My head keeps trying to stall into these pre-holiday mini shutdowns and by the time I realize it I'm already digging my way back out of stats. I know, I said yesterday I'm getting so bored with them, so I'm kinda surprised I caught this. The only reason I did was because I was looking for an old Thanksgiving mention I'd made in a post somewhere, using google search, like you do, and ran into disciprin! and lol'd because I'd forgotten all about that post on the old Pinky blog, and as I was glancing down the page I noticed the sitemeter count off to the side. Sitemeter is one of those years ago genius inventions that paved the way for all the new tracker stuff but sadly got hammered with spam/bot/hack progress, and after several cyber attacks and a huge server move and other major problems, I'm surprised still works at all. Note- I tried to install a sitemeter on this current Pinky blog ages ago and it didn't start working at all until this month, which I just discovered. All I get is one graph so far, absolutely nothing else, so I can't use sitemeter trending on this Pinky blog. The really nice thing about retaining my old sitemeters that still kind of work is that even though I actually pay for statcounter now, my free sitemeters still give me better info on my older sites in several ways.
So I'm dinking around in sitemeter, something I haven't done for a very long time. I can't install new ones, I can't upgrade the old ones, just hafta delicately tiptoe around in there, so it's really not that fun to play with them and I just don't go there any more. Until today. I thought ok, let's see how the trends are doing, and *wo*, there actually is a trend. I got excited and ran over to statcounter, and sure enough, the trend replicates over there. That's the really important thing about tracking, the trending. The day to day week to week stuff is just the ins and outs of people moving around in real life, like how traffic tends to surge and dip around weekends and holidays unless you are selling something or offering some kind of distraction for the bored, because everyone else is busy. The month to month stuff is where you see payoff- am I holding my traffic, can I see what I was doing that bumped it, etc.
When I created my first Pinky blog on 1-6-14 (nearly two years ago!), it was more an experiment to see if I could handle public blogging than anything. I never expected to get more than 100 hits a month, to be very honest. I'd have been happy with 30. In the past I had a hard time balancing any kind of social interaction, and moving to private convos from comments tended to make it all worse, no matter how positive the interaction might be. Finding out I'm autism spectrum helped a lot, because it helped me understand the continual fail was more about me overloading and feeling pressured than anything personal between me and whoever. I do this with everyone sooner or later, regardless. So the public blogging experiment was more about experimenting with tweet linking and coding and practicing my 'voice'. I didn't have big plans for it, and never expected it to take over all the other blogs.
I piddled and played, and eventually surged right out of my comfort zone last spring, if I actually even have a comfort zone. It's more like I learned to cannonball out there and just shut my eyes and don't think about it, just do it. And that's where we see the trend start happening in the graphs I snipped. I was already surprised over Pinky blog tripling monthly views over the summer, but to see how that affected my other blogs too is also a surprise. I kind of realized what it was about, but now I'm pretty sure. To be very clear- no one has contacted me privately about this. Not a soul. I had no idea what and why, but I guess it's pretty obvious.
Ok, first the graphs, then the thoughts.
By the way, this is an example of what I was talking about yesterday with the spam swarms. This is the sitemeter graph for bluejacky blog, which has lain dormant for ages but still pulls in my most consistent traffic from search engines without me link sharing on the side. Please note the surge is during June 2015 and then a flat nothing during July 2015- I think someone on the sitemeter team was working on the spam filters and turned off the counts coming in from search engines, not particularly on that blog, but across the board. I remember sitemeter going 'down' and people complaining about it. Bluejacky is a good control because I wasn't adding new content and the traffic was so regular the whole time, so we can compare it to the other blogs.
This is for grandfortuna, which is the original Lexx blog. Again, we see the spam spike in June. This blog continued to get regular traffic through July from other sources because it's linked all over the fandom, and I think the reason it continued to show hits through July is because it's the only paid for sitemeter I have. I guess paying for it means I get to keep seeing stuff when free accounts don't.
This next is Yablo blog, which I'm not crazy about because wordpress and I don't get along that well, and the internal wordpress stats are unimpressive and dismal, so I just ignored it. I was very surprised to see this today in sitemeter. Yablo blog was completely dead until last March, and you can obviously see that the spam swarm didn't bother it much, and also see sitemeter turned off during July. I'm not sure what to think of this yet. A person's first thought might be that the sitemeter wasn't installed until March 2015, but this is the start date for sitemeter on Yablo blog, so Yablo was pretty dead for awhile and suddenly jumped last March. Keep this in mind.
Ok, this is interesting, old Pinky blog (not this Pinky blog, but the one before it on Xanga) is doing the same thing as Yablo blog, all but dead and suddenly traffic starting last March. I'm going to lump the May spike in with the June spam problem just to err on the side of caution, and you can see the same July hole, but August? October? We'll come back to this.
Now let's go to statcounter, same blog order. Remember, what we're looking for is the trend, not how the different sites do their actual counting.
This is bluejacky blog. A little surge in May, otherwise pretty steady, still my control blog. Statcounter obviously didn't have to deal with a spam swarm attack, so the spikes and sudden drops are gone.
Here's fortuna, the original Lexx blog, and I can pretty much match trending views with other Lexx activity on the webs or me actually posting. This has been a really steady blog for a long time.
But Yablo blog is doing the same thing on statcounter that it did with sitemeter, really dead and suddenly surging to life for no apparent reason, same curve and everything.
Because I pay for statcounter, and because I assumed old Pinky blog was dead, I replaced it with my new Lexxperience blog, which is interestingly looking like two trends mixed together, like the fortuna Lexx blog and whatever is affecting Yablo and old Pinky, particularly the spike in March.
And now we see new Pinky blog. This blog had a pretty good holiday season last year, slumped through the winter (I've seen this happen across many blogs over many years), picked up in March, spent the spring and summer doing pretty good, then surge like heck in August and October. Sitemeter shows old Pinky blog spiking in August and October and I wasn't even blogging over there. Yablo blog is also showing some life.
March 1, 2015 I wrote you've got the keys hot on the heels of losing Leonard Nimoy. In March I also openly supported Barry's #teamJanika thing. These kinds of posts do help, but there was something else going on- I started talking about Lexx more, started crossing the streams from the fan blog to my personal blog. My next to last post that month was world class webmasters- a Jurassic expedition, and then the very last post was a direct Lexx tie-in via writer for a new TV show working on fundraising. This wasn't enough to explain the continuing trending, but it got some attention. This is where my newer friends, especially those who've never seen Lexx, really have no idea who I am. Yeah, I do Lexx stuff, but that's over and there's all these new shows and we're all live tweeting Walking Dead, etc.
I cracked open in April. No one but me saw the old fandom light up in my stats. I know the locations by heart. By the end of April I was a little stunned and couldn't believe what I was seeing. By mid summer I was cracking open more and more, and in August I was making confessions left and right and pulling all my old exploded blog personalities back into Pinky. For the first time in all my public years, I was finally owning my entire self to the public. By mid October I had figured out the 8-year angst, with Lexx related stuff being at the heart and soul of me uncovering and moving past a much older repressed memory.
During those moments, my blogs were crawled by hits from all over the world. Nearly every time I even whispered a hint of my past, trackers churned to life and left me wondering what in the world was going on, this sort of synchronized rabid search, people in several countries reading everything I've written post by post, blog by blog.
If there was ever any doubt in my mind, it's gone now. To a world fandom, we were a thing, and we were important, and people still care and want to know. Aspienado was too thick to get it, and there is nothing I can do but say I am so sorry to everyone. I have no answers. All I know is that the fandom was so alive and vibrant while she was there. I know some of you are watching and hoping, and just about literally hanging on every word I breathe about the past.
Sherlock busted me open. I couldn't see myself until I saw John. I get it now. Thank heaven for fandoms showing me how to feel the feels. And I think it's pretty safe to say I'm not the only one who misses her dreadfully, because I'm being shadowed, and I've got the stats to prove it. I keep swearing I'm going to let this go and move on, but we know better, don't we?
I'm not going to tag or link this anywhere, just quietly tucking it into the whole Pinky love letter.
