a banner month

So December 2023 was easily the best month I've ever had, stats-wise, with several thousand hits per day on most days and two particular days with around 12,000 unique visits. A case could be made that I'm finally being noticed as a writer, or perhaps the entire month could just be a big fluke. With my "honorable" monthly baseline of 20,000 unique visits, I ended up surpassing that by a factor of 6: 121,850 visits for December. Sure, divide by 2 to account for bots, but that's still a lot more live bodies than I'm used to.

Part of the increase might be due to my recent change to spacing out my posts over regular and frequent intervals. The formula is: post at 2:00 a.m., 4:30 a.m., 6:00 a.m., then every four hours: 10:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., and 10:00 p.m. If I have anything more to say throughout the day, I slip an extra post or two in. Most of the posts are embedded YouTube vids plus a little (or a lot of) commentary; some posts are links to articles, plus excerpts and a little (or a lot of) commentary. If things get too hectic, though, I might dial the intervals back to every five hours. Ever since discovering the superpower of scheduled posting, I can write up a whole day's worth of posts in 60-90 minutes, then have the rest of my day to do whatever. This keeps blogging from becoming an energy drain or a time sink.

And I can write extra posts, like this one, at my leisure.

Normally, I say that I don't obsess over my stats, but I'm wondering whether December is merely a fluke or a sign that things are finally breaking my way. We'll see.