Lucky Thirteen

The Earth has completed yet another orbit from this particular spot, so here we are (or at least here I am) with another Blog Anniversary. Almost hard to believe the Earth has spun ’round the Sun thirteen times since I began this blog. My blog’s a teenager now!

Thirteen years, fourteen hundred posts (this is post #1400), lots of wyrds (1.8 million). Lots of Wyrd, for that matter. This has been a self-documenting project from day one.

Needless to say, I have lists, stats, and charts (oh, my).

Speaking of which, some key stats:

• Years: 13
• Posts: 1400 (107.6 posts per year but see below)
• Words: 1,851,765 (1,323.6 words per post)

The posts-per-year average above is based on the full 13 years, but I was only active for 12 (I took 2017 off), so a more accurate average is 116.7 posts per year. That’s close to ten posts a month. Seems a decent output over twelve years.

My posts grew noticeably longer over time:

My first year, I was well below 1000 words per post. In the following years, I remained at about 1000 (which I considered my ceiling then).

After my hiatus in 2017, I decided a higher word ceiling was okay. At first, I thought 1200, but 2018 reveals a different truth. I dropped closer in 2019, but a few years ago decided that 2000 was a better ceiling. This year I’ve deliberately reached for more brevity and apparently grasped it some.

Traffic has never been anything to brag about here:

I was never popular. Not in school, not at work, not in the blogsphere. Oh, well, so it goes. At least I’m used to it. In an especially good year (of which there have been two), the blog just breaks 20,000 views. The average is only 14,700 (and that’s rounding up).

That said, there does seem a slight uptick in traffic lately, a hair over 11,700 views so far. It’s not visible in the by-year chart above, but it shows up in this by-month one:

Not sure what the source of the uptick is. Could be random variation in traffic — there’s that bump near the end of 2020.

I’ve been editing old posts and generating a lot of link-backs. I used to delete those, but recently decided to allow them. I have no idea if SEO notices those links, but it has occurred to me it might. It might be due to linking to my old posts from (my new blog on) Substack. WordPress only sees 18 refers from Substack, but just the links I made there may tickle the SEO. Sites do get rated, at least in part, by how many links to them exist.

Not that I care, particularly, but it’s kind of interesting. In any event, if the uptick continues, 2024 could be an especially good year. Time will tell!

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Last anniversary, as well as in the New Year’s review, I noted a couple of old posts that had gained new life. Those have continued, and others have joined them. Here are the Top 20 Posts in 2024 (so far, obviously):

1. Gibbs’ Rules (1145)
2. Elephant Story (679)
3. From the Far Side (616)
4. Flat Space of the Torus (601)
5. QM 101: Bloch Sphere (535)
6. Sideband #17: Ready when you are, Mr. DeMille (365)
7. Rick O’Shay (230)
8. Abacus and Slide Rule (180)
9. QM 101: Bra-Ket Notation (156)
10. Secret Code (140)
11. Decisive Agnosticism (118)
12. Physical vs Abstract (115)
13. Plato’s Divided Line (103)
14. The Expanse: Disappointment (91)
15. Movies: Grand Canyon (88)
16. “Imaginary” Parabola (88)
17. Fairy Tale Physics (87)
18. Movies: Face Off (85)
19. Baseball vs Other Sports (83)
20. Square Root of NOT (82)
21. Movie Cookies (82)
22. The Imitation Game (81)

(There are 22 because there are two posts tied in two places.)

The biggest surprise is the Gibbs’ Rules post (should be Gibbs’s Rules, but I’m afraid to change it now). A lot of page hits, and it has worked its way up to #11 overall (see list below).

The two posts I mentioned in the earlier posts are Elephant Story and Flat Space of the Torus. The former was semi-popular in the past — #3 in 2015 — but sinking to #29 in 2018 and then vanishing (under 50 views) until it springs to life at #6 in 2023 and now #2:

The Torus post was a slow burner for the first year but picked up big time in its second year. Going strong still, but maybe fading a bit now:

The performance of QM 101: Bloch Sphere is another outlier. Way more popular than the other posts in the QM-101 series (though QM 101: Bra-Ket Notation did get into the top 20):

Also surprised, but not unhappy with, Decisive Agnosticism making #11. It has gradually grown in popularity in the last three years. It didn’t get much attention after I published it in 2012:

A nice surprise is Plato’s Divided Line, a post I did about a chart Tina Lee Forsee requested for use in her novel, A Footnote to Plato:

I like to think it’s because her book is selling, and people are following the link in it. (I’ll complain yet again that the, in my view superior, follow-up post gets almost no hits.)

These posts (and others) seem to be contributing to the recent uptick, but the exact reason for the increase, or even if it’s meaningful, escapes me.

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Here are the Top 20 Posts Overall (2011-2024):

1. From the Far Side (9632)
2. My Grandfather’s Axe (6281)
3. Sideband #17: Ready when you are, Mr. DeMille (4759)
4. Rick O’Shay (4481)
5. Deflection and Projection (3960)
6. Santa: Man or Woman? (3370)
7. God is an Iron (2962)
8. Abacus and Slide Rule (2519)
9. Bushido Code (2457)
10. Elephant Story (2273)
11. Gibbs’ Rules (2111)
12. Flat Space of the Torus (1796)
13. Why I Hated The Holodeck (1504)
14. QM 101: Bloch Sphere (1499)
15. Barrel of Wine; Barrel of Sewage (1423)
16. Madam Secretary & Scorpion (1411)
17. BB #27: Far Less (1354)
18. Hawkeye & Margaret (1318)
19. CNN Is Dead To Me (1084)
20. Movies: Grand Canyon (1080)

Not a lot of surprises, other than Gibb’ Rules. Last year at this time it had only 730 page views, ranking it at #19. It’s picked up 1,381 views since:

Bang went the dynamite!

The post about the Far Side still rules with the usual posts trailing behind:

I thought My Grandfather’s Axe was going to overtake that long-time champion, or at least give it a good run for the money, but after a good showing, it has fallen behind:

That damned Santa post still plagues me. [See previous Anniversary posts for details.] Many of these posts get almost no hits anymore but were popular enough in the past to earn a Top-20 ranking. (A few of which rankle me.)

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The next part is technical and mainly part of my documentation. It assumes at least some familiarity with HTML. The tl;dr is I’ve been doing a lot of editing of old posts to clean them up in a number of ways, both grammatical and internet publishing technical. This section details that effort. Feel free to skip down to the next section.

This past year, I’ve been making an active effort to go back and, as I call it, “HTML bulletproof” all my old posts. By that I mean, most importantly, to apply the paragraph fix I discussed in WP: Classic Editor vs Reader back in November of 2021. I mentioned starting this process last year.

In the last few months, I’ve devoted some time to it and I’m down to only 55 posts left to fix. It’s a grueling tedious process that requires full attention, so it has been a pain.

WordPress assures me (ha!) they’ll inform me when the various bugs I’ve submitted over the years are fixed. Having heard nothing, I either doubt their word (ha!) or assume the bugs remain unfixed. As far as I can tell, it’s the latter. So, I assume the problem still exists.

The main goal then is each post consisting only of HTML block elements, mainly <P> (paragraph) elements, but also <DIV>, <HR>, list, blockquote, and table elements where appropriate. That ensures WordPress (or any other rendering engine) won’t be confused by the blank lines WP uses when they store posts.

Going through old posts with a powerful text editor also gives me a chance to clean up some other issues (in the first few of these, I’d been slowly making the change when there was reason to edit an old post, but I’m hoping this last furious round finishes the job):

• Originally, to differentiate links to my own posts from links elsewhere, I made “local” links red. I later decided against the idea. Wikipedia uses red links to signify non-existing pages, which made red links here looked broken.
• Image elements (which are inline elements) varied in standing outside or inside a block element (such as a <P>). I want the post body to have only block elements, so images must be inside a block element.
• When images have captions, the caption text should be in italics unless there’s a compelling reason otherwise.
• Muscle memory from typewriter days resulted in lots (and lots) of periods followed by two spaces. But that looks bad using variable-spaced computer display and print fonts. Browsers compress consecutive whitespace to a single space, so WordPress preserves double spaces using a special space character for the second one (the non-breaking space, hex value A0). Those must all be removed. Which is fun, because they look like spaces.
• Conversely, I used the printed text convention for M-dashes — no spaces on either side. Then I noticed browsers don’t line-wrap on an embedded M-dash and began surrounding them with spaces. One task is adding spaces to old posts without them. The other is finding where those special space characters are the trailing space. I think from how I sometimes inserted an M-dash by typing two spaces and then using the WordPress symbol window to insert the M-dash between the spaces. But by then WP had made the second space that special space character.
• I picked up a bad habit of using a comma in front of ellipsis (e.g. 1,… 2,… 3,…) but that’s wrong because the ellipsis fulfills that grammatical role.
• Some early posts don’t have the page-break (what I think of as “the fold”) to separate the lede from the rest of the post.
• Some of my </span> tags are on the next line rather than at the end of the paragraph text.

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The revisiting of old posts showed me two things. Firstly, I’m not ashamed. I’ve written what I (at least) think are some pretty good posts. Quite a bit of filler, and a few stinkers, but all things considered, I’m not embarrassed. (Though a few bits do make me cringe.)

Secondly, my writing style has certainly evolved over time. Well, of course it has. If nothing else, almost two million words is a lot of practice. One thing I realized in this editing is that I start way too many sentences with “So”, and it’s especially irritating because I can’t decide if a comma should follow it or not. Often, even usually, yes, but not, I think, always.

I think my writing has gotten a lot cleaner and more efficient but also think I still have a long way to go.

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And that’s about it. This is an evening publication because I’ve spent the day processing the XML export file and making charts and all the various tasks related to my Anniversary and Year End backup, analysis, and post task.

Over the years I’ve got the Python code pretty well-tuned for this. Many previous occasions had me having to dive in and fix code because WordPress had changed something. My CSV parser now knows explicitly about their broken CSV files.

But their XML export file has been legal XML for a few years now (it often wasn’t). The last few times I’ve done this, everything has gone smoothly. This time, too, though I did take an hour or so detour to make the Visitors and Views chart — that’s new.

Best of all, though this won’t mean anything to anyone but me, for the first time ever in this processing, my Admin and XML Category lists match! The software gets post category info from two places, the XML export file and a list I make based on the WordPress Admin→Posts→Categories page.

In theory, both come from WP, yet they’ve always disagreed just slightly in a handful of categories. Something to do with the XML export file not handling them consistently (I think).

My recent editing seems to have reconciled the two. In particular, I removed any Tags that were also Categories. That confuses WordPress (I think).

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

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