We’ve chalked up ANOTHER successful year here at Ye Olde Blogge! Let’s celebrate by walking through some of the more interesting and impressive stats — impressive for us, that is!

Each and every stat means someone, some real live person, visited the blog. Every number is important to me. I deeply appreciate all of the help and support that we receive from our readers. I am humbled by the positive comments I get on Twitter and am thrilled to be interacting with folks in the comments.

Looking back on the year helps us take stock and decide on changes that we’ll make in the coming year. Take a walk with me through the things we can discover about ourselves on the old stat page.

The Top Posts

We’ll go through and look at several sets of top posts. If you’ve missed them somehow, now’s your chance to catch them and comment upon it all in the comments!

These Went “Viral!”

Every year we have several posts that do exceptionally well for us, usually because some more popular publication — Mike’s Blog Roundup, Mock Paper Scissor, Fair and Unbalanced — has linked to that particular article.

Don’t Let Them Gaslight You: The Implications of Trump’s 6 January Insurrection Riot as a Flashbulb Memory

Right after the 6 January Insurrection as the horror of the day began to sink into the soul of America like the poop dragging down a toddler’s diaper, I searched for something important to add to the conversation that maybe no one else would. Knowing that the shock we all felt would produce a national flashbulb memory somehow comforted me. It won’t be so easy for the GQP spinmeisters to memory hole this one.

The Texas Deep Freeze: Welcome to the Republican Dystopia

Back in February 2018 the country was aghast at the spectacular and long predicted failure of Texas’ independent power grid. Thousands of real live Americans were left without heat, lights, or water and hundreds died — fast becoming a Republican speciality! Ted Cruz fled to Cancun. Greg Abbott fiddled. And the Texas utility company grabbed cash from Texan bank accounts as fast as they could.

It is a preview of all of our fates if we lose the 2022 elections!

The Medieval Witch Hysteria Teaches About Today’s Pandemic and Stolen Election Hysterias

Sometime this year, I was struck with the thought that no matter what happens, we still have to cohabit a country and supposedly govern with these people in MAGA Nation. One of the posts that came out of that line of thought was this one comparing the #COVID19 and Big Lie hysteria to that experienced in Medieval Europe about witches. Spoiler: we’ve got a lot more cray-cray to go before this fad runs its course.

Forensic Psychology: The Motivations of the Atlanta Asian Spa Shooter

Back in March the nation mourned another set of victims taken by another disturbed white young man with too easy access to a gun. This time the victims were Asian women working in the message industry in Atlanta.

This time we explored the interesting insights that forensic psychology affords us of these rampage mass shooters. Wonder what we’ll write about for the next time?

Extra! Extra! Read All About it! MAGA Troll Trolls Ye Olde Blogge!

We’ve long lamented that we must be social mdeiaing wrong because Ye Olde Blogge doesn’t get much online abuse from trolls either on Twitter or at the actual blog. Well, October saw that change when an extraordinarily obsessive troll paid us a visit and left dozens and dozens of comments for us. Most of them somewhat incoherent, many of them anti-Semitic, and none of them actually presenting any kind of reasoned or remotely factual argument. It was so astounding that I just had to write about it… you know, brag that Ye Olde Blogge had been trolled, too.

Referrers

Here’s the thing, you never really find out where most of your viewers come from. On any given day, the numbers in the referrer section of the stats page don’t add up to the number of views or visitors. Some of these mystery viewers come from the email and followers list. I know this since on the days posts are published, views and visitors spike. No matter, I was pretty happy over all with the number of viewers we had (24,000 views).

OUR TOP FIVE REFERRAL SOURCES for 2021 were some of our closest friends. I do spend some time pimping the blog on Twitter, but as the year wore on, I realized I was getting more referrals from other sources and from the followers, so I’ve been cutting back on the pimping.

SEARCH ENGINES remain a mystery. Many days you’ll be getting search engine hits but no listings for the search terms. How does that work? Unsurprisingly, Google is the number one search engine source, but Dogpile is number 2? Dogpile?!? That makes me happy. And Bing! and Yahoo are still in business? Who knew?

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Every year there are some referrers that may not send us a lot of viewers and readers, but are interesting and worth mentioning for special reasons. Like, every year we get people using links from posts that are years old, or we get visitors from new forums that have “discovered” us for some reason. I guess what they say is true after all, once it’s on the Interwebs it stays forever.

• SURLY HORNS gave us 57 visitors one week, but mostly day, when someone on the forum for UT Austin Longhorns post a link to Making Explicable the Inexplicable, a post about how the waves of the pandemic make natural waves of terror.
  • If you visited from Surly Horns, please comment. I’d like to know more.
• CAPTAIN AWKWARD sends a handful of readers a year, this year it was only three, but still, they were quality readers, I know, because I made the mistake of commenting on a comment in which someone was complaining about being wolf whistled or hassled on the street, and I mentioned that it was not personal to her thinking it might be of some comfort. Of course, I was immediately dogpiled because I was a man commenting on a man’s behavior because a woman complained about ergo mansplaining or worse. I guess to get the half dozen or so visits every year, it was worth it?
  • If you were one of those visitors, please let me know in the comments, okay?
• IN DARK TIMES is a smallish medium-based blog that did a roundup of Trump is a narcissist articles back in 2018. He was so good as to quote from Ye Olde Blogge’s 2016 post, The Narcissism of Donald J. Trump. It is a something that I’m actually quite proud of, “will have the paranoia of Nixon, the ineffectiveness of Harding, the sheer callous cruelty of Jackson, and the racism of Wilson. But nowhere in the mix will there be any clear policies or agendas to pursue, because Mr. Trump is completely empty and devoid of anything other than a slavish devotion to his own ego and utter fear of the narcissistic wound.” Those old posts are actually quite prescient.
  • We got one lonely visitor this year, but hey, it is the gift that keeps on giving. If that’s you, leave us comment!

Clicks

You know we love to refer folks to other blogs. Quite a bit of time is spent looking for blog posts on the topics we write about. We also spread the word every Monday in the Whaz Up!?! column. Every blog post is a labor of someone’s love, so it is gratifying to see these clicks. We’ll review some of the more notable links that were clicked on in 2021.

• HUFFINGTON POST won the 2021 contest for most clicks with 150 total. Most went to their article, I was a cable guy from 2018. That makes sense since I was a cable guy is also the most searched item getting folks to the blog and I reposted their article with commentary.
  • I’m sure most of those visitors stay just long enough to pass through to the Huff Post article. If you’re one of them, stay long enough to leave a comment!
• MOCK PAPER SCISSORS got 70 clicks. I’m very proud of that. It covers a lot of links with the most popular article getting five clicks. Still, Tengrain has been a good friend to the blog, so I’m very happy to send some traffic back to him.
• OTHER FRIENDS OF THE BLOG: I’m so pleased that so many folks click on links in the Whaz Up!?! post:
  • Homeless On The High Desert
  • Cabbages and Kings
  • Scottie’s Playtime in its various iterations
  • Fair and Unbalanced

We also do our fair share of community service even though it will never amount to enough to allow us reentry to a country a court decreed us never to mention again, so it is especially gratisfying to see these ones used:

• Project Implicit the Harvard implicit bias test site.
• Indivisible the folks who’ve helped us organize to influence Congress and win elections.
• Five Calls the folks who keep us up-to-date about bills before Congress.
• Choosing Therapy the folks who help us find therapists
• The Psychopathy Test over at Psych Central.

Image Attribution

The screengrab of my world views page for the year of 2021 is absolutely unlicensed — unless WordPress has some claim on it — and totally available to be used and abused as you see fit.