Blaugust Day 31 – Ultimation

[Which was the only reason I wanted to call yesterday’s post Penultimation. Ah well. Next year.]

I’ve been too busy and/or sleeping (meece feeding every 3 hours overnight, Ysh-face =  >:-|  ) to check Feedly yet this morning — whoops, afternoon, even for me — but I’m sure our Blaugosphere is full of these posts. And I’m equally sure there’s an ambivalent mix of OMFG IT’S DONE IT’S DONE IT’S DONE SOMEBODY GET ME A BUCKET OF TEQUILA AND SOME FIRECRACKERS!!! — or maybe that’s just me? — and “Damn, it’s actually done. We did it! However much we posted, however well we posted, however much we read and commented and liked and hi-fived — it’s done. Huh. I might even miss it. Just a little. While I down my second bucket of tequila.”

Thank you author. I have no idea who you are because following links led me to a site in Iran, not much help, but thank you.

It’s been a trip. I’m not going to get all number-y on you because TAGN is so much better at it (remember girls, math is tough!) and did his Blaugust wrap-up post yesterday. Not because he’s a teacher’s pet or anything, just because he’s Borgishly efficient. I’m tempted to keep prefacing my posts with Blaugust all the way through September and October just to give him something to curl his lip at in Feedly.

(Okay, Blaugust is over, I guess I should stop picking on him. Pax.)

A little more seriously though, while I suspect TAGN has 83 times the traffic I do, the sources of our traffic are oddly similar so there’s no reason for me to reprise his analysis. I thought I’d get a significant traffic boost from Blaugust, but I didn’t really. I got quite a boost over January – July 2015, during which I barely posted, but this month’s numbers are comparable to last year’s numbers at this time. Which is nowhere near what they were 3 or 4 years ago, but that’s basically what happens when you stop posting; I’m surprised as many people still did visit throughout the Great Stylish Drought of 2013-2014. (Apologies to California.)

The vast majority of my traffic comes from search engines and always has. The most viewed post this month was the silly, glib and utterly throwaway post about the WoWspansion, by which I mean it was even more glib than usual for me. That would me mildly irritating if I didn’t already know that’s how things go — my most-viewed post ever is another throwaway one with a simple link to a FF XIII post on Gamasutra – that’s it. I guess it shows up on search engines a lot.

I’m getting more traffic from Twitter now than I used to, which isn’t hard because I got practically none, and I’m sure I have the lovely @RowanBlaze and his RTs to thank for that — not to mention everyone else who has RTd me, of course. I’m getting quite a few new followers over there too, bafflingly. I suspect I just don’t get the basic point of Twitter, which seems to be to follow as many people as possible in the hope of having as many people as possible following you so that you can say “Hey! I have Xty-million followers, that’s 1.27 more than you!” Or something. The “Oh yeah, I know you” people I follow back. Some of the “Um, who? But sure, you seem interesting” people I also follow back. The obvious bots (you know, Egghead icon, 78k tweets, 0 followers) I block. As for the rest, I just hope my insignificant, glib and usually irrelevant tweets vanish into the raging torrent of their 6k+ followed feed.

As you can tell, I’ve spent some time on Twitter this last month, probably more than I have in 5 or so years. It’s kinda neat to be able to bat silly little text-snippets back and forth with people almost in real time… but it also makes me deeply uncomfortable. Being on Twitter ‘live’ is like having a thousand tiny lampreys nibbling at your soul. Or maybe that’s just me. I’m really good at multi-tasking except, apparently, when it comes to social media. And I don’t think one is supposed to be on Twitter the same way one watches an episode of House on TV — or maybe people watch TV like they watch Twitter these days, with 0.3% of their attention, while doing 5 other things. I don’t know. It makes me feel old and vaguely Luddite. Luddite-y? Luddite-ish?

I posted every day, which is cool, mostly because I didn’t expect I was going to  — although in hindsight I’m not so surprised. I’ve never had any problem waffling. It’s the interesting, useful, perhaps even thought-provoking content that’s been so conspicuously absent from this blog for the last few years, and that’s what I’m agonising over. But if Blaugust has shown me one thing, it’s to stop bloody agonising and just do it. If I truly am blogging for myself, as the lady keepeth protethting, then surely it doesn’t matter what I write. Just because a post (or three years’ worth of posts) isn’t interesting doesn’t mean I’m not capable of being interesting or thought-provoking anymore. Right!

Right?

… Anyone?

…. Bueller?

 

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PS: Meece still alive and doing as well as can be expected. Feeding them is still a major PITA. I think we over-estimated their age – they now appear to be about 4 days old, so they were 2 days old tops when we found them. Brought them to our vet just to get their opinion and everyone there went aiiiiieeeeee hanta aieeeee tularemia leper mice outcast unclean! so we came home again. (Our vet is a lovely practice. I’m being overly facetious.) I’m just waiting for their silly little mouths to get big enough to make feeding less of a hit-and-miss, make-sure-they-don’t-inhale-it-and-DIE kind of tension-fest.