Gosharootie. I just logged into my dashboard this morning for a look under the hood of PPM and to what to my won’dring eyes did appear, but a badge proclaiming that I’d been blogging on WordPress for a stately dozen years now! On one hand, it seems like only yesterday that I made the decision that it was time to get all of the copy that filled my head with every moment spent listening to music out of my skull and onto a screen so that I [or anyone else] could read it. And on the other hand, it also feels like I have been writing frantically during my lunch hours since I was a lad. What stories do the stats tell us?
- Number of posts: 2,470
- Number of page views: 904,274
- Number of comments: 17,550
- Number of visitors: 331,763
Hmm, PPM is closing in on nearly a million page hits, but that’s small change for the web. Professional bloggers would scoff at such numbers. My stats will never be stratospheric due to my recoiling from Social Media usage. And I’m fine with that. I’m not blogging out of megalomania. Just my ardor for music! If anyone wants to read it… it’s there. And I always allow commenting. The Askismet anti-spam is about 99.99% accurate, so there’s no reason to limit discourse.
The month-by-month page its stats show the story of how PPM was a tiny, unlit corner of the web for the first half of its lifespan with very modest readership. Then, things began to pick up about seven years ago.
But that table is hard to read the trends from. A bar graph more capably shows three discrete eras for PPM, with leaps between 2016-2016 and especially 2019-2020. Who knows what the future holds. There’s nothing I can point to that would account for such growth spurts, but we’ve seemed to have plateaued of late.
Popular Posts
The 16 most popular posts are shown above, but the numbers are deceiving. Because every day a post is published, it’s identified as the “home page” and those hits are calculated separately, What the numbers show here was how many times the posts in question were loaded when they were off the home page position. The Human League post popularity was probably down to Pitchfork posting to the post from a LCD Soundsystem [huh?] post they ran. The Cars post was linked to from a classic car forum because it showed the reference photos used to paint the cove of “Candy-O!”
In the last years I can see a lot of traffic sent from FaceBoot but I have no way of knowing what page exactly on that site was sending traffic. There’s also Twitter referrals, but they are a fraction of FaceBoot. There are other sites that I see traffic from, but reciprocal linking is a lot harder than it used to be on the web. In many instances, you have to be logged in to a particular ecosystem to do that. The referral links I’m probably proudest of are from The Guardian. That’s a site I spend more time on than Discogs! And having a link from Malcolm Garret’s home page is something that any graphic designer would swoon over. Vanity Fair was also unusual. As was Wikipedia, where there are a surprising number of links. Well, it sure wasn’t me! I’m too busy blogging. And we’re not slowing down in the foreseeable future with our usual 933 words [on average] per post, to the tune of roughly 205 posts per year.
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![Chris Cross: 1952-2024 [part 2]](https://postpunkmonk.files.wordpress.com/2024/04/ultravox-cross.jpg?w=200&h=200&crop=1)
Post-Punk Monk 
Congratulations Monk. Part of my daily news update is to check the posts on PPM. Always well written with proper research and insightful comments.
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Here, here! Congrats, Monk. Keep up the great work!
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Congratulations – it shows discipline to produce content consistently over many years….and even though I sometimes shake my head at some of the music you post about, most times I marvel that I do know that song or artist, just not their names or the song names. Shame on me :-) So many of those tunes bring back so many memories of that time in my life. It was so hard back then to know who or what was being played on the radio unless you made a concerted effort to find out. But thanks to you I am getting edumacated….I expect to read more about your culling process and why you cut what you did. Should give me some inspiration for my own culling of my own other collections.
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Deserat – “Other collections?” Are you saying that people collect things other than music!?!
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Hehe-yes, I am! I even subscribe to a daily post about organizing and culling. Don’t ask if I actually heed the posts…..but I do like reading about the ideas 😉
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Deserat – I’d like to be able to get ALL of my CDs on those racks. They hold 2800-3000 CDs [slimline single cases shew the number higher]. I have around 4000 now. I would like to have strict accounting of exactly what I have before I start cutting it free.
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No doubt about it … gonna need a bigger monastery! :D
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Happy blogiversary! Here’s to dozens more years. In future times expect an (even more) elderly Taffy to log onto whatever device one will be logging onto to check the musings of my favorite Monk.
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Congratulations on your first twelve years Monk. I can’t even remember how I first came across your posts but I try to visit your site daily. Even if the subject matter isn’t something of obvious interest I will make a point of reading. Invariably I will learn something new. We’re lucky that you manage to find the time in your lunch breaks to write with such passion and knowledge. Here’s to another twelve years, at least.
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AndyB – Thanks to the magic of the admin panel, you knew me from the Metamatic forum and jumped in when we were doing the OMD Rock G.P.A. in 2018!
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Congratulations. Happy to be here. An interesting read I look forward to every day.
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Brian – Thanks! Well, I try to be here five days a week, but sometimes I fall down [like yesterday].
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Oh, the discipline and fervor of the Monk! Congratulations to you, and I think I’ve been here pretty much the whole time, though I cannot claim to have read (or at least remember) every single post! Still, this is that most rare of sites — I enjoy the author, I enjoy the content the author generates, and almost uniquely, I enjoy reading the comments of the incredibly solid community that have come together here. Long may the Monk do his penance, and sacrifice his lunch to enlighten the masses!
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chasinvictoria – Oh I don’t sacrifice my lunch… it usually takes under 15 minutes. I sacrifice goofing off for 45 minutes, but the “incredibly solid community,” as you so well put it, is more than worth the effort!
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