Blogiversary

A year ago today (February 2nd, 2025) I started this blog. Time flies when you're having fun! This post'll be two things: a rundown of all sort of the statistics that Blogger shows you about your blog, because I love looking at statistics, and then a comparatively brief retrospective from me about a year of blogging. This one's just for the real Blogke heads.

Statistics

Overall Views

The main statistic that Blogger tracks is the amount of views on each post. I guess it should be said that I'm not trying to optimize views or engagement or anything, I just genuinely find this interesting.

Here's two versions of the same graph—the first one breaks down views by day and the second by month (it also includes January of 2025, before I blogged anything, for some reason).

The peak of my views was in February 2025, when I first made the blog, yeah, but it's important to put this data in perspective by showing how many times I blogged a month. Below is how many times I blogged each month (this is also visible on the blog itself by clicking "archive").

February 2025 - 21

March - 14

April - 10

May - 3

June - 4

July - 2

August - 4

September - 6

October - 6

November - 9

December - 6

January  2026 - 4

(This will be my first blog post in February 2026)

Given this, I think the viewership makes a lot of sense. There was a lot of stuff to view in February 2025! I'm not really sure why it went back up in late September and early October, though? I do really like the diary comics I made then, but obviously good diary comic doesn't equal more views. My best guess: I went to a 24-hour comics event (I didn't stay the whole time) on October 4th, and gave a bunch of people zines which linked to my blog, and there is a pretty noticeable spike on the next two days. Maybe it was them! Who knows.

The other thing is the lifetime 4.32k views. That's pretty nuts (even if maybe 500 of those views are from me looking at my blog on my phone). Most diary comics get between 15-20 views at the very least, and I really truly do not know who all those people are. It's neat! I like sharing my work. But now I'm getting retrospective-y and that doesn't happen until later.

Top Referrers

The next stat Blogger tracks is what website lead a person to my blog. I have no idea what many of these websites are. "t.co" is twitter, which makes sense, since I usually tweet a link to every blogpost I make. But some (very small!) amount of my views come from people finding me through a google search? Wonder what they're searching!

Views by Country

This is the interesting stat, to me. United States views make sense—I have a friend who lived in Argentina for a while, so that tracks, and my friends go to Canada sometimes, so, sure. I also have a friend in Ireland right now. Singapore though?  I can only imagine the rest of these are bots scraping the web, or something. Weird. But who knows! Maybe I've got shooters in Singapore. Thanks, Singaporean shooters!

Retrospective

Most Popular Posts

To put the following in context: I have made 89 posts (not counting this one) to this blog, and have had 4.32k total views. That means the average views on a post is 48.5, at least if Blogger is counting views how I'd imagine they are, which they very well may not be because my highest performing posts are almost all below that. So. Who knows what that's about!

Here are my top 6 most-viewed posts (because #5 is a tie!), and how I feel about them some time later.

5: Earth Company Page 1 and Pre-Summer Fling - Poem with 49 views

It makes sense that the first page of Earth Company is so highly viewed—it's the first page of an ongoing thing so I'm sure a lot of people checked it out, and also it's possible people reread it when new pages came out. In retrospect, now that I'm not working on Earth Company anymore, it's sort of funny. There's a lot I'd change about the page but I'm glad it's something I tried. Someone I don't know very well once talked to me about Earth Company at a party and said he liked it, which was very cool and also a really strange experience. 

I'm pretty surprised Pre-Summer Fling is so highly viewed. It's work I'm extremely, extremely happy with, but also very personal. I mean, I suspect many of the people who like it also lived through the thing it's about (lol) but I am glad that's one of the more popular things on my blog.

3: Golem - 4 Page Comic and 2/28/25: "Stumbling" with 50 views

I made Golem for a class I was in, and then pretty heavily edited it to post it on my blog—among other minor art edits I don't remember, I added the halftones and changed the background to black, which totally change the feel of the comic for the better. There are like three panels I wish I could redraw, but I am super proud of it. I think it's pretty tight, and it communicated exactly what I wanted it to. I am super proud of the last page (especially the last three panels).

Stumbling's my favorite diary comic. Sorry to the haters! I think I both captured the moment and how i felt about it really well, and just made a comic that is funny to read for someone who wasn't there. Everyone's faces throughout are really just great. Funny moment with my friends and funny diary comic! I know it's the favorite diary comic of at least one person in it too, but that's sort of cheating since they're in it. Well, I am too. But I'm in all of them.

2: 6/23/25: "Hourly" with 54 views

I do think this diary comic is funny. I do. It hits a very different tone than most others, with the narration becoming conversational. But also, oh my god, the scan of it I posted is horrible. It is super-duper muddy, like, wow. Also, the title was formatted wrong until I fixed it right now. The comic itself is drawn, like, fine, though I do like the script of it, if that makes sense. It's well-thought out. Overall, though, I'm sort of shocked a comic I find this sloppy is the second most-viewed one. 

1: 2/26/25: "Pavlov" with 80 views

Pavlov is awesome and I'm glad it's my most-viewed thing, but also, wow, it is most-viewed by. A lot. It's a lot of people's favorite diary comic, I feel like—it definitely is one of the few that comes up in conversation with my friends sometimes. The number one thing people have told me about it is that they think the soldier in the third panel is really funny looking (often very specifically that he looks like a thumb). That's pretty funny to me because, honestly, he was a huge afterthought in the comic. 

In any event, Pavlov isn't, like, the Casablanca of diary comics, it's hard to point out what I like about it, but I certainly get why it's the most-viewed. That being said, 80 is still a really big number for me. I'd imagine a lot of those 80 (or these high numbers generally) are repeat views, but I really have no idea. All of these still sometimes pick up new views. Who knows (which is the de facto motto of this post)!

Blogging Generally

I like blogging a lot. I'm a big believer that people should share their art, and this is by far the best way I've found to do that. I don't feel as obsessive about the numbers as I do on social media, but it's equally easy to share and all the people who I really care about seeing my stuff will see it. And maybe some folks from Singapore, who are now included in the people I care about seeing my stuff. 

Anyway. I do think I will keep blogging for the forseeable future. I am happy with the tone this blog hits where I can blog pretty much any art I want to put out into the world, but it also functions as a nice archive of my stuff for myself and others without too much clutter. 

I've made 87 diary comics now and I assume I'll do a similar retrospective to this one for diary comics specifically when I hit 100 some time in the next 20 years. 

Thank you all for reading my blog :) It has truly been very special, and has made me feel more like a "real artist" (stupid term) than anything else! If you've read this far and you don't have a blog, let this be a formal request you make one too.