Happy New Year!

Let's hope 2024 is a good one!

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Milestones

Today is the actual last day of the summer of 2023. Autumn starts sometime before 0300 tomorrow morning.

As summers go, it hasn't been a horrible one. I got to go to gun school, made it to an Indians game, took some decent photos...

Also, it was a month ago that the post count for the year here at VFTP exceeded the entirety of my post total in 2019. Now I've blown past the post count of 2018 as well. It's good to get back into the habit of posting more frequently.

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Blogiversary? Oops.

A couple days ago while I wasn't paying attention, this blog turned eighteen.

That's right, View From The Porch is old enough to vote. That's a lot in blog years.

Eighteen years, seventeen thousand eight hundred and twenty eight posts, one goofy page template.

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Uptick...

2019 was a nadir for my blogging. That whole year only saw 567 posts here at VFTP.

There's more content of late, since this is the 569th post so far in 2023. Hopefully I keep writing more, because the more I write, the easier it is to write. I need to get back in the habit.

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QotD: State Of Social Media Edition...

Mike Johnston, telling it like it is:

"Sigh. I would love to have that many viewers. Unfortunately, to accomplish that, I'd have to be making videos, writing only about products, and relentlessly structuring my my content as clickbait—not only in the title, but in the body of the content."

Mysterious 'bot storms will occasionally cause the spike he noted. It's such a weird internet artifact.

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Frequency...

I seem to be posting with greater frequency. This is the eightieth post this month, and I haven't posted eighty times in a month since the summer of 2016.

I should keep it up.

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Yay?

Starting today I can order off the Special Menu at International House of Carbohydrates, so...yay?

I don't even know where the nearest IHOP is, and I haven't eaten in one since...2012? Wait, that was a Denny's.

The sort of restaurants enjoyed by pretentious hipster foodie douchebags like me rarely have senior's menus, alas.

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What'll it be?

The New Year has dawned, one in which this blog will turn eighteen. That's a lot in blog years.

Will 2023 be a new year full of good stuff and an improvement over the turbulence of recent years, or will it be 2020 III?

I'm hoping for the former, of course. I'm kinda chaos-ed out at the moment.

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I guess it's something to do.

According to the tabulations in the sidebar, the seventy-nine posts put up here in June is the most in a month since May of 2016.

I guess it keeps me out of trouble.

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This blog is now old enough to drive.

Sixteen years ago, at 10:23PM, with a hurricane barreling toward the Louisiana coast, VFTP saw its very first post.

That was... a couple posts ago. How time flies!

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The slackest week of the year.

It's the last week of this dumpster fire of a year, and so I'm going to use some top five lists and retrospectives to generate some low-effort content as though I were a regular media outlet. 

For starters, according to Blogger's built-in stats package, here are the four posts that got the most eyeballs this year:

1. Eternal Verities, 8/2/2020


2. Surprise! It turns out that you're the zombie bikers, 4/9/2020


3. A Different Flavor of Panic, 7/19/2020


4. Survivorship Bias, 8/24/2020


5. That Seventies Show, 5/5/2020

I'm not speaking to me.

I missed my fifteenth blogiversary. I didn't even get me flowers or anything.

I haven't even changed the page layout since then and, to tell the truth, I'm afraid to at this point for fear it will jack something up horribly.
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State of the Gunblogosphere?

I started paying less attention to site numbers 'way back when The Truth Laid Bear and the "blogger ecosystem" finally went away for good, and I pretty much stopped altogether when Sitemeter went the way of the dodo. I couldn't tell you to the nearest five hundred what this blog's daily traffic is in this current year.

But traffic is important for monetization, and any money this blog makes for me is incidental; extra ammo money is great (and so's the occasional windfall for geriatric cat food by the case!) but it's not the end of the world if the faucet slows down.

Greg Ellifritz, on the other hand, has been diligently maintaining his blog. He's been diligently tracking traffic, and conscientiously putting out column-to-article length pieces multiple times a week.

And what Greg's noticed is...well, I'll let him tell you:

"When I first started realizing that I was hemorrhaging pageviews, I decided to write more. In 2019 I’ve been writing a few more articles each month. As compared to the same time period a year ago, my year-to-date writing is up 43,000 words in 2019.

An average novel is usually around 100K words. So I’ve basically written half a novel more free information this year than I have in any comparable time frame in the past years.

In August, I really busted my ass. I wrote 20 articles and my total word count was more than any other month in the history of my site. What did that get me? Fewer readers.

I got my August website stats update from Google. My hard work wasn’t enough. My total pageviews declined by 12.52% in the last month. The number of unique visitors to the site dropped 7% from July."

Greg's a smart dude and turns out a lot of quality content. Following him has taught me a lot, and I recommend his stuff highly.

Force of habit at this point, really...

Today marks fourteen years now that I've had this silly stock Blogger template.

That's a lot in dog years, let alone blog years.
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Twelve years ago today...

...the Gulf Coast was underwater from a hurricane and I started a blog.

The blog has outlasted SiteMeter or I'd tell you how many unique hits it's had since then.
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Where has the time gone?

Apparently my blog turned eleven today while I was out screwing around at the gun show.

Eleven years ago, Louisiana had been freshly wracked by disaster, I was working in the gun biz, had no dough, and spent a bunch of my weekends browsing the aisles at fun shows to help maintain my dough-less status.

Not a lot has changed, as you can see.

It's weird to think that first-graders who had my first blog posts read to them are now perusing college catalogs.
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That's forever in blog years...

Tim Berners-Lee put up the first web page in 1991. If he's waited just a few years, he could have put a link on it to Charles G. Hill's blog, dustbury.com, which turned twenty today.
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Happy Birthday To Me.

I'm supposed to make some reference about how if I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself, but it would be a lie. I don't think foreknowledge would have done much to improve my iffy judgment skills or override my occasional impulse to say "Hold my beer and watch this!"
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Isn't this where we came in?

Ten years ago I started this blog. Some things haven't changed, like my opposition to asset forfeiture laws or the looming threat of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Others have; for instance I'm a lot less opposed to the idea of the local po-po at least having access to some sort of bullet-resistant vehicle than I was. (Although in most smaller communities it would probably make a lot more fiscal sense to talk the bank president or car dealer into taking up an interest in WWII surplus armored cars and then handing him one of those auxiliary deppity holster-sniffer badges in exchange for a spare set of keys.)

I was working in a gun store & indoor range at the time and that seems to have come full circle, too...

"Do you want to interview?"
"Er, I really don't have much time for a job."
"Part time is fine!"
"I'm out of town a lot for gun school."
"Let us know ahead of time! Wanna interview?"
*scuffs toe* "I guess. Employee discount and free range time?"

Blogger says 12,103 posts. From 2008 to 2010, I was a postin' fool, it looks like. Since that time, I've gotten published in dead tree rags, largely because of this blog. I'm told that it's more usual for writers to have to shop article ideas and column proposals around than to get approached by editors and asked to write stuff. Being almost morbidly shy, I'm glad the latter route has worked for me.

Anyhow, I'd ramble on more about this stuff, but I've got today's blog post to write. Thanks for reading and for all you awesome readers have done for me. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blog, already in progress...
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Well, neat-o!

I just now noticed that sometime just before midnight last night, VFTP recorded its eight millionth visit.

Thanks for reading, everybody!
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