A Belated Janus Post

I usually publish a pair of Janus posts in early January, one looking back (with charts and stats), one looking forward (with intentions for the year). This year I’m “juuust a bit outside” the strike zone.

I got a respiratory virus just before Christmas, and it took me out for Christmas and the song-celebrated Twelve Days after. Mid-January I was dog-sitting and decided to take the whole month off from the interweb (and, to a large extent, even the computer).

Now I’m back. With charts and stats.

An irony that I’ve already noted here is that, on the one hand, views and visits have increased:

The two spikes on the left are from when WordPress publicized (“Freshly Pressed”) two of my posts, one in December of 2012, one in March of 2015. The uptick and spikes center-right are, I think, from COVID lockdown boredom. People surfing the web. The uptick dies down as we finally got COVID under control (after one million deaths).

The uptick on the right — which exceeds anything in the past — is what I’m noting here. That huge spike on the far right is that web crawler or LLM that pegged my traffic back in November [see A Blog Invasion? and the post after it for a follow-up].

The irony is that, on the other hand, I’ve posted here less:

A lot less (only 64 posts). Less than even 2018 when I started up again after taking a year off. It seems I’ve been losing steam since 2020.

However, this doesn’t account for the 50 posts I published on my Substack blog in 2024, so that last bar is actually much higher. In fact, it turns out total posts in 2024 was 130.

In small part because of 16 posts on my programming blog:

Much better than in previous years (except for 2014 when I enthusiastically started and 2021 after a period of trying to write more programming posts). Traffic on The Hard-Core Coder has also increased of late:

Notice again the apparent COVID spike. The programming blog was also hit by a spider or LLM but not as intensely (mostly because it doesn’t have that many posts — only 120). That accounts for some of the spike on the far right, but I’ve also had some visitors who read multiple pages while exploring the blog (the average is close to one page per visit).

On the other, other hand, back on this blog, I have managed to cut down on word count:

At least a little. But the briefer posts of the past remain in the past. Appropriately so, probably. Most of what I write about takes more than 1000 words at a time. Alternately, I’m just irredeemably verbose. (And, in truth, I do love words and language, hence the handle.)

The as-yet-unexplained increase in traffic means I’m got over 50 (ever silent) visitors per day in 2024:

This chart is similar to the first chart above. Same spikes and trends. Just comes from a different WordPress data view. Since, other than a few regulars, none of these visitors ever engages in comments, I have no idea what the recent uptick means. If it means anything at all.

[Note to self: Modify the various overview charts to include the blog’s name like the one above does.]

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Besides the usual suspects, there were some interesting surprises in the Top Twelve Posts of 2024:

1. Babylon (Anime) (2,538)
2. Gibbs’ Rules (2,389)
3. Elephant Story (1,252)
4. From the Far Side (1,221)
5. Flat Space of the Torus (1,203)
6. QM 101: Bloch Sphere (989)
7. Sideband #17: Ready when you are, Mr. DeMille (728)
8. QM 101: Bra-Ket Notation (536)
9. Abacus and Slide Rule (515)
10. Rick O’Shay (505)
11. Joe, Jim and Bernie (443)
12. Plato’s Divided Line (268)

(The number in parentheses is the number of views in 2024.)

The first one, Babylon (Anime), was especially a surprise. Suddenly, a 2021 post I wrote about a Japanese anime series was getting lots of hits:

In the Great Scheme of Things, it’s a molecule in a tank, but it’s pretty unusual in these parts. It went from nearly none to a lot and stayed at a lot. I found it so interesting I started tracking the daily traffic:

Wild! It died down but picked up again. A second round of visitors, I guess.

The post’s popularity continues with 944 views in January and 461 views so far this month. So, with 1,405 views so far this year, it’s by far the top post for 2025. The #2 post this year (the one mentioned just below) only got 425 views. As usual, I have no idea exactly what the attraction is.

With 2,646 views prior to 2025 (4,051 total), it has become my 11th most viewed post overall.

The #2 post, Gibbs’ Rules (a page, actually), has been among the top posts of the year since 2020, so it’s not exactly a surprise to see it at #2, but that masks the jump in views in 2024:

Getting 2,389 views in one year was a bit surprising. In previous years, top posts of the year never broke 2000 and frequently barely broke 1000.

This one wasn’t popular for the first five years, but business picked up in 2020. What’s interesting is how 2020 through 2024 — except for 2022 — seem to form a rising trend. Not sure what happened in 2022. But note how 2024 is off the scale with 2,389 views (so the apparent trend, if trend it is, makes a big jump).

It’s my 7th most viewed post or page overall.

The #3 post, Elephant Story, had what I thought was its day in the Sun back in 2015. But there was a sudden jump in 2023, and in 2024 views are again (literally) off the chart:

It’s a cute post (if I say so myself), and I’m happy to see it get views. (I doubt people realize I made that “elephant crossing” sign.) I really like that little poem, too, so I can’t claim all the cuteness of this one for myself.

(I never did get around to writing the follow-up post.)

The #5 post, Flat Space of the Torus, was the number one post in 2023, so falling to fifth place in 2024 isn’t surprising:

It actually did better in 2024 than in 2023, but other posts beat it out. It’s my 13th most viewed post overall. In 2023, its 1003 views made it the most viewed post of the year. (And you see what I mean about top posts barely breaking 1000 — the second most viewed post in 2023 only got 997.)

The #7 post, Ready when you are, Mr. DeMille, is a post from way back in 2011:

The post is a retelling of an old joke (the punchline of which is the post’s title). It’s my third most viewed post overall, mostly because of years of steady “income”.

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I just realized there is a bug in my code that generates my list of Top Posts of the Year. What should be the eighth most viewed post or page, Strong Female Characters, with 591 views, was somehow excluded from the 2024 list. It does show up as #37 (659 views) on the list of Top Posts Overall.

This one was a surprise. It languished for two years and — along with some others here — exploded in 2024. I think in this case due to my having mentioned it in a comment on Substack. But I’ve posted on Substack a lot of links to posts here, and nearly all of them have been largely ignored (as far as I could tell — no uptick in views of those pages), so once again, who knows.

But nice to see it getting views. The list is up to 155, and two of the list items include multiple roles, so the full count of great roles for kickass female actors is actually slightly higher.

I think I may know the source of the bug. The Strong Female Characters page (the one getting the views) is an extension of an earlier Strong Female Characters post from 2022. The software is, I’m sure, using just the name to identify the page or post, and probably got confused by the identical names.

[Another note to self: In addition to fixing this bug (if I can), change the labelling on these charts to replace “hits” with “views”.]

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What is listed as the 10th most viewed post in 2024, Rick O’Shay, is actually the 11th most viewed because of the bug just mentioned:

It (along with a handful of others) has been a reliable performer over the years, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s one of my favorite posts. And it ranks #4 overall.

Another mild surprise, albeit not in the Top Twelve, is my Decisive Agnosticism post from way back in 2012:

This one didn’t get much attention when I published it, and by 2017 interest had dropped off to almost nothing. But it regained popularity recently, especially in the last two years.

It’s only #24 in views in 2024, but it was #14 in 2023 (and #61 in 2022). That shows how crazy last year was, and I’m sure my stats for 2024 are inflated due to that damned spider or LLM that ran roughshod over this here blog last November. Really screwed up my stats.

It’s kinda cool this has been getting views because it’s another post that’s near and dear to my heart. It’s made its way up to #48 on the Top Posts Overall list.

The last post I’ll mention in this section, ranked at #22 in 2024 (and #42 overall), is my “Imaginary” Parabola post from 2020:

Mostly because the chart shows such an attractive trendline.

The post is actually an aside in a four-part series ultimately about the cardioid shape of the “main lake” of the Mandelbrot. The first post, “Imaginary” Numbers (only 101 views), introduces the necessity of the complex numbers. This second post explores the same territory visually. The third post, The Complex Plane (only 31 views), continues the discussion of complex numbers and introduces the complex plane (where the Mandelbrot lives). The last post, The Heart of the Mandelbrot (a whopping 128 views), explains the cardioid formula and shape.

This post is, if again I do say so myself, a pretty good one, and it does stand alone, so I’m happy that it has been getting attention. Hopefully people are learning from it!

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Here’s a list of my Top Twenty-Five Posts Overall:

1. 1. From the Far Side (2015; 10,237)
   2. My Grandfather’s Axe (2016; 6,428)
   3. Sideband #17: Ready when you are, Mr. DeMille (2011; 5,122)
   4. Rick O’Shay (2013; 4,756)
   5. Deflection and Projection (2013; 3,978)
   6. Santa: Man or Woman? (2012; 3,441)
   7. Gibbs’ Rules (2015; 3,355; page)
   8. God is an Iron (2011; 3,139)
   9. Abacus and Slide Rule (2019; 2,854)
   10. Elephant Story (2013; 2,846)
   11. Babylon (Anime) (2021; 2,646)
   12. Bushido Code (2012; 2,477; page)
   13. Flat Space of the Torus (2021; 2,398)
   14. QM 101: Bloch Sphere (2021; 1,953)
   15. Why I Hated The Holodeck (2011; 1,536)
   16. Barrel of Wine; Barrel of Sewage (2011; 1,530)
   17. Madam Secretary & Scorpion (2014; 1,441)
   18. BB #27: Far Less (2013; 1,392)
   19. Hawkeye & Margaret (2012; 1,365)
   20. Movies: Grand Canyon (2016; 1,134)
   21. Transcendental Territory (2015; 1,111)
   22. CNN Is Dead To Me (2016; 1,100)
   23. Here Today; Pi Tomorrow (2015; 1,097)
   24. About (2011; 1,047; page)
   25. Assassin Movies (2012; 1,007; page)

In the parentheses, I included the year published, the total views, and marked which were pages rather than posts. The only particularly notable difference from past years is that that Babylon (Anime) post made it into the Top Posts Overall list. Most of the others have been on this list for years.

BTW and FWIW, there is a slight ulterior motive to including so many links in this and similar posts. I have an understanding that web-crawling indexers pay attention to how many links a page has to it. My theory (and possible explanation of this recent uptick) is that by creating lots of links to previous posts, I’m doing a crude form of SEO and possibly raising my “credit rating” with search engines.

For most of the life of this blog, when I included links to previous posts, I always deleted the “link back” comment WordPress creates automatically. I’ve been doing a lot of cleanup editing of old posts in recent years and found that WordPress creates link back comments even when editing a post (if those links don’t already exist). So, I’ve been keeping them rather than deleting them.

Hard to tell if higher visibility might be behind the recent uptick, but there is at least an apparent correlation.

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I’ll end with some stats and a few more charts.

• Total Number of Posts: 1,422 + 120 = 1,542
• Total Number of Pages: 41 + 5 = 46
• Total Number of Words: 1,886,703 + 190,040 = 2,076,743
• Total Number of Sentences: 282,033 + 25,971 = 308,004
• Total Number of Paragraphs: 62,204 + 3,333 = 65,537
• Number of Distinct Words (LCC): 40,744
• Number of Distinct Words (HCC): 9,183

These are for Logos con Carne + The Hard-Core Coder. And as mentioned above, I’ve published 50 posts on Substack, so the total number of posts is 1,592 (since 2011). It’s an average of about 113 posts per year (I didn’t post anything in 2017, so it’s actually more like 122 posts/year).

FWIW, in the above stats, my software counts lines by counting periods, so the line count may be inflated due to decimal points or other non-sentence-ending uses of the period. (I used the Unicode ellipses character, so ellipses don’t count.) The paragraph count is more accurate because I’m counting <P> tags, but that count necessarily also include the section breaks I use as well as centered images — those are each a “paragraph” to the counter.

It’s interesting that my vocabulary seems rather larger on Logos con Carne than on The Hard-Core Coder, but the former also has a much higher post count. Unsurprisingly, the most used word is “the” (106,942 time on LCC and 9,062 times on HCC). It’s followed in rank by “a”, “of”, “and”, “to”, “is”, “in”, “I”, “that” and “it” (at least on LCC — HCC is different due to all the coding terms).

With 64 posts here, 16 posts on the programming blog, and 50 posts on Substack, I’ve published 130 posts in 2024. And the 64-50 balance is interesting. Or 80-50 between WordPress and Substack. No question much of my focus was on Substack last year, though I kept my hand in here. I also put more focus on the programming posts, which left less for here.

Definitely a downwards trend, at least here on Logos con Carne.

But I’ve come to have mixed feelings about Substack on top of the mixed feelings I have about blogging at all. Substack has a lot going for it, but there are things I don’t care for. (Though, as a blogging platform, I think it’s superior to WordPress.) I almost decided to stop blogging this year, but I obviously haven’t taken that option.

At least not yet. The future is an unknown road, but I suspect I’m just too expressive and opinionated to give up blogging entirely. Maybe I’ll at long last start treating this as a weblog (we-blog, I-blog?) and Substack as a platform for my more informational posts.

I’ll leave you with one last chart:

It’s a histogram of views and visits over the life of this blog. It mostly shows what a small fish I am. And in truth, it’s a growing sense of futility and powerlessness that has me questioning how much I care to continue blogging. Perhaps two-million words is enough.

I can say I thoroughly enjoyed taking January off from the internet, and it made my questioning that much more urgent. But we’ll see.

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

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