Wow. I can’t believe I’ve made it to 500 posts. I began this blog back in January 2017 so I’ve been at this for almost 8 years. The time has really flown by. I started out with the goal of posting at least once a month, now I post at least once a week. I typically never look at my site statics, but now seems like a good time to check them out.

WordPress tells me I have 50 subscribers. I think this just counts people who have WordPress accounts who click on the subscribe button, so the actual number could be higher than this if you count people who visit the site regularly using an RSS reader or something like that. Of course, not everyone who clicks the subscribe button reads every post, so the actual number of regular readers could also be lower than this.

I’ve consistently gotten more views each year from just over 300 views in 2017 to over 5,000 so far this year, averaging over 100 views a week. It looks like the most views I’ve gotten on a single day was 60. That’s not much compared to the top social media influencers, of course, but I don’t think it’s too shabby considering I do absolutely nothing to promote this site.

By far most of my readers come from the United States, which isn’t a surprise. Canada is a distant second, followed by the United Kingdom, China, India, and dozens of other countries. This is probably typical for an English-language blog.

The most popular search term that brings visitors to the site is “Don Juan” with “Legion” being a distant second, followed by Captain Marvel, Recrossing Brooklyn Ferry, and Elizabeth Bathory. I reviewed Lord Byron’s epic poem Don Juan back in 2017, so I’m surprised it’s still driving the most traffic to my site. Legion is also a surprise since I only made one short post about that TV show, also back in 2017. “Recrossing Brooklyn Ferry” by John Richard Trtek is a big surprise. This is a short story that appeared in an issue of Asimov’s that I reviewed back in 2019. I only wrote a couple sentences about this short story, so I’m sure the people who searched for it on my site were disappointed.

Goes to show, you never know which post of yours will end up being the most popular. Doing lots of different posts about a wide variety of things is probably the best way to get new readers, although probably not the best way to keep them. I’ll go ahead and continue my policy of posting whatever I want, even though my favorite subjects right now (U. S. Presidents and obscure Mormon documents) don’t bring that many readers. When you’re a writer, I think you’ve just got to write what you want to. Trying to please others isn’t a great way to gain an audience, so you might as well do what makes you happy.

My most viewed post is my review of Don Juan Canto 1, followed by my 2021 review of the ancient Babylonian Poem of Erra and a post I did in 2018 on “Some Kids Movies that Stand the Test of Time (Or Don’t)”. My most liked posts are reviews of The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2012 and The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey. It’s pretty random.

I started posting a weekly round-up of good news every Friday back in September 2021. I did this because negative news is everywhere. It makes sense for mainstream media to focus on the bad since people are more likely to click on bad news. However, the overall negative tone of the news causes people to think the world is worse than it actually is. In addition to this, humans have a negativity bias which causes us to focus on the bad and ignore the good. I used to think the world was awful myself until I read Hans Rosling’s Factfulness and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature which prove the world keeps getting better and better, despite what our news and negativity bias tells us. To do my own small part to counteract the media’s tendency to ignore good news, I thought it would be a good idea to post about good news each week to remind everybody things aren’t as bad as they seem. I’ll probably continue doing this for the foreseeable future.

I’ve got some ideas for other additions to this blog, but I won’t announce them until I’m sure I’m going to do them. Thanks for celebrating my 500th post with me. Here’s to 500 more!