Archive for blogging

On the Blog

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics with tags , , , on February 15, 2026 by telescoper

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”…

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Blogging Matters

Posted in Biographical with tags , , on March 30, 2023 by telescoper

A recent post about how much this blog may or may not be worth made me think about the fact that I’ve been writing this blog since September 2008 and for all that time I’ve used the very basic free version of WordPress. That version has quite a low limit on storage (1GB) but after all this time I’ve still only used 75% of that, so at the current rate of use it should last another 5 years or thereabouts. The downside of the free version however is the plethora of advertisements plasters all over the place as punishment for daring to use the free version. I don’t know if that bothers other readers as much as it bothers me, but it is a problem that is definitely become much worse recently.

Today, therefore, I decided to upgrade this site to a paid ‘plan’. Being a cheapskate I’ve gone for the minimum possible plan – called “Personal” – but it does increase my storage to 6GB, which is more than I’ll ever use, gives me a free email address, and removes all the ads from the site. This latter feature is the most important and I hope it makes for a more pleasant reading experience for my regular readers, Sid and Doris Bonkers.

I’d be grateful if readers could confirm that the advertisements no longer appear.

Another feature of the paid plan is that I can register a new domain name, which is telescoper.blog. My new email address is telescoper@telescoper.blog, so henceforth you can contact me there with matters relating to this blog (although I suppose I’ll get mainly spam…)

Apparently under the new arrangements I can also make podcasts, although I’m not sure I want to…

P.S. Don’t worry if you have bookmarked the address telescoper.wordpress.com, which will continue to work.

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Fourteen Years In The Dark

Posted in Biographical with tags , on September 16, 2022 by telescoper

When I logged onto WordPress yesterday I received a message that it was the 14th anniversary of my registration with them, which is when I took my first step into the blogosphere; that was way back on 15th September 2008.

I actually wrote my first post on the day I registered but unfortunately I didn’t really know what I was doing on my first day at blogging – no change there, then – and I didn’t actually manage to figure out how to publish this earth-shattering piece. It was only after I’d written my second post that I realized that the first one wasn’t actually visible to the general public because I hadn’t pressed the right buttons, so the two appear in the wrong order in my archive.

Such was the inauspicious beginning of this “shitty wordpress blog”!

If you’re interested in statistics then, as of 9.00am Irish Summer Time  today, I have published 6060 blog posts posts and have received a total of 4.99 million hits; I expect to pass the 5M mark sometime next week. The largest number of hits I have received in a single day is still 8,864 (at the peak of the BICEP2 controversy).

The last 14 years have been eventful, to say the least, both personally and professionally. I started blogging not long after I’d moved into my house in Pontcanna, Cardiff. Since then I moved to Sussex, then back to Cardiff, and then to Ireland. The last couple of years have been dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Scientifically we’ve seen the discovery of the Higgs Boson and gravitational waves, both of which resulted in Nobel Prizes, as did the studies of high-redshift supernovae. The Planck mission mission was launched, did its stuff, and came to a conclusion in this time too. Most recently we have had the launch of JWST and have started to see the first science results. Science at least has moved forward, even many other things have not.

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Don’t mind me, I’m honing my toning

Posted in Biographical with tags , on December 12, 2019 by telescoper

Trying to divert myself from thoughts of what the British electorate is about to do, I actually read one of the emails I get from WordPress. I found this:

 

I suddenly realized that I’ve been doing the blogging all wrong for the past 11 years. I should have been trying to cultivate and convey my online personality in order to humanize my brand as well establishing an emotional relationship with, and gaining the trust of, my visitors.

I’m by no means convinced that any of my visitors would want to have an emotional relationship with me, but I promise to try harder in future to hone my tone.

Even if I do all this, however, I still think I’ll struggle to achieve business growth, principally because I don’t have a business in the first place.

 

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