15th Anniversary of the blog

Found On Web is now an impressive 15 years old. At least, I’m impressed. Who’da thought I could maintain my concentration for that long?

Brief summary stats (because the new WordPress interface doesn’t provide the level of detail in their data that they used to):

Between 2009 and 2024 there were 53,000 visitors to the site, from all over the world. Aside from the overwhelming majority of US visitors, the country count ran from 6,000 from the UK, to 1 from little Timor-Leste. The peak year was 2015, with 14,000 visitors. Last year (2023) we were down to 4,200 (all values rounded).

In that time we have published just over 1,900 essays, maintaining our 10/month average. Highschool of the Dead remains the all time winner, with 3,100 views total and a peak 120 views in May, 2020.

If I can push it for another five years, I’ll have spent about the same amount of time blogging that I did in each of my two previous careers, academia and the military.

Thirteen years of Found On Web

I started this blog on the 5th of March, 2009, and have managed to keep it going for 156 months. I think that’s because I haven’t set myself any sort of goals for articles or topics or such. I just write what seems interesting at the time.

Looking at my stats page I see that over the last 13 years I’ve published 1740 posts, or 134/year. The top five for the full run of this blog, not counting the ever-popular “Home Page/Archives”, are:

Garden Gantt — a garden planning tool that goes trending every spring
Highschool of the Dead — fan-service delight and an eternal, perennial favorite
Anime worth watching, Winter, 2015 — a marvelous season that included Shirobako, Saekano, KanColle, and YuriKuma Arashi. I reread it now and again, myself.
Picture stories from Earth: Seawater Farms — An early, doomed effort to build a sustainable source of biopetrol. I suspect it’s a favorite topic for a school report.
Nisemonogatari — The start of the franchise. Surprisingly, not the one with the toothbrush.

Those of these that are not ongoing are all somewhat old — two date from 2011 and one from 2012. Of course, older entries have more time to build up a track record. As for topics, most of the 1740 were my Green Thumb gardening series (298), Anime (289), or Cooking (my oatmeal series at 279).

Those posts enticed 55,000 visitors and generated 93,600 views, so roughly one visitor every three days and something less than two clicks per visitor. The highest one day total was 166, which came on 02 July 2021 when a group of lockdown-addled people found 2011’s Shirobako post.

So that’s it — thirteen years summarized in 300 words. Here’s to another thirteen that are equally productive.

Found on Web is Twelve

On this date in 2009, NASA was preparing to launch the Kepler space telescope, and I was preparing to launch this Found On Web blog. Twelve years later, Kepler is retired but the blog is still going.

Retired at ten

I’m going to take a quick look back on how the blog did in over the last year, but before I do that, I want to touch briefly on how this blog has kept going when so many other blogs and space telescopes have faded away — about 5 per month, according to a comment from Crow, and one per decade according to NASA. I think what keeps me going is that I don’t have as much invested in it as others do. That’s not to say I’m not serious about it. I seriously do this for fun, writing when I want about what I want. Some years it’s military, some years it’s politics. I maintain a strong running base of essays about gardening and oatmeal, and most years there’s a non-trivial amount of anime. But I don’t have a self-inflicted requirement to publish three or four times a week, or to follow every anime of the season, and I’m not trying to make any money off of it. As with Kepler, if you use it too much you can burn out your gyros.

In 2020 I published 158 essays (3 per week), bringing my grand, twelve year total to just over 1600, or 135 per year (2.6/week). In terms of topics, 35 of the 158 were on various aspects of Anime(~22%), 17 on Gardening and of course, 64 on the Pandemic.

These essays enticed just under 7,000 visitors, who clicked on just over 11,000 views. As usual, the high-scoring essay was Highschool Of The Dead, with 613 views, just over 1.6 per day. It just confirms my suspicions that what the fans really want is…service.

The essay is a serious analysis of cinematic themes in the genre, really!

Also up there was my Garden Gantt chart (364), a spreadsheet designed to help with scheduling that complex, multiphase project known as the backyard garden.

Gantt Chart Calendar

Two other essays of note, which demonstrate how a simple mention can skew public interest in a blog, were the book review on Tearmoon Empire (553), and the anime review of Flying Witch (344). What makes these interesting is not their topics, but the parts of their content that drove the views. Flying Witch included a short discussion of the Bechdel Test, and concluded that the anime passed the test with flying colors. The Tearmoon Empire review included an even shorter paragraph, sarcastically comparing the heroine’s trip from the Palace to a walk from the US White House to the Office of Personnel Management. Anyone Googling “WH tour” or “OPM” or similar was going to get directed here. I guess that counts as an odd form of clickbait.

Flying Witch

Tearmoon Empire

Of course, the really high scoring entry was “Home Page/Archives”, with 2512 views. I’m still not at all sure how one gets to the Home Page without clicking on a direct link, and I can’t believe there’s that many direct links out there. Most of the other references BTW, were from search engines, but a goodly chunk were from Crow’s World of Anime. Thanks, Crow.

10th Anniversary of the Blog

The Found on Web blog is ten years old today. In that time I’ve published almost 1,300 articles (just over 10 per month), which pulled in just over 67,000 views (about 50 views per article). They generated over 87,000 comments, of which 500 were real, and the rest were spam.

The most views were on August 10th, 2015, at 106, mostly from people reading my various Girls und Panzer essays. As for individual essays, High School of the Dead (1865) maintained its position atop the leaderboard, followed closely by Garden Gantt (1855) and Anime Worth Watching for Winter, 2015 (1492). Two others topped 1,000 views: Nisemonogatari (1107) and Picture Stories From Earth: Seawater Farms (1104).

HSOTD was described as a fan service train wreck, but I liked it. I suspect most people didn’t come for the well-handled storyline. Garden Gantt is a garden scheduling spreadsheet. Anime Worth Watching includes the ever popular Shirobako, and Nisemonogatari has the infamous little-sister-and-toothbrush scene. I suspect that Seawater Farms is a popular student paper topic.

As for the future, I hope to be writing more, and better. We’ll see.

 

 

Nine Years

This blog started on March 5th, 2009, nine years ago. Will it make it to ten? We’ll see.

Twelve Days of Anime 3: The Roots of My Obsession

The roots of my anime obsession go back at least ten years. At least, that’s what Amazon tells me. My first Amazon anime purchase was Cowboy Bebop, in 2004, and my second was Porco Rosso, in 2007. My first aniblogging entry was about Red Garden, in 2010, and I’ve averaged just over one entry a month since then.

But that’s just the surface artifacts, as it were. The remains of threshing floors that say agriculture was practiced here, without telling us when the hunter-gatherers first settled down and subscribed to cable. To sift out these other dates we will need some indirect evidence.

The indirect evidence says it can’t be in an earlier century. Then, I was living in Northern Virginia, working in DC, and between work and commute, my hours were measured in the teens. Towards the end of the century I became a college student (again), with no TV, a slow modem, and a burning desire to finish my dissertation. Any spare time was spent drinking craft beer and writing equations at Portland’s Market Street Pub, the unofficial headquarters of the Systems Science grad students.

So that brings us up to late 2000CE, when I acquired a job and a house and was reunited with my wife and other household goods. At that time, my main TV fare was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I had been introduced to it by my niece when she visited from Georgia (yes, I have a niece, and a grand-niece as well). For the next five years or so I collected Buffy/Angel DVDs and books and, OK yes, graphic novels. Or at least, that’s what Amazon says. I also had time to hang out on the kinds of places on the Internet where Buffy-like things were discussed, and those were just a few IP numbers away from the otaku boards.

Unfortunately, I have slept since then, and have forgotten just where and how I started watching. Obviously I was interested enough by 2004 to buy Cowboy Bebop (and loan it to friends). By that time as well, Miyazaki Hayao had issued over a dozen full length movies, most of which had already been released in the US, so I was undoubtedly exposed to long form anime. Relying on Amazon, again (there’s no other source for anime in this one-Starbucks town), my next purchase was Porco Rosso (and some other Miyazaki,in May of 2007) and for some strange reason Moon Phase (in November, what was I thinking?). By the time 2008 came to an end I’d bought Wolf’s Rain, Whisper of the Heart, Cat Returns, Last Exile, Castle in the Sky, Ah, My Goddess, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The rest, as they say, is filmography.

Three Years

I started this blog on this day, three years ago. Since then, I’ve moved from my original tool to WordPress, changed the name, included pictures, kept on blogging. The stats are slightly off, since WordPress only counts starting from the Great Renaming, in May of 2010. Since then, I’ve averaged 7 hits per day — 12/day this year, up from 4/day my first year. That level is fine with me, because I’m doing this mostly for fun. It would be nice to know that what I write had greater meaning, but systems people are steely-eyed realists, and the level of effort I can put in right now is deserving of no great flow of visitors. So, thanks to my handful of real friends, and also to the dozen or so who just stopped by now and then. I plan to keep at it. You can too.