The Blogging Dozen

It’s that time again, my blog anniversary. It’s been twelve years, more than 1300 posts (plus a few dozen pages), and almost two million words (1.7 and change). That’s a fair amount of water over the dam. That said, the river flows a bit slower these days.

This 12-year anniversary comes on the heels of the 10-year anniversary of being retired. While the perceived importance of tens is a very human conceit (you’d expect the Simpsons and Mickey Mouse to attach that same importance to eights), twelves have a nice mathematical importance — there are more ways to evenly divide it: 2, 3, 4, and 6 (compared to the 2 and 5 of tens or the 2 and 4 of eights).

(That nice divisibility is handy with our 12-hour clocks and 12-month years.)

To illustrate what I mean by the river flowing slower these days, this chart:

Obviously, the bar for 2023 only shows the number of posts so far (46 not including this one). Hard to say at this point whether 2023 will come in slightly ahead of 2022 (with 82 posts), but it certainly won’t be a match for 2021 (with 125 posts), let alone 2020 (with 177 posts). I’d have to be unusually productive to beat those years.

But if I’m as productive in the second half as I was in the first, I’d end up with 92 posts in 2023. Time (specifically, six months) will tell. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. The older the river gets, the slower it flows.

Not for lack of content or ideas but for lack of energy (my get up and go has largely gotten up and gone). And there is a certain ennui that sets in after twelve years, (especially when, as indicated above, writing to a notable lack of major interest).

[On the other hand, I don’t make much effort to promote this blog, so perhaps the lack of interest is not surprising. (I don’t have Twitter or Facebook accounts, let alone any of the trendier social media, so promotion isn’t really possible. And I’m certainly not willing to pay for it.)]

Despite the decrease in number of posts per year, the average word count per post has constantly risen:

The river may flow slower, but the water is higher.

In the first six years, I tried to maintain a 1000-word ceiling. Back then, I was okay hitting 1200 words, but figured 1500 was the absolute max. There were exceptions, but I strove for more brevity then than I do now.

After taking all of 2017 off from blogging, I found myself writing longer posts, especially as the years went on. The current ceiling is 2000 words, and there have been a few that got into the 2500s.

Bottom line, posts down, words up. (Honestly, 1000 words was a pretty tight ceiling. I’m comfortable with 2000.)

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I posted back in November of 2021 about how the paragraphs of posts written in the “Classic” WordPress editor can be merged into a single paragraph when displayed in the WordPress Reader. In that post I included a workaround to prevent that problem.

I’ve seen the same thing happen with comments entered in the WP Reader Following section. It doesn’t happen in the WP Reader Conversations section. But it does seem the Reader has some issues handling blank lines correctly.

I’ve seen fairly recently some posts from other bloggers that displayed the problem, so apparently it still exists. I’ve been using a workaround ever since, so it doesn’t happen to my posts anymore. (Admittedly, the workaround requires some ability with HTML.)

Sometimes WordPress “catches up” to itself, recognizes the problem, and corrects it. Perhaps through a process that runs periodically? The post (or comment) initially displays in the Reader with no paragraph breaks, but when viewed later, the breaks are there. (Note this only applies to the WP Reader. Viewed on the author’s actual website, posts display as written.)

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I’ve been slowly going back and applying my fix to older posts. Usually when I see an old post getting hits, I’ll look to see if that post has been fixed yet. If not, I’ll open it in the (Classic) editor and apply the fix. I figure eventually I’ll have fixed them all.

Doing this also lets me correct three types of mistakes in early posts. Two are typographical errors on my part, the third is a design choice I later decided was a bad idea. The first typo came from my typewriter-trained muscle memory for using two spaces after a sentence-ending period. The WP editor preserves those two spaces by using a Unicode non-breaking space character for the second space. (Normally, multiple spaces in web text collapse to a single space.)

The second typo came from following the book typesetting convention for em dashes — no space before or after. But web text sometimes treats two words joined with em dashes as one long word — which makes line wrapping awkward. The spaces are one way to make sure a system can wrap the text at the dash. (The other, more tedious, way is to use the Unicode breaking-non-space character).

The design choice was using red text for links pointing to other posts on this blog. In retrospect, it made the links look broken (Wikipedia uses red text to indicate a topic that probably should have a page but doesn’t yet.) Seemed like a good idea at the time — a signal to the reader — but bad idea.

[If you read this on the website, in the paragraph above, the text “red text” is, in fact, red. In the WP Reader, it’s not.]

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WP Reader issues aside — as viewed on my website — I like how the HTML looks on posts with the fix. Without the fix, WP wraps paragraphs with <P> (paragraph) tags. Since I began this blog, I’ve wrapped paragraphs in <SPAN> tags to set the text color to full black. (I don’t understand why theme designers persist in using low-contrast colors for the text. Makes it harder to read. A definite case of style over sense.)

Because WP adds the <P> tags, older posts are wrapped:

<P><SPAN style=”color:black;”>…paragraph text…</SPAN></P>

Whereas new and fixed posts are wrapped:

<P style=”color:black;”>…paragraph text…</P>

Much cleaner. It appeals to my sense of parsimony and elegance. I have a macro that converts all my paragraph-wrapping <SPAN> tags into <P> tags. When WP sees my <P> tags it uses them rather than the default.

I wish the WP Reader didn’t strip out all the style information and formatting. I put some effort into having the text look the way I want it to, and the WP Reader messes with that big time. It won’t even show the section marks (§) centered even though I’m using the WP method of centering them.

I understand the basic desire to give posts viewed in the WP Reader the same look. But it goes too far. I wish it allowed some degree of formatting control. (Centered section marks would be a nice start.) As such, I use the Reader mostly to reply to comments on other blogs. It’s the only way I know to reply directly to a comment when replies have reached their depth limit and — as viewed on the author’s website — no longer have Reply links.

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I posted back in February of 2022 about how the Conversations section seemed broken in how it displayed comments. For one, it didn’t display the most recent comments. For another, it had weird behavior associated with clicking the Load previous comment from Author Name link.

They fixed that. I might complain about how many comments they display before cutting them off and putting the Load previous comments from Author Name and others link at the top, but I vastly prefer the new behavior.

Unfortunately, because apparently the developers don’t do thorough QA testing, the last update broke the Conversations section. Now the Reply and Read More links don’t work as you might expect. The former should open a text box for your reply, the latter should expand the comment so you can see the full text. Instead, both jump you into the post as if you’d clicked into it. You then must scroll down and find the comment if you want to reply to it or read its full text.

Very annoying. WP has acknowledged the bug, and they’re working on it. (It’s anyone’s guess when it’ll get fixed. A bug I reported over a year ago is still extant.)

In the meantime, they did give me a workaround: Select (highlight) the text of any comment in the Conversations section and that makes the Reply and Read More links work as expected.

However, clicking the text of any comment also pops you into the post, and the workaround does not work in this case. Click the text and, bang, you’re in the post. (Unless you click the selected text!)

I don’t understand how a bug that egregious gets through QA, but perhaps the more appropriate question is, “What QA?” (Or even, “What’s QA?”) As a retired software designer, I find it hard to have much respect for the WP developers. (In fact, these days, for most development teams. What the hell happened to software development?)

I will say that I’m happy with the WP customer support folks. They’re responsive and friendly. Wish I saw that more often. Thumbs up for them all.

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I’ve said this before, but this is a good occasion to say it again: I’m not happy about that subtle form of blogger spam involving False Likes and False Follows — single Likes and Follows from people I never hear from again. The Likes often come from blog-based peddlers of goods or services — obvious sellers. The Follows are less obvious: blogger self-promotion even if the blogger isn’t selling anything.

The key is the utter lack of engagement thereafter. Drive-by Likes and Follows. I might buy such a Follow as maybe being from someone genuinely interested in the blog but too shy to ever be heard from again seems a stretch.

On the other hand, it’s possible a post catches someone’s eye and they Follow the blog expecting more of the same. And don’t get it and lose interest. I’d think one would unfollow, but maybe some aren’t tapped into followed blogs. Notifications might be disabled (or filtered out), and one might not use a reader that automatically loads new posts. But that means they’re probably not reading posts.

Bottom line, I routinely remove subscribers whose only appearance is the initial Follow. If they’ve never Liked a post since, nor ever commented on one, eventually I delete them. I immediately remove obvious sellers unless they introduce themselves and say why they’re following my blog.

Honestly, I think any time you begin to Follow someone’s blog, you should make some sort of introduction. At least leave a comment. Ideally, engage. Comment once in a while to show you’re paying attention. On a busy blog, a Like once in a while at least lets the blogger know you’re there.

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Speaking of Follows, full disclosure, I’m a pretty shitty Follower. I don’t Follow very many other blogs. Most of the ones I do are science-based with informative posts. I do engage with the less formal ones (and sometimes even with the formal ones).

I don’t Follow blogs with ads or that are obviously selling something. I also don’t follow photo blogs, fiction blogs, poetry blogs, or dear diaries. This is purely a personal time management measure. It doesn’t stem from any negative attitude towards those types of blogs. In any category, blogs that post too often — I’d say regularly posting as much as twice a week was pushing it.

The big part of this is that I try not to live too much online. Other than long-form blogging (almost entirely on WordPress), and some engagement on YouTube, I don’t do social media. So, I have a hard time keeping up with the science blogs, let alone engaging with the social aspects of blogging. On some level, I’d almost regret this blog becoming popular and having to moderate, let alone reply to, tons of reader comments. I’ve seen other bloggers complain about the time it takes.

This blog is my semi-sorta-autobiography, my scrawl on the interweb wall. Kilroy and me. We were here.

Which is all to say, this is why I don’t complain too seriously about not having many Followers. Can’t really expect what one won’t give. C’est la vie.

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Here we are at the 2000-word ceiling. Normally, the anniversary post has lists (and often charts) of posts that have been popular in the past year and popular overall. But I’m thwarted by being unable to copy-n-paste the monthly hit data from the Total views table shown in the individual post stats. Makes it much harder to add that data to the Selected Posts database used to make those lists (and charts).

I don’t have the time to transcribe it from screen to data file, and plus, I don’t want to, so no charts and lists. And we’re above the word ceiling anyway.

I’ll just say that, generally speaking, the Top Posts from previous anniversaries (and New Year’s posts) are still the Top Posts.

One surprise recently is the Flat Space of the Torus post — the second-most viewed post so far in 2023 (first most-viewed, as always, is the From the Far Side post from 2015).

Two other recent hits are from the QM-101 series: Bloch Sphere, in fourth place, and Bra-Ket Notation, in thirteenth.

The Abacus and Slide Rule post from 2019 remains a contender — fifth most viewed in 2023. And oldie from 2012, Decisive Agnosticism, woke up and rumbled: 46 views in 2021, 61 views in 2022, and 86 so far this year. From less than a dozen in each of the six previous years (less than a half-dozen in the middle four of those six).

I would like to see the charts for those. Maybe later. Word count is well and truly blown at this point.

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I have a very special bottle of champagne in the fridge — a gift from a friend. I’ve been saving it for something special. Summer Solstice (actually a time of mourning for me; shorter days ahead), my retirement 10-year anniversary, and my blogging 12-year anniversary.

Reason enough to celebrate, and there are others more personal.

I’m going to eat, drink, and be very, very merry.

Starting right now.

Stay blogging, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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