Ten

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From the Kusho series by Shinichi Maruyama.

It was February 13th, 2006, when I sat down and wrote some words from Charles Fort—”One measures a circle, beginning anywhere”—as a title of the first post here. Ten years on, and the circle has turned ten times, or once if you’re measuring in decades. This time last year I made the decision that when I reached the tenth anniversary I was going to reduce the activity a little. Writing a blog post on a different subject every single day of the week requires discipline even if it’s your main line of work. This has never been my main line of work, but I’ve nonetheless managed to rack up 4,035 posts while juggling design and illustration work, and while (somehow) writing an as-yet-unpublished 217,000-word novel. When the workload has been heavy it’s been a chore having to write another daily post yet the improvisational nature of the thing has always been fun. Writing something new every day puts you on the spot; it forces you to get your thoughts in order (or scale them back), and it also hones your writing skills. I don’t know what I expected of this blog in 2006 but I’m fairly sure I didn’t expect to be writing it daily for ten years. And yet here we are.

So with that said, I’m going to discontinue the daily posting for the time being although the weekend post will follow tomorrow as usual. One thing that’s become apparent is that the first five years were easier than the second five because I seemed to have more time on my hands. The increased visibility of my work in recent years has meant that I’ve been more in demand, and I’ve been subject to increasing periods of all work and no play. When that happens, something has to give, and not having to write something here every single day will give me an hour (or more) free time each day. There will still be posts, of course: this forum is too useful to abandon, and on the work level alone I have some high-profile projects due out this year. I’d also like to be able to write longer posts from time to time. One hazard of the daily post is that longer pieces have to be written over several days while still writing a daily post as well.

My thanks, as always, to regular readers and commenters. Don’t be alarmed by a few days’ silence. Things will continue but at a slower pace.

John x

MMMM

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Post number four thousand coincides with Roy Batty’s birthday, so happy birthday, Roy. Best not wish him many happy returns… It’s also David Bowie’s birthday and album release day but he’s receiving enough attention for that already.

WordPress always sends a statistics summary at the end of each year. The stats for 2015 looked like this:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 900,000 times in 2015. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 39 days for that many people to see it.

The busiest day of the year was January 18th with 3,460 views. The most popular post that day was The gay artists archive.

No surprise about the most popular section of the site which frequently gets double the traffic of any single post. Input to that section of the blog has fallen off over the past year but I do have a couple more posts lined up when I get a spare moment.

These are the posts that got the most views in 2015.

1 The art of NoBeast June 2007
2 The art of Takato Yamamoto June 2007
3 Phallic casts 2011
4 Compass roses August 2011
5 The art of Thomas Eakins, 1844–1916 March 2006

The phallic casts post had a huge spike of traffic on New Year’s Day for some reason. Some of the attention for these posts will be from Facebook but since I don’t have an account there—and Facebook also hides their referral details—you can’t be certain. As always, my thanks to everyone who takes the time to read and to comment.

Of cards and calendars

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Ex-calendars.

Last weekend I was preparing to upload a set of new calendar pages to CafePress when I discovered that the wall calendar option I’ve been using there for years is no longer available. In place of the portrait calendar with square artwork pages there’s now a landscape-oriented calendar with artwork pages that are wider than they are tall. This is fine for people wanting to print their photos but it’s useless to anyone whose work is predominantly portrait-oriented. The square page was never ideal but with a little adjustment I could usually tailor a few things to fit the ratio; I also produced the two Alice in Wonderland calendars (above) especially for the square pages.

So that was the end of that. Suggestions from Twitter sent me to Zazzle where I’d forgotten I already had an account, required some years ago when I had to complain to the company about someone selling products featuring my artwork. Zazzle have a better range of calendars but none have square artwork pages. Zazzle does, however, offer more options for page layout than CafePress so after some playing around I’ve found a compromise which allows for square artwork to fit the portrait page (half of which is filled with the days of the month) with some slight overlap from the dates grid. This will be made more apparent when I’ve uploaded everything at the weekend. I may do the same with the older calendars but it’s a lot of work uploading these things, and at the moment I have more important things to do. One consequence of all this turmoil is that if you’ve ever bought one of my CafePress calendars you now have something of a collector’s item since these things are unlikely to be seen again in that form.

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Breaks the ice at eldritch parties.

So having set out a stall at Zazzle I can now start selling other things there, something I’m looking forward to since they have a different range of products, and the back-end is a lot better than CafePress. I’ve stuck with the latter since 2001 but their site has always been awkward to use, with things malfunctioning or not working at all. Earlier this year I tried putting playing cards on sale featuring one of my Cthulhu designs; this seemed to work at first, unlike attempts to make similar cards using other artwork, then the shop page vanished for some reason. As a test I’ve done the same thing at Zazzle with immediate success. Expect more announcements along these lines in the near future.

Nine

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Celebrating nine years of interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms. As before, a look at the annual delivery of stats from WordPress is instructive.

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 970,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 42 days for that many people to see it.

The busiest day of the year was August 30th with 4,215 views. The most popular post that day was Index, fist or manicule?

Most posts here hit between 2,500 to 3,000 visits a day although the annual total is down on last year. I have Google stats indexing this site but I can never be bothered logging in to see how they compare. WordPress has the advantage of delivering stats to your blogging dashboard.

These are the posts that got the most views in 2014.
1 The art of NoBeast June 2007
2 The art of Thomas Eakins, 1844–1916 March 2006
3 The art of Takato Yamamoto June 2007
4 Gekko Hayashi revisited December 2012
5 The art of Oliver Frey July 2009

The gay art posts always beat everything else, and NoBeast is the most popular post for another year. Russia’s current crop of authoritarian goons may regard gay sex as horribly un-Russian but NoBeast gets consistently heavy traffic from VK, the Russian social network.

The top referring sites in 2014 were:
1. twitter.com
2. facebook.com
3. ficbook.net
4. pinterest.com
5. mentalfloss.com

Twitter and Facebook referrals are all very well but the way they hide what people are looking at means they’re no help to people running websites. Anyway, thanks as always for reading, referring and commenting! Here’s a few musical nines:

If 6 Was 9 (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Nine Feet Underground (1971) by Caravan
Nine Moons In Alaska (1971) by Beaver & Krause
Party 9 (1973) by Faust
Katzenmusik 9 (1979) by Michael Rother