On the Blog
This “shitty WordPress blog” (to use someone’s memorable phrase) has been going for over 17 years now. I have occasionally thought about breaking the habit but having gone this far I think I might as well keep going until I retire, by which time in it will have reached the grand old age of 20.
In recent years the traffic here has settled down to a level about 40% lower than it was in its heyday. There are about 2,000 people recceiving posts by email and a few hundred who read it on the fediverse; these are not counted in the web traffic statistics unless they click through to the website.
The most popular year ever for web traffic was 2012, in which In The Dark attracted 464k visitors, whereas for the last few years it has been more like 260k per annum. Part of the reason for the drop will have been my move to Ireland and not posting so much of relevance to people in the UK, which was my main audience. I prefer not to think that the decline is because I’m now older and my posts more boring, but that may well the case. Twitter used to be the source of a considerable number of clicks too, but the changes introduced by Elon Musk put a stop to that even before I left that platform. In any case the blog numbers are far higher than I thought I would attract when I started blogging way back in 2008.
Anyway, I have noticed that in recent weeks the levels of traffic have been closer to those of a decade or more ago, with several notifications like this popping up:
In the first two weeks of February, for example, there have been over 30k views, i.e. over 2000 per day. The drivers of this increase have been two posts about the STFC funding crisis, first mine at the end of January and then a Guest Post by George Efstathiou which has been shared very widely.
I suppose the recent increase in traffic is a new manifestation of the old adage that “bad news sells newspapers”…
In the Dark 
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