Grumpy Rumblings 2019 year in Blogging

Traffic continues its downward trend.  Again, blog traffic in general is down, and we haven’t really been doing deliberately controversial posts, we’re not on twitter, etc.  I think we’ve been engaging less with the blogosphere as a whole in terms of commenting on others’ blogs (and we’re off some blogrolls that we used to be on, though I’m not sure why this year… we don’t seem to have any obviously controversial posts or commenting drama this year).  We have a record low number of posts this year with 198 (previous low was 210).  And I suspect our posts just haven’t been as interesting.  Comments are down which I entirely attribute to Chacha1 being MIA (you are missed, chacha!), number of likes is about the same as last year.

These are the posts that got the most views in 2018:

• 1 My cousin’s wedding December 2011
• 2 Liberty Tabletop Review: We bought cutlery April 2017
• 3 Sleep and gifted preschoolers August 2011
• 4 Being Asked for Money July 2019
• 5 Help me with countertops! (Please?) January 2019 (I should probably post completed pictures sometime…)

I think these probably show an increase in people finding our blog via googling and perhaps a decrease in conversations across blogs (or twitter) bringing in traffic.  Again, only two of these are from 2019 and the #1 post is still from students trying to plagiarize a really common composition assignment. We have cornered the market on plagiarizing a short essay about a relative’s wedding.

According to our stats, here’s the most popular posts from 2019:

• Being Asked for Money
• Help me with countertops! (Please?)
• things you don’t actually have to do (unless you want to)
• Ask the readers:  How can a student remember to turn in hir completed homework?
• Feeling like a jerk about money (I should note that I got over this and we handed the in-laws a check for half next summer’s Air BNB at Christmas)

Top referring sites were:

• bardiac.blogspot.com
• something-remarkable.blogspot.com
• academic-jungle.blogspot.com
• http://naturalscientist.blogspot.com/
• http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/

Most visitors came from The United States. Canada & India came next.

Our most commented post was things you don’t actually have to do (unless you want to) (note to self for next year:  this stat is now hidden under “insights” and is no longer on site stats) (Thank you previous self!  Also, self next year, it’s been further hidden in the comments part– you have to change to comments by posts and pages where it says comments by authors)

I can’t get the most active commenters for the year, only for some undetermined amount of time. :( These were the 5 most active commenters on that unspecified amount of time:

1.  Debbie M 46
2.  Michael N Nitabach 45
3.  Revanche@agaishanlife 43
4.  First Gen American 39
5.  bogart 33

Great to see bogart back in action!  And I think this is a first time for comrade Nitabach on the leader board.

Yay Debbie M!  This means you get to tell us where to donate our most recent month’s proceeds from amazon sales.  Either tell us and link up in the comments (if you want more exposure) or email us at grumpyrumblings at gmail if you want it to be more secret-like.

Any blog commentary or highlights from the grumpy gallery?  Also, congratulate Debbie M in the comments.  :)