The Dawdler

What’s a typical or average day look like for you from when you awaken to the day to when you retire for the night?

I finally give up trying to sleep. I listen to whatever book I’m into for maybe an hour, then I get up. I feed the birds, give Duke his treats (can’t forget THAT one!). I make coffee, though whether I’ll ever actually get around to drinking it is a whole different issue.

Then I open the computer, take a look at the mail. If it has climbed to more than 300, I start to delete everything that isn’t a personal message, a bill or a receipt. THEN I answer comments. Sometimes I write something, or I go take some pictures and process them for posting later in the day, usually at night. Some time in there, I wander into the kitchen and figure out what I’m doing about dinner. It helps if I’ve defrosted something, but if I haven’t there’s always eggs and cheese and potatoes, so I will then make cheese omelets with home fried potatoes, with or without bacon or sausage. I used to make pancakes (griddle cakes to some of you) with maple syrup, but I began to find that too sweet.

Now almost everyone in the house is cutting way back on glutton so there are more potatoes, less bread (a LOT less bread) and essentially no pasta.

What has been your most well-received blog post to date, and what made it unique to your blog for it to become so popular?

Breaking this down, I am definitely the most active blogger with an average daily output of between 2 to 6 posts. In the past two years, no more than three and lately, just two. I’ve been doing this a long time and I don’t feel a need to prove anything anymore.

1. My “Home page/Archive” has 214,000 views.
2. Descending from the Golden Horde: B+ and Me has just under 15,000 views. It has been reblogged a couple of times, so it’s probably has several thousand more under reblogged names.
3. The FBI Can’t Do A Simple Google Search has 11,000.
4. Gazing Through to the Other Side has 7,150.
5. The Jonestown Massacre has at least 15,000 — probably more. I publish it every year under a slightly different name, so it has many more hits if you add it all together.
6. Where Do The Swans Go is at 4,700.

There are more, but that’s enough.

I think the big winner for a single day is Rich Paschall at 1,700 for Angel Comes Out.

Tom Curley got 1,400 for There’s Got to be a Pony in There Somewhere and 1,300 for Darwin Awards In Danger Of Being Cancelled Due To Too Many Candidates and a few others.

Garry had several that garnered more than a thousand each including his biography, Remembering Dad on his 100th Birthday, and another dozen or so that each hit around 800 or more.

Ellin Curley got quite a few that hit between 800 and 1000.

NONE of these — except Rich’s piece — got all of their hits on a single day.

Serendipity has been around for almost 12 years. It holds more than 13,000 posts and about a million and a half views and lord only knows how many comments. For most of its years, I have posted every day unless I was too sick to write.

We peaked in 2017 and got 170,00 views that year. We have been slowly dropping since then, a little at a time.

This is what I expected when I decided I needed to do less blogging and more living. Despite what everyone tells you, volume counts, at least statistically. More posts? More views. It’s not a mystery. I still get approximately the same number of views per post as I used to get — but I’m only posting once or twice — not five times a day or more. I decided that when the number of daily posts exceeds the number of fingers on your hand, you ARE spam.

Do you trust the internet?

Trust it for what? For accurate news? For cute pictures of kittens and dogs? For honesty? Give that a “yes” on pictures of kittens and dogs. Otherwise, seriously, are you kidding?

Categories: #Blogging, #MarilynArmstrong, Anecdote, Humor, Media, Q & A, questions, social media, Statistics

Tags: #Photography, Blogging, questions, statistics, The Dawdler