to be more than just a collection of whatever thoughts or ideas grabbed my attention on any given day. I expect that’s why I have managed to keep after it year over year no matter whether the views were up or down.

WordPress has given me an open platform to blurt out whatever happened was on my mind without a requirement to categorize it or enter into a discussion. It’s where I can come and simply state that this is my opinion and here’s the thinking that led me there. It’s far more cathartic each evening than diving into a comments section or social media post and screaming at whoever wanders by with a differing opinion.

So, you might be wondering, after nine years where do we stand by the numbers? Since February 2010, we’ve racked up 2,364 posts, 565 comments, and a staggering 702,018 total words. Fortunately, those are statistics that the site keeps for me. There’s no way I’d have come close to those totals if I were asked to take a guess.

Next milestone: June 2021, when we’ll be celebrating 15 years of blogging. See y’all there.

Style versus substance…

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I’ll probably live to regret this, but WordPress asked me today if I wanted to switch over to a “new and improved” editor. I’m firmly in the camp of if something is advertised as new or improved it’s practically guaranteed to be worse than whatever it’s replacing. 

I’m going to try keeping an open mind about this thing – although it’s currently very tempting to dismiss it since I can’t figure out how the hell do do things that took two clicks using the old editor. It’s probably just a learning curve kind of thing, but writing is hard enough without needing to spend a lot of time and effort figuring out how to make things look right too. 

That’s probably a lot much to ask from the internet, of course… especially considering the layout this blog hasn’t changed in any meaningful way since the day I first set it up. I’m a guy who’s usually more concerned with content over looks in all things and if my own layout happens to be a little long in the tooth, I suppose that’s a little telling. 

It’s probably a good thing that I’m trying to get this sorted during Thanksgiving week. It’ll give me at least four or five days to figure out what the hell is going on before anyone starts paying attention again.

Something cool just happened…

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So, something cool just happened. Well, I guess it’s something cool if you enjoy blogging, facts and figures, and establishing order out of chaos.

A few minutes ago I hit “post” on the last of the archive material I was bringing over from my long-defunct and anonymous alternate blog site. For the first time ever every single post I’ve made now resides on WordPress right here at http://www.jeffreytharp.com. That’s 2,774 posts stretching back all the way through 2006 and the early days when MySpace was considered a legitimate blog hosting alternative.

I’m not even going to guess at the word count or the number of hours that have poured into this little endeavor of mine. Both of those factoids would fall into the “interesting but irrelevant” category for the moment. Instead, I think I’ll just fix a bit of a drink, sit back, and be pleased that I’ve done a thing.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Perception. Working for our Uncle lo these many years has given me an odd relationship with money, particularly with my perception of what constitutes a “large amount” of it. Sure, in my personal life $100,000 is a big number. It’s almost twice what I paid for my first place. In my professional capacity, though, throwing out round numbers in the tens and hundreds of millions is the rule rather than the exception. That’s why having long drawn out conversations about spending $100k makes perfect sense to my tax paying soul, but drives my professional self to madness. In the overall scope of the budget it’s barely a rounding error and I’d just like to get on with other stuff.

2. Facebook. I secretly suspect that we all have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. It turns out due to a recent policy change, my blog, hosted on WordPress, is no longer allowed to communicate directly with my Facebook profile. What I use to be able to do with one click can now conveniently be done with about twelve. I do love it when technology is used to make simple tasks even harder to do. I also enjoy it when the solution to having a handful of bad actors exploit a feature is to terminate that feature for all users. Look, I know Facebook is a “free” platform and they can do what they want, but honest to God at some points their tweaks and “features” are going to drive one to ask if it isn’t just easier to interact with the other platform instead.

3. The Privilege Police. I have a bad habit of browsing the comments when I read news articles or opinion pieces. I’d probably be far less agitated by the news if I’d stop doing that. On one recent article, every 3rd comment was some variation on “this was so written from a place of privilege,” as if that were somehow sufficient reason to invalidate someone’s opinion or personal experience as detailed in an article written from their point of view. It feels patently ridiculous to assume every American, living and, dead has had the same American Experience. I feel not one ounce of shame about where or who I’ve come from and will continue to tell my story from my perspective no matter the gnashing or teeth and rending of garments it may cause the Privilege Police. After all, they are perfectly free to write an article addressing the same topic or experience from their point of view. Apparently creating original content is harder than just sitting at the keyboard being offended by every damned thing.

It’s pointy sticks for WordPress…

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It’s come to my attention over the last several days that the bit of technology that connects my WordPress account to Facebook to provide a helpful little notification that there’s something new to read seems to be not working as it should do.

Having been in at the creation of the internet, spending my formative technological years in newsgroups and chat rooms before moving on to more modern offerings like Classmates, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. I only mention it to establish my credibility as one who is steeped well in the art of screaming into the online void. The fact that nothing happens to be screaming back at any particular moment isn’t particularly surprising. The void is a big place after all. However, that little notice that “Hey, Jeff published something new” is something I looked forward to five nights a week.

The beauty of the basic WordPress account is that it works just about flawlessly 999 days out of 1000. There’s not that much administrative work to keep up with unless you have a deep desire to figure out what all the switches and buttons do. Mostly it just sits there and runs itself based on whatever selections you made when first setting up the account. I’ve stayed firmly rooted to this platform because it has required so little in the way of upkeep over the years.

There are, of course, there’s the odd day when something behaves oddly and you have to climb down into the engine compartment and start poking things with pointy sticks until it starts working again. That’s what it’ll feel like anyway, because I’ve very clearly lost touch with how anything deeper than the surface layer of technology works.

The spamming of WordPress…

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I’ve been using WordPress as my blog platform since 2010. It’s been a good, feature-rich home that is about as straightforward to use as anyone could reasonably expect. There have been a few hiccups along the way, but overall it’s the kind of happy technology that just works and lets itself fade into the background so you can focus on content instead of the nuts and bolts of how the website itself functions. I’m just not geek enough anymore to be particularly interested in that side of running things.

The last couple of weeks, though, I’ve found myself inundated by an unexpected and unprecedented amount of spam message traffic making its way past the WordPress filters. Each and every post on jeffreytharp.com seems to generated a responding barrage of dozens of likes and follows from click bait sites filled with brilliant marketing strategies and tips for monetizing your page. For the purposes of my writing here, each and every one of them is both pointless and annoying – spam messages in their most pure form.

Until now, the filters provided by WordPress were sufficient to hold this onslaught of wasted electrons at bay. Since that is true no longer, I’m trying to manually enforce some kind of discipline on what makes it through to my inbox. That being the case, I’ve had to impose rather draconian restrictions on what notifications I’m receiving from WordPress. The free and easy days of letting everything flow through to my inbox and sorting through one or two messages a day seem to be over.

So look, if you are trying to reach me through the blog for some reason, chances are I haven’t seen your message. Feel free to leave a comment, though, because for the moment I am seeing those notifications without undue amounts of spam getting in the way. It feels like there should be a better way to manage this sort of thing but it’s the best I was able to implement on short notice. Frankly, though, any option that stops the flow of this junk to my inbox is more than welcome so I don’t see any major changes in the foreseeable future.

The Year in Review: 2017 Edition

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Screen Shot 2017-12-31 at 9.55.36 AM.png WordPress use to helpfully provide a year in review feature that would auto-magically spit out a post with all the facts and figures about what posts were popular, where your views were coming from, and all manner of information about what your readers found interesting. Sadly, they discontinued that feature a couple of years ago, so it’s up to me to come up with something to say here at the end of the year.

In plain language, this year was almost exactly average with about 6,600 views and 3,684 visitors. Some years have been better, some worse, and I guess that’s about all we can reasonably expect to say about blogging – or life for that matter.

The most viewed post of the year wasn’t even a post from this year. Instead, you have to reach back all the way to 2014 find the post titled For Official Use Only. Some people would mind that, but me, I’m not picky about where people are looking so long as they’re looking. In case you’re wondering, you had to drop all the way down to the third most viewed post to find one written in 2017. You probably won’t be shocked to find out it’s about people making bad decisions and the rest of us poor sods who have to listen to them talk about it.

In related news, it’s also the first year that “hot lesbian cheerleader” didn’t lead the ranking of search terms that brought people here. I’m not sure if that says more about what people are searching for or the content I’ve been posting this year… so make of that what you will.

I won’t even speculate what 2018 holds for the world. Assuming the new year is about the same as the old, it’ll be about equal parts joy and terror, with a heavy dose of “what the actual fuck” thrown in for good measure. The only thing I’m reasonably sure about is that as long as I have an internet connection and and a few thoughts that I can’t stand keeping to myself, I’ll be here writing them down and sharing them with the world. That too could be good or bad, depending on your perspective. Since it seems to help preserve my sanity, I’m going with the idea that remains a net good overall.