Mystery Numbers

 

I'm not sure where they're coming from.

Last month was more typical. I received 1,046 views on my blog, The Strait Line.  

This month, so far, I have 8,688 views. I don't know why this month is substantially higher than last month. To date, I have 6 new posts in Mach, which is the same as in February. 

I know what it is not. It's not FaceBook because I get little to no response there. Facebook shows my Strait Line posts to few. Maybe because the blog is from rival Google. Maybe because it wants me to pay advertising money to show it to more people. I can't do that. My blog doesn't make money. I was lifetime banished from advertising more than a decade ago. 

I can see views made to individual blog posts, but I don't see anything explaining this month's numbers. Sometimes, my stories get reposted to more popular sites, but I don't know where.

It's probably some bot thing. I don't know. I'm trying not to get too depressed.

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Speaking of not trying to get depressed, I bought Mega Million lottery tickets. The jackpot was $1.1 billion, and I figured if I was going to lose, I might as well lose big.

Which, of course, I did. The odds are such that wasting a lot of money on the lottery is really stupid.

Oh, well. Never said I was a genius.

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There seems to be some joy in Biden's improvement in poll numbers in swing states.

But it's nothing more than a statistical tie for many of those.

Given what a lousy candidate and horrible person the Orange Conman is, I don't understand why anyone is supporting him anywhere.

But they are,  And now he's hawking "patriotic" bibles. I'm surprised they're not combusting at his touch.

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On a happier note, we are counting down the days (roughly 60) until we can see our Granddaughter again! We could see my oldest son in roughly two weeks, and my youngest son is coming home for Easter!

So, that's all good!

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Have a good week!

T. M. Strait

Dreaming about Waffles

 Poor girl.

Her parents posted a video about her obsession with waffles, and now it's gone viral.

The dudes above even set to song.

And now here I am, posting it as the main picture to my blog story, where another, I don't know, ten or twelve people will see it.

I don't know how the little girl feels about it, but I'm guessing the parents are pretty pleased. It's the apex of our society now to have something go "viral."

I'm not immune to this. My blog has been up since 2009, and I just passed 500,000 views. Or, the number of views that Instagram gets in about 1/13th of a second.

Would I like to have a big hit? Sure. It wouldn't hurt. What would be real nice is if I could make a tiny bit of ad money, but I received the death penalty on that years ago.

I do have one post that has over 112,000 views. That's Authentic Frontier Gibberish, a title borrowed from Blazing Saddles. I think that it just happens to hit higher in the search engines than the others.

It drops way down for my second-place blog story - I Built This Business! Me! Myself! I! has 12,600 views.

My third place is my highest-ranking fiction story - The Vigil at the Honey Dew, with 8,840 views. Vigil is part of the story collection, Crowley Stories, which features interrelated short stories set in a town near the Okefenokee Swamp.

Crowley Stories is my biggest writing disappointment. It should have caught on, at least in the area where I live, and it did not. Bad writing? Maybe. Bad promotion? Definitely.

As I change my schedule, I hope to return to more fiction writing. Does it garner many views? Nah, of course not.

Nevertheless...

Like the little girl above, I can't stop dreaming about waffles.

But, in my case, writing is my dream, and to break through where I make a tiny bit of money.  

Can't stop dreaming about it.

The Unexpected Disappearance of Formatting

This is not working right. The formatting on my blog has gone insane, and I'm not quite sure how to fix it. I connat change the size of my font. I tried to add a picture, and it just added a binch of code. On this line, I'm going to see how long it will go begore it bumps me to the next line. Ok, so I'm staying on the same line. It's still having me type on the same line. Will this ever end? Stil the same line. Boy, this is a ...there it goes. I have no odea how this will look when it's finished. I hope I figure out how to fix this. Ten years of bloggin down the drain. This is not the topic I planned on writing on. So... due to technical difficulties, I am ending blog transmission for now. Hope to be back soon! I pressed a button and it further shrinky-dinked it.

Return of The Blog!

 

Sorry.  Misread that.  Should be The Blog, not the Blob.  

Good start, eh?  Anyhoo, the rest fits. Kinda.

My month-long experiment without posting a new blog piece gave me an idea of what my bottom was.  In April, the blog had 929 views.  That's not nothing, but certainly not enough to have Buzzfeed or any Instagram celebrity shaking in their boots.

How much is it when I operate normally?

Oh, in and around 2,000.

Pretty pathetic, isn't it?  All the effort extended to garner maybe another 1,000 views.

Well, I'm still trying to decide what to do.  But I do intend to keep the blog.  I just don't know the level or frequency.

I may not know more until May 17th.

I love writing, so it's a matter of deciding to focus my attentions.  My major goal is to continue the phaseout of accounting, so I may have to evaluate what best serves that end.

So, stay tuned!  I should have my usual 15 or so new blog posts this month.

If you want more of a fix, don't forget that I have over 2,250 blog posts for you to select from!

Bloggingly Yours,

T. M. Strait