Monthly Report for October 2016

Last month, all categories were very similar to September.  I attribute our continuing slowness to my vision problems, my medication problems, Lynn’s absence doe to health, as she is our second most prolific writer, and the fact that even we cannot keep up to the extent of Republican horrors.

Here is our latest summary:

Year over year, 2016 is considerably lower in every category.  Here is our latest demographic data from Quantcast:

They miss a ton of raw data, but among those they can identify they are a valuable source of information.  We are still mostly older, well educated, Democrats, and politically active, ns poor to middle class.  We are  about 45% male and 55% female. 

Here is our ClustrMap for 2016 YTD.

ClustrMap misses a lot of visits, because many visits can’t be easily traced to a location.  They have changed their format.  When you click the map in the left column, it shows the current month only, but they changed their interface to allow me to pull up the YTD map, and they just made several different  formats available, including one in Russian for Republicans.

Here are our top five articles:

Jane Smiley: Capitalist Pigs 1/17/2010 1,103
Squatch’s Open Thread 28/06/2016 6/28/2016 457
Keith Could Not Be More Spot On 10/26/2016 227
Oliver Blasts Hannity! 10/4/2016 204 204
Questions for the Circus 10/19/2016 199

The count represents only the people who followed an external link to that specific article.  Four were from September.  Three were from last month.  Congrats to the Squatch, who had an article make the list.

Here are our top non-blog/news referrers (100 referral minimum):

Care2 2,563
Google 1,909
Stumbleupon 186

Care2 is up by over 25,  Google  is up almost 500, Stumbleupon is down 7, Facebook  and Google (Images) did not make the list.

Here are our top  blog/news referrers:

http://bildungblog.blogspot.com/
http://infidel753.blogspot.com/
http://www.dailykos.com
http://oakcreekforum.blogspot.com/

We had only 4 sites  with 2 or more referrals, down four from September.  Putting blogs’ links here increases the ratings of their sites, so this “linkey love” is our thank you for their support.

While optimizing the site for better performance, I discovered that our Top Commentators plugin was such a resource hog that it was increasing the time it took to load our pages by 33%, so I discontinued it two months ago.

We have 351,945 links on other websites, down 5000 September.  I expect that to decrease, because thousands of our links are over five years old, dating back to a time, when we consistently averaged over a million hits a month.  I used to have the time and energy for 7-8 articles per day. Major sites (like Care2), where I used to post links are no longer available, I’ve stopped posting links at other major sites, and I no longer visit 20 – 30 blogs per day, because I just can’t do everything I used to do.  However, as quantity has gone down, I hope quality has gone up.

As of Midnight on November 1, we have 6,931 articles and 83,709 comments.

Congrats to Joanne D.  \Shee won a Big Mouth Award in October, for the 83,000th comment.

I recommend using your own avatar. Go to Gravatar.  Sign up using the email address you use to post comments here and upload the image you want to use as your avatar.  Whenever you comment under that email address here or on any WordPress blog (several others too), that image will become your avatar.

Your Administrators are Lynn Squance, aka Sasquatch or Squatch, SoINeedAName, aka Nameless, and I, aka TomCat, the Founder.  Your Editors are Joanne Dixon, aka JD the Erynator and Lona Goudswaard, aka Lona the Napster.  I  promoted them from Author in August to give them the ability to add graphics to comments and the ability to correct my innumerable typos.

This is our policy on links.  We do not embed links to extreme Republican websites, like Faux Noise, Breitfart or World Nut Daily.  However I leave notes in square brackets when I delete such links, (example: [faux noise delinked]) so readers, who wish to follow them can click through to the source article.  I also remove topical links.  Finally, I blank the target on all links, so they open in a new tab or window. 

Given our expanded talent, I expect to resume our overall upward trend, although my medical problems are still interfering with my writing.  One way you can help is to share our articles, not only with your family and friends, but also, on other sites, linking back to the article here.  The more exposure we get, the better we shall do at fulfilling our stated purpose, “Overcoming Right Wing Insanity One Day at a Time!”

Thank you for all that you do, here and elsewhere.  You are why we succeed!  You are the reason America can survive!!

Remember . . .

You have less than one week to save America!