Spending time with you is like dating a supermodel… with a multi personality disorder…
I love you, but you drive me crazy…
I love to check the stats and see how many people from all around the world came to visit me.
And then you changed the stats and showed me that only a small percentage of those visitors actually stuck around to read anything.
I love seeing my posts on the topic walls where people scrolling by can see my clever posts and get drawn to my blog.
And then you changed the reader format and now it doesn’t show all my funny Photoshop pictures anymore.
I love random people showing up because they typed something weird into a search engine and ended up on my blog because they were looking for rainbow-pooping unicorns, squirrels on crack, Dick Cheney dressed as a gynecologist, Conan the barbarian doing a funny dance, funny pictures of mixed-up famous mustaches, flaming beavers, trained zombies, scorpions having sex with a vegetable, Star Wars feety-jammy slumber parties, practical jokes that went way too far, babies with ten eyes, a picture of me juggling some skunks, Mitt Romney pulling his own brain out of his head, a tiki that looks like Elvis, and all the other weird stuff I do on top of original songs, paintings, drawings, stories, poems and so on and so on…
And now you have done something to change the search engines and nobody is showing up… Not just on my blog… on the blogs of all the people I know… For a whole week or more now.
I am getting the same number of views that I was getting three weeks after I started this blog.
So come on, WordPress…
Stop messing with stuff.
You aren’t making it better.
Pouring My Art Out 
The Reader is shit and always has been (there wasn’t always a Reader here, they’ve never got it right, and as they are all about changing things all the time, it’ll get worse!) And the stats thingy here is shit too.
Put an external statcounter in a text widget on your blog (it doesn’t have to be visible) and you’ll see the real stats.
I reckon, from what I’ve read in your blog so far that you’ve got a high readership and don’t have anything to worry about! 🙂
It is a long story. I am just trying to get huge numbers to impress publishers and get my funny sci fi novel published. That isn’t the only reason I do this, but mostly I enjoy blowing of steam now and then. And wordpress won the honor. I am sure I will be back doing funny pictures of Dick Cheney soon enough.
Oh never mind my last comment on your other post, I found this. Sigh…WordPress. You know all I want them to change at this point is the worthless grey area that pops up at the almost top of my home screen. I don’t know why it’s there, it serves no purpose and yes I’ve checked to see if it’s there in other browsers and other PCs. I hate that grey area.
Another outrage!!! The revolution will continue! Please hand me that beaver… and some matches.
I hate to be devil’s advocate, but my joint is doing fine — there’s a couple instances where I’m getting listed fairly high in Google searches for a few things, and I even changed my theme at the beginning of the year, which as I understand, wreaks all kinds of havok on search engines because the site map changes (Bing is still not happy with me, apparently, from the email notifications.)
My numbers are creeping up on a regular basis in terms of average daily views, and I picked up a mass amount of Follows over the past week or two after trying some new types / subjects of posts. Week to week it fluctuates a bit, but I’ve gone up every month so far and my daily average is slowly getting up there, as well.
One thing I did notice was that when I stuck to a consistent theme with regular features I do better than just random observations. Kind of an ego blow that people aren’t just showing up to listen to you ramble on whatever comes to mind, but there it is: you can’t always control what the audience is going to respond to. And I even more or less dropped doing some regular material that was getting views (and still is, months after the fact) because I was getting burnt out on it, and I allow for several posts on my home page, which I’m sure also would drive up my views, but I figure if I’ve got someone’s attention with the newest post and they keep scrolling down and reading, I’m good with not giving them a barrier or excuse to quit reading, even if it is something as simple as a mouse click.
I’m not real thrilled with the reader functionality now — it does odd things, but I, personally, like the fact that not all the images in my posts show up in the reader, because I often set up punchlines verbally and pay them off visually with a sight gag, so I’m cool with people not seeing them in advance as thumbnails. But I think that *should* be an option if you want it. For a free platform to work from and not having to pay a cent for bandwidth, I’m fine with it. I recently set up a self-hosted site using WP.org for a webcomic and I’m wondering if I wasn’t better off just staying on WP.com and saving myself some money, as well as having to do some of the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting myself, at least for now.
Maybe I’d be doing better without the changes, I haven’t been doing this long enough to really be able to definitively say one way or the other. But I’m also thinking that it may have to do with the season — lots of people are back to school and work from the holidays, so internet surfing may not be high on their list of daily priorities, too.
As far as the whole views / visitors controversy: the visitors are the important metric, and I’m sort of glad they’ve given us that information. Page views can be generated by automation and while that sudden spike might give you a warm and fuzzy feeling, it’s the actual number of unique vistors that counts: if you’re doing any sort of promotion that’s what whomever you’re trying to impress with your traffic numbers is going to look at. I used to work in a paid position for a videogame website, and while I didn’t serve as webmaster, I did regularly communicate with my boss to see how we were doing. Anyone can get huge traffic in page views via automation, and until we get sentient bots who can get their own credit cards to pay for whatever you have to sell, it’s the actual visitor metric that shows how many flesh-and-blood people you’re actually reaching.
Instead of getting upset about the gap between the big blue bar and little blue one, think of it that when people do come by, they’re actually doing more than just drive-by window shopping, and are actually pulling in and roaming around the shop a little. That’s what you want, not someone who just clicked in by mistake and immediately wants to go for the back button.
uuummm… right… a well reasoned comment. But I am not the only one who is having these problems. I don’t believe that after a year of steady growth I suddenly have become less interesting. But if it is me and not WordPress, I am never going to do just one thing because this whole blog is about not ever doing the same thing for more than a short while. I don’t do it just for the view numbers. I do it for myself and because people have always responded to my weirdness. Thanks for the comment.
It’s enough to drive a blogger crazy, isn’t it — I despise the views/visitors paradigm on the stats page. WP must have a department of fucking up things that used to work!
Customer disservice.
HA!
!AH
Huh. I guess I’m the only one on WordPress doing a blog for myself. At least it doesn’t hurt as much when I get no likes;-)
Doing it to yourself… wait… that sounded wrong… doing it for yourself? That is just crazy enough to work. I am going to use my big numbers to impress publishers so I can get my novel published… because that is what it said in the ‘Idiot’s guide to getting published’ … and also I am a sad lonely person who longs to be the center of attention… so…
Yep, that was really good, and funny. I guess I should check my stats from time to time.
Look at the map thing that tells you where people are from… I am playing it like a game of Risk… takin over the world one view at a time.
Oh, yeah . . . I see it now. I guess I have friends in far-away places. Or, they just got lost somewhere along the way. Thanks.
I am still waiting for China to give me some love…
Dear WordPress, I never check my stats but this is true, I have suddenly decreased in popularity. It’s awful to feel so unloved. You will be responsible for my gorging myself on cake and putting on 300lbs.
You buggers
You tell ’em, Joe.
I thought it was just me that had lost some lovin’…..what the f$&k are they doing on this site??
I have done about 12 posts trying to get people worked up so they will all do posts telling WordPress they aren’t happy. I started a revolution… but it is hard to organize people.
We get too distracted by shiny things like Twitter!
This is worth doing. I can’t go on spending hours being clever and cute and fun and entertaining for these kind of numbers.