TLDR: Hey! You read stuff. Thanks. No, really. Thank you.
2018: Nano to Micro…forward to Mini in 2019.
I just posted The Tudors Season 2 Episode 1 (Part 1) so if you don’t want to read about the Meta ‘running a blog’ stuff go right ahead and click that. Happy New Year.
Hi. I’m the human behind the various curtains running a blog.
The state of the blog is…encouraging.
I was getting no hits but the bots for most of the time I was writing The Tudors Recaps this year. In amongst the code trying to sell sportswear a few intrepid souls drifted by from time to time and they have my eternal thanks. I Finally broke 100 views per month in June, 300 in August, and have averaged 650 a month for the last three months of the year. Now I’m sat here on December 31st, at 2901 for the year.
(10:30pm GMT – 2933)
(End of the year – 2940 for 2018)
My blog has a whole 25 posts. So that’s pretty good.
The Third most popular recap this year was Episode 5.2.
Full of protein, this nourishing recap contains Katherine of Aragon’s historical backstory, a consideration of female succession to the English crown, and the explanation of the Princess Margaret-Mary mashup character.
Really. 5.2, eh?
It took a few levels late in the year, along with its partner, 5.1. But once you get past the top two (particularly the top recap which is approaching twice as many views as the next nearest one), the next eight are pretty close. This one edged in front of the pack with a strong December. And just look at that fabric. Sumptuous.
In Second Place is Episode 8.1, the bot’s favourite. 
Oh 8.1, the memories. It overtook my very first most popular post (2.1) in June/July. I was kind of taken with a spam bot comment on it, it was really polite but still sounded like something a machine would say. It’s the only comment on the site (Goodness I do wish someone would do something about that, even if it’s just to tell me to shut up about it) and the site it linked to didn’t seem harmful, so I posted it.
And the bots, well if they didn’t swarm with one of their number posted then they certainly consistently nibbled at 8.1 enough to get me visible to the ‘not Google’ search engines – Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo mainly. And more people started to read it and some of them stuck around and read more.
That gave me enough confidence and energy to close out Season 1 at the end of July when honestly, my actual work had already got busy in June.
As I got back into work I wondered if I would blog Season 2.
And then the most popular recap this year showed up, along with the teeniest, tiniest section of Google, looking like the Queen Mary completing a turn and hoving into view and has been crushing it since October.
Yeah, all hail the Come Cloth Holder. It’s Episode 10.1, by a mile.
Whenever I go back to find my 1.1 recap just unbearably wacky, and wonder should I just ease up on the italics? And start to go a bit “5.2” on everything I remember I apparently owe most of my readers to a Come Cloth Holder.
May God Bless the United States of America
The home of my largest group of readers by far (about half of all traffic). I’m now at the point where there’s a general background noise of hits from the USA each day, and the odd exciting leap forward. A day when the USA does not hit up this site is a quiet and sad day indeed, and those days went from ‘every day, basically’ down to one or two a month by the end of the year.
On the other hand thank you to my single, and very small groups of readers from other nations: a few people reading in Vietnam and India helped me confirm the diagnosis of my lack of content. I mean, it was clearly an issue, but it was the only way (given the very restricted data I get -number of views broken down a bit, number of viewers not broken down at all, no cookies) that I could actually see viewers running out of stuff to read over time and drifting away.
Australia was the first country to make any kind of showing for me (back in June/July it was my 1st place country), and Canada, New Zealand and the UK were all strong and in the top 10 countries this year. Japan’s showing was unexpected, as was the person in France who read through most of it over a couple of days but then, it has to be said, never came back.
My Thanks to all.
That Other Thing
Also that thing I wanted to check out that I mentioned last post, well it did check out but soooo much better for season 2 or 3 than it would have been for season 1 so I’m saving that for the future and getting ahead on my New Years Resolution.
The Ten Commandments
But…it’s hard to concentrate on it when The Tudors is getting all the views and I have limited time as a resource, Seti. The Ten Commandments is already doing far better than The Tudors was at the same stage though. I’ll finish it, I think mainly by using it as an alternate task when I’m blocked on The Tudors and by putting out a couple of recaps at a time.
It’s also slower going because I just don’t have the same background level of knowledge about the Hollywood Golden Era that I do about The Tudor period. I’m finding Scott Eyman’s Empire of Dreams (2010) – (a biography of De Mille)to be a fantastic guide. It does keep providing me with great background stories from the production and about the man, but it’s enough of a page turner that I tend to find I’m still stuck in the book when I went to look something up a while ago and should be back writing.
It’s a slightly different kind of writing challenge and I’ll finish it in 2019. I’m nearly halfway through, I’m delighted with discovering that Joshua needs to be dropped in order to activate his heroism, and writing Part 5 is currently making me believe that I might be able to pull off a ‘sexist-hilarious’ bit. The movie is not about to have its finest hour (which is good, The Ten Commandments keeps charming me out of sarcasm, dammit) and I am going to be there for it. Also, God’s about to show up.
In 2019.
The State of the Blog 2018
It’s looking good. I’m setting a target of 10,000 views for 2019 (about 20% better than it’s doing right now) it should be doable, especially if I double the content.
And a comment from a human being would be, like, really nice.
I’m also, because I have no human comments, posting a new bot comment for 2019 (It’s on 8.1, that is where the spam bots gather) – this one:
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point. You clearly know what youre talking about, why throw away your intelligence on just posting videos to your site when you could be giving us something enlightening to read?
The balls on this code. I have had spambots pulling the most outrageous psychological tricks in a few lines of text just to try and establish some kind of connection in an attempt to get themselves posted. I think one of was trying to pretend to be my mother, once. And this one just walks up, says I’m shit and I need to write more.
Wow.
I think Adidas Superstar Rosa 36 is getting posted, even if she does share a first name with an awful lot of fake people. Fly, my pretty, Fly.
I’d also like to thank the other, real, biological people that read this year. The first Season got completed because you showed up to read it. You’re still showing up so..I should get back on with Season 2.
And That’s The State of The Blog in 2018.
Thank you so much for reading, and Happy New Year.
Autocrat on a Sofa 
4 days ago·