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Dharmacakra in the Sun temple, Odisha, India.
Celebrating eight years of interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms. These days WordPress conveniently prepares a page of stats at the end of each year, and since I generally use the blog anniversary to record the posts of interest this is how things worked out over the past year:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 1,000,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 43 days for that many people to see it.
The busiest day of the year was February 12th with 6,374 views. The most popular post that day was The gay artists archive.
This was more than a million fewer visits than last year. Nothing to do with me as far as I can tell. I read somewhere that Google had tweaked their algorithms which may have resulted in a fall of traffic. I’ve also noticed a lot less comment spam in the past year, something you seldom see at the front end thanks to filters.
These are the posts that got the most views in 2013:
1 The art of NoBeast June 2007
2 The art of Takato Yamamoto June 2007
3 Phallic casts May 2011
4 The art of Oliver Frey July 2009
5 Magicians September 2013Some of your most popular posts were written before 2013. Your writing has staying power! Consider writing about those topics again.
Okay, WP! Everyone is always after the erotic stuff. No surprise there although there was less of it in last year’s top five.
That’s 210 countries in all! Most visitors came from The United States. The United Kingdom & France were not far behind.
As always, my thanks to all those blue countries for reading and commenting. Here’s Neu! playing After Eight.
Well done on 8 years John, in the blogging world that’s the equivalent of a giant sequoia tree. I discovered thee mighty Feuilleton last year when I was looking for pics from the Reverbstorm book (the images on the book’s dedicated page here convinced me to finally pick it up) and since then I’ve been a devoted follower of the blog, stopping by every day to check in. More than that, this blog inspired me to be more free with my own blog – which was locked into a generic Cult/Horror review site – now I try to post about those interests and obsessions that wake you up in the middle of the night, and hopefully my blog has become more diverse and interesting because of it. I’m always full of admiration for your posting rate, I reckon there’s something new posted up every (week)day, which is amazing (for the frequency and quality), my own blog might manage twice a week at most – and many times when my blogging spirits are flagging and I’m on half-rations, this is the place I visit to rekindle the fires. So, a big thank-you !
Congratulations John,
You are an example to us all. Where you find the emotional, physical and creative resources to blog like you do I will never know… but I am certainly glad that you do.. I keep reading that “nobody blogs anymore” and this is clearly true of the witless hoardes but so long as people like you are around, the value and validity of the form is self-evident.
Thanks for eight wonderful years so far
Callum
Congratulations, John! I believe I first discovered this site when I followed you back over from a posting you did on Harlan Ellison’s Art Deco Pavilion. I then made the connection with your work in THE STARRY WISDOM which I had read years earlier. Oh, that guy!
This is one of the sites I point people toward when they wonder what value the internet has. You constantly introduce me to places and people I didn’t know existed and somehow thanks doesn’t seem enough.
But…thanks!
Thanks, everyone. The discipline has never been much of a problem since I was already spending a great deal of time working at the computer each day. I find that having a wide variety of things you want to talk about is a help, I’d quickly get bored writing about the one subject all the time.
I also have an advantage in that this blog serves a number of different functions: Firstly I can promote things I’ve worked on, and discuss them in detail if need be. Then there’s the convenience of having an online resource to post something about an obscure item I may want to tell people about in the future. Once I’d written about Penda’s Fen, for example, I no longer needed to write another explanation, I could simply direct people to the post. I’ve always been somebody who likes sharing discoveries so this is an extention of that impulse.
Finally, I’ve mentioned before that this blog is also the R&D department of the novel I’ve been working on since 2006. One thing I found after the first year or so of writing posts was recurrent themes or interests emerging. When you’re writing about something on a regular basis it forces you to articulate half-formed thoughts or rationalise obsessions that you might not otherwise examine. Some of the obsessive interests–peacocks, mirrors–have fed directly into the novel. The other assistance I’ve found with the fiction writing is that doing this spurs your curiosity all the time, it keeps you looking for new things and making discoveries that you might otherwise miss. So it can be time-consuming–sometimes I spend far too long on a post even though I generally try to write everything in a single hour–but the benefits continue to outweigh the drawbacks. If nothing else, doing this sharpens your writing technique by forcing you to work quickly and get your thoughts in order.
Ah,a day late-story of my life I’m afraid. Thank you. Thank you for eight years of taking me places every day that inspire me and make me think. How you are able to do it is a wonder to me. Here’s to your unflagging energy and your unceasing inquisitiveness.
Hats off! I remember the first time I looked up that commenter on Giornale Nuovo (possibly on some of my own posts) and found out that he had a rather interesting blog of his own…
The recurring pose: me, hunched over my RSS feed, checking for feuilleton updates.