Wednesday, July 01, 2026
July 1 report
Steamy out; everyone's getting ready for the Fourth and fireworks have been going off in town all week. The dogs are getting jumpy. I'm in here counting blog visit numbers to stay out of the heat. It's the coming and going, from air-con and back, that gets to me by the end of the day. The blog numbers are oddly reassuring.
29 personal blogs and 9 commercial, on two different servers, plus about seven dead ones that I keep track of partly because I'm mulling over what to do with them. One is called "turning point" but it's about the 1970 bombing of Sterling Hall in Madison Wisconsin; I think people land on it just because "Turning Point" is in the news. Last month 761 people landed on it. I haven't posted on it for maybe ten years, but maybe it comes up high in Google searches if only because of its name, and its consistency, and the fact that it does have some essence to it. Perhaps the bots are thinking, why is this blog here? Maybe it's what they are searching for?
The bots are always trolling around, but there's no way of knowing how many actual visits are actually visits. All the seven dead ones, for example, have rising averages. So there's more bots than there used to be? No way of knowing. Overall they were mixed. Commercial ones did well too and also the lower third of the personal ones, the loser ones, and that seems to say bots to me. One that's about writing (yeah write, here, seems to be doing incredibly well, though now when I go looking for it, I can't find it because links to it are faulty. It's a little edgy. But it's about my life and feelings as a writer trying to peddle my wares out on the market.
It's actually a grim existence. Both the blogs and my writing are basically here for me; that's why they survive. Because day in and day out, I need to express myself in this world, and also because I have no patience anymore for pointless blather. I was in academia for a while and had a lifetime of it there alone. But now if I have something to say I want someplace to put it, and it works for me to put it in public but where very few people actually see it. Then I wake up one day tired of advertising my work on Facebook or Twitter, which is basically dropping pop-art around, and realize that if I'm getting 761 visitors a month even on a dead one, I'm wasting a lot of views to not set these blogs up a little nicer so they point to my work. Now that has been a slow and gradual process, but at least nobody kicks me out of there, or bans me like Twitter did for some god-forsaken reason. Well Elon you can kiss that whatever because I have my own place to advertise, and I don't care if the wrong people come to visit.
29 personal blogs and 9 commercial, on two different servers, plus about seven dead ones that I keep track of partly because I'm mulling over what to do with them. One is called "turning point" but it's about the 1970 bombing of Sterling Hall in Madison Wisconsin; I think people land on it just because "Turning Point" is in the news. Last month 761 people landed on it. I haven't posted on it for maybe ten years, but maybe it comes up high in Google searches if only because of its name, and its consistency, and the fact that it does have some essence to it. Perhaps the bots are thinking, why is this blog here? Maybe it's what they are searching for?
The bots are always trolling around, but there's no way of knowing how many actual visits are actually visits. All the seven dead ones, for example, have rising averages. So there's more bots than there used to be? No way of knowing. Overall they were mixed. Commercial ones did well too and also the lower third of the personal ones, the loser ones, and that seems to say bots to me. One that's about writing (yeah write, here, seems to be doing incredibly well, though now when I go looking for it, I can't find it because links to it are faulty. It's a little edgy. But it's about my life and feelings as a writer trying to peddle my wares out on the market.
It's actually a grim existence. Both the blogs and my writing are basically here for me; that's why they survive. Because day in and day out, I need to express myself in this world, and also because I have no patience anymore for pointless blather. I was in academia for a while and had a lifetime of it there alone. But now if I have something to say I want someplace to put it, and it works for me to put it in public but where very few people actually see it. Then I wake up one day tired of advertising my work on Facebook or Twitter, which is basically dropping pop-art around, and realize that if I'm getting 761 visitors a month even on a dead one, I'm wasting a lot of views to not set these blogs up a little nicer so they point to my work. Now that has been a slow and gradual process, but at least nobody kicks me out of there, or bans me like Twitter did for some god-forsaken reason. Well Elon you can kiss that whatever because I have my own place to advertise, and I don't care if the wrong people come to visit.
