Blogging The Candle At Blog Ends

At first glance the title of this post looks like it might be a clever play on a fairly common idiom. But it isn’t really that clever and it doesn’t bear up to much scrutiny. Nonetheless, as the title of a fairly pointless post about my current blogging stats, it serves a purpose.

That I’m blogging about blogging stats is also hard to justify. It’s just something that I’ve been doing on the first day of the month in recent times. Back on July 1st I was celebrating the fact that, according to the four key strands of blogging success as dictated by our supreme blogging overlords, the Gods of WordPress, June 2020 had been my most successful blogging month since August 2015. Of course, August 2015 was something of a freak month, an outlier, a beacon of shame casting a shadow over all of the much much less successful months that followed. So I assumed June 2020 was just another aberration.

But lo and behold, on August 1st, I was celebrating the fact that July 2020 was now my most successful month ever. Having two bumper stat harvests in consecutive months was unheard of over here at Proclaims Towers and I began to believe that maybe, just maybe, all my blogging dreams were starting to come true.

And then came September 1st, and as I looked back on the preceding month, I realised I had broken the record again in August. And there was really no more denying it. I had made it. I was in the blogging big leagues. Nothing could stop me from ascending to the highest echelons of the blogosphere now.

Except that in September, UK schools reopened for the first time since the end of March. And, as I work in a school, life suddenly got a lot busier. Obviously I like to claim that I never really stopped working during the pandemic. And I didn’t, not even during the school holidays. But it’s hard to deny that I didn’t really work as hard when the schools were closed as I have done for the last few weeks. Frankly I’m exhausted. And maintaining a daily blogging schedule has required me to burn the candle at both ends quite a bit (oh, wait, now the title does seem quite clever). But by mainly writing poetry about poetry for much of September, I appear to have kept my blogging streak going.

Nonetheless, my September stats have suffered. They were not as good as August. Or July. It would be easy to get quite despondent about this change of fortunes. But if I’m honest, although I have posted every day, I have been phoning it in a bit. I haven’t been great at replying to comments on my posts. And I’ve been very remiss at visiting the blogs of other people. Given the reciprocal nature of blogging (I’ll like your posts if you like mine. Even if I don’t actually like your posts…) it’s only natural that my blogging stats have slipped a little.

But September 2020 was still my third best month of all time in terms of the stats. And it’s also the month that I finally broke through the glass ceiling of 1000 followers, which has literally been an ambition of mine since before I even knew what a blog was. So in many respects, it’s fair to say that my ascension to blogging greatness is still on course.

Now, I know that some of my regular readers take a somewhat cynical view of blogging stats. And I used to feel this way too.

Back when I was a loser.

But now that my stats are soaring, I have seen the light.

Stats are more important than anything else in the world.