Page Counts, Clicks, X-Cetra

Who's up for some blogging about blogging? Yes, I know it's not Blaugust any more but always remember, a blog is not just for August.

It all started when I replied to Tipa's comment on Wednesday's post. Not the one about Wednesday the show. The one I put up two days ago. The one that none of you have read. 

Oh, you did read it, did you? Congratulations! That puts you in quite the elite club. Want to know how to get into the club's super-secret, cool kids only treehouse? Click on the embedded video in that post. If you're quick you could be the fifth person ever to see it!

I expect people not to watch the videos. Hardly anyone ever does. I can see how many times they've been viewed on YouTube (And yes, I checked, and watching it on the blog does increment the YouTube counter.). The last one I did before this, for the post Some Puppy Walking,  has been watched sixteen times. The post itself has over three hundred views so you do the math...

Three hundred views used to be bang on average for a post here, after it's been up for a week or more. So far, only forty-five people have viewed Wednesday's post, according to the little widget next to it in the post list in Blogger. 

That's about the only stat I ever pay any attention to these days. I got very fed up with the unnecessary complexity of Google Analytics, so when they revamped it and you had to jump through a load of technical hoops to have your website included in the new version, I opted not to bother.

I also stopped looking at Blogger's own stats ages ago because they don't seem to filter out bots so they're always ludicrously inflated. Even the page-view number that I do still look at, mostly because it's always right there in front of me, is just the same number from the main stats, so I don't take it too seriously either.

Still, even bad stats are useful if they're consistent in their badness. Any sudden change means something must have happened. And there has been one heck of a big change just recently.

Before Blaugust, that page view figure bobbled fairly consistently somewhere between 250 and 400 over the first seven days or so after the post published. Most posts stop picking up views after that although there can obviously be spikes at any time.

At this point, you're probably expecting me to say page views went up during Blaugust. That's always been the conventional wisdom and with this year having a record number of participants and with me consistently linking every post in the Blaugust Discord, it's more than reasonable to imagine it would hold true. 

It didn't, though, or not for me. Most years I see little or no uptick in views from Blaugust and this year was much the same. Until the last week, that is. 

From the 25th of August, page views almost doubled, averaging around seven or eight hundred. That bump carried on long after Blaugust ended and indeed became more pronounced as September went on, with quite a few posts hitting four figures, topping out at just over two thousand.

Why? No idea. I rarely have any clue why these things happen. And equally, I have no explanation for why they stop, which seems to be what's happened now. Only this time the drop is as spectacular as the rise was.

Generally, any post I put up gets most of its views in the first 24-48 hours, as you'd expect. I haven't been keeping track but I'm fairly sure back when they were finishing up with  three or four hundred views, they'd have seen half of those in the first two or three days.

The last two posts have so far managed 45 views in two days and 34 in 24 hours respectively. That doesn't seem normal to me, which is why this morning I started fiddling about in Google's stat cupboards to see if I could figure out what was going on.

I'll put you out of your suspense now. I did not figure out what was going on. I have no way of knowing whether regular readers have suddenly found better things to do or if Google has started tallying things differently. I'll just wait for it to change again, which it will.

I did, however, discover some other new and quite interesting things while I was rummaging and that's how this post came about.

Firstly, I'll say that Google Search Console is a huge improvement on Analytics for the casual user. If you have a Blogger blog, I'd recommend giving it a look. It's much clearer, far easier to understand, and best of all it explains what the stats mean. You can set filters and use them to dig out some quite useful detail without a great deal of trouble.

I particularly liked the new Insights Report, which gives you a very clear indication of which of your posts are trending up or down and enough granularity to take a shot at figuring out why. And that's where I noticed something very odd.

It wasn't that there'd been a big spike in search requests for my post on housing in Throne and Liberty, which I put up just under a year ago. T&L has just added housing so obviously people are googling for information on it, none of which they're going to find here.

It's harder to explain why there's been a surge of interest in Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt. If anything new is happening there, I've missed it. Two of my posts about it do turn up on the first page of Google Search results though, so I guess if anyone is still interested, they might well give me a look.

The one that really set me thinking, though, was the sudden interest in this post from just over a year ago. 

That's a "What I've Been Listening To Lately" post. No-one reads those. Okay, some people do, but clearly that series isn't going to come up in a general search very often. Yes, they do often have the names of famous people in the body of the post but hardly ever in the title and let's be realistic here - even putting Taylor Swift's name in the title of your blog post is not going to get you onto the first hundred pages on a search result, is it? I mean, there's a lot of competition there...

In the case of this particular post, I didn't mention Taylor Swift in the title (Although A$AP Rocky's Taylor Swif is one the featured tunes.) or anyone even close to being that famous. I did, as it happens, mention the name of a Woody Allen movie that doesn't even feature in the post at all, but that's not what people were searching for.

They were looking for a band called X-Cetra, a bunch of Californian tweenage girls who made a very odd album by the name of Stardust a couple of decades ago. I said in the post that X-Cetra didn't even have a Wikipedia page. I just checked and they still don't. I guess that explains why someone would bother to click through to a blog that mentioned them.

And they have. Not in the kind of numbers that click through to check on posts about clothes or housing in Once Human, which seem to be by far the biggest draw here over the last twelve months, but in numbers that feel statistically significant, especially since most of them appear to have happened not when I put the post up last year but in this last month.

 

In fact, my top search query for September is "X-cetra stardust" and two more variations of the phrase are also in the top ten. Altogether, there were 829 searches for X-Cetra Stardust in the last 28 days and twenty-nine people clicked through to look at the page in full. It may not sound like a great conversion rate but in comparison, of more than a thousand inquiries about housing in Throne & Liberty, only nine people clicked.

What's even more interesting is that, of the 39 clicks from search the post has ever received, 38 of them were in the last month. There was a huge spike (Seven clicks!) on 3 September and it's been ticking away ever since.

If there's been any general news about the album or the band, I'm not aware of it. Google Trends does confirm a huge spike of interest on 3 September but a general search finds nothing special.

Enter Blaugustian Calishat with their invaluable selection of search refinement tools. With the inestimable Back That Ask Up utility I was able to narrow my search down to the exact moment of the spike and find the reason for it - an article in Rolling Stone entitled "Four Best Friends Made an Album as Kids. 25 Years Later, It’s a Cult Classic"

It's a big article with lots of new information. It even links to a "Blogspot User", sadly not me. I bet they got some page views that day. I just got the spill-over. 

But wait. There's more. 

Unsurprisingly, given the paucity of information on the band, my post does appear on the first page of Google search results, but you have to scroll down a fair way. The thing that amazed me and led to this post, though, is what I saw at the top of the page. 

It's in the image up there at the head of this post. That's a screenshot of the top of a Google search page, the bit I rarely look at. I almost always scroll straight past all of the featured links and the AI summaries to the point where the old school listings start and go from there.

In the middle, with the eye-catching thumbnail of Teri Gender Bender from Le Butcherettes, is a link to my post. Why I'm getting that prime spot rather than, say, the Rolling Stone article, I have no idea but I'll happily take it. 

That big panel across the top of the results seems only to appear if you search for specific entity by name. It works for bands, albums, movies, actors, games... As soon as you add any detail to the query, though, it vanishes. Has it always been there? I guess I hardly ever search for anything purely by name so I would very rarely see it. 

I might have to  pay it more attention, now I discover that one of my posts has been featured that way. I guess it proves you don't have to pay to get featured on Google search, at least.

And after all that, I guess my extremely late for Blaugust advice on how to get more page views and clicks would have to be write about very obscure things no-one else is covering or clothes and housing in online games. That's what seems to be working for me, anyway.

For a given value of "working", that is. A very, very tiny one.

Facing Off With The Faceless

Yesterday evening and again this morning, I did something unusual. I played EverQuest II.

I don't mean I logged in, collected my completed Overseer missions, set my new ones for the day and logged out, like I do every day. Although, I did do all of that... except the logging out part.

I'd been getting a slight itch to play an MMORPG "properly" again for a couple of days. It started, weirdly, when I was on Steam and noticed there were some patch notes for Rift.   

It's a constant surprise to see dribbles of content still dripping into the game during Gamigo's maintenance-mode custodianship but guess perhaps the oddest thing is that I still have Rift installed. It's not like I'm going to play it again. 

Or is it?

It was when I found myself seriously considering doing just that, wondering whether I ought to pick up one of my old characters and carry on with them or if it mightn't be better to roll up a new one and start over, that I had a little talk with myself and decided I'd be better off doing something productive in one of the games I was supposedly still playing istead, not taking a wholly ill-advised trip back in time to one I'd abandoned years ago.

The choice was pretty obvious. I clearly ought to patch up Wuthering Waves and try to get back up to date there yet again. There's another update coming and I haven't touched the last one yet. I'm already behind and soon I'll be too far behind to catch up.

So, I didn't do that.

Second choice would probably be Once Human. There's a lot going on there, too, and I haven't seen any of it. 

Didn't do that, either.

 

Also in the running, albeit as an outsider, there's New World. I realy like New World. It's my second most-played game on Steam, after Valheim. There's a major update - you could almost call it an expansion - coming to the game in less than two weeks and it looks very interesting, all vampires and werewolves and spooky castles. Just right for the season

It's a free update but you have to have New World Aeternum to get it and I don't. So I'd have to buy that, which would then give me even more new-to-me content. And contrary to what you might expect, that's actually a point against going back. I don't have the time or inclination to take on a big tranche of content in any game right now. I'm looking for something to fill the odd session, here and there, not some big commitment that could take weeks.

Something like, oh, I don't know, a new solo dungeon or an instance I haven't done. Even better, one that might have some drops I could use. I've always been a big advocate of the gameplay being its own reward but good drops are cake.

All of that led me back to EQII, where there have been two Game Updates this year that I haven't touched. 

Alright, that's not entirely true. I did set foot in the new, contested dungeon that came in GU128 back in April. It didn't go well.

That update is called Lure of Darkness and features a large dungeon by the name of Spiral of Vul. It's designed for multiple groups to explore at the same time, old-school style, but it does have a small, soloable area at the front, as has been the norm in EQII as far back as beta.

I can say from experience that the allocated area for solo players is soloable. I did a little bit of it back in April and I didn't die. I also didn't have much fun. The mobs were very tough and took ages to kill. If there are any soloable bosses, I never got far enough to try my luck with them. I did one quest, whch took about half an hour and gave up.

That was on my Berserker. Since then, I've upgraded all his gear using the Anniversary gift. He was mostly in 475-495 Resolve gear then and now he's wearing all 525. Resolve is a very sound indicator of performance, much like Gear Score in other games, and 30-50 points is enough to make a difference so I was hopeful I might get a little further this time.

I did not. I map-hopped over to the Sodden Archipelago and flew halfway across the zone to the entrance of the dungeon, went inside and immediately picked up a couple of shinies that completed a collection. That made the trip worthwhile, which was just as well because the trash mobs seemed no easier to kill than before. I tried a couple, decided it wasn't going to be any more fun than last time, so I  left.

The second of the annual updates arrived in August. It's called Fear of Eternity and consists of Fabled versions of the dungeons from the 2012 expansion, Chains of Eternity. Fabled dungeons are generally the same as the originals but with all the mobs revamped for the current level cap and all the loot similarly upgraded. They also come in all the regular flavors - Solo, Heroic I and Heroic II.

My experience with Fabled dungeons at the time they first appear has been patchy. There have been some I've been able to make progress in but mostly they're too tough for me. I usually give them a go, decide it's too much like hard work and leave them for later. Sometimes I do come back and finish them when I'm a bit tougher, sometimes I forget they exist.

I was fully expecting the first one I tried, Fabled Temple of the Faceless, to be at least as hard as Spiral of Vul. I mean, you'd think so, woudn't you? It's six months later, after all. What would be the point of adding something easier to the game at level cap?

It was easier. It was a lot easier. At least it was once I got myself sorted out.

The zone-in is much more conveniently placed, right on the dock where you zone in to Sodden Archipelago. No flying right across the map this time. That was nice. You can access all the available dungeons from the update from the same portal, too. Also nice.

I picked the first instance on the list, zoned in and pulled a mob to test the waters. They were warm. The mob, a three-up arrow spider, theoretically tough for trash, died in a reasonable time and didn't pose much of  threat. I worked my across the opening area towards the first boss, killing as I went and it felt comfortable. It wasn't a walkover but it wasn't a grind. I felt like I was moving through the zone at a reasonable pace.

I got in range of the boss and thought about looking him up for strats but I couldn't be bothered so I just pulled him to see what would happen. Nothing much. In fact, as far as he was concerned, nothing at all. His health stayed solidly at 100% no matter how hard and how often I hit him. Clearly there were unseen factors in play.

With my merc pumping out the healing and the Berserker having a pretty solid self-healing capacity of his own it was a stalemate, albeit one that was eventually only going to end one way, even if it was likely to take an hour to get there. I rummaged in my bags for a Totem of Escape to port myself to the zone entrance and couldn't find one so I just legged it to the zone-line with the boss beating on me all the way. He still didn't make much of a dent, even with my back turned.

Once I was safe outside, I looked at the wiki. It turns out there are two pillars, one in each of two side-temples, that have to be destroyed before the first boss can be damaged. I vaguely remembered that from whenever I did the dungeon when I was questing through the relevant expansion but that was years ago and I needed to be reminded.

I went back in, found the pillars, knocked them down, then had a second go at the boss. It went much better that time. 

I was curious to see what he'd drop. I was hoping it would be gear over 500 Resolve. In fact it was identical in quality to the Anniversary freebies - 525 Resolve. Since I was already fully kitted out in that, I was also hoping it wouldn't be Plate Armor. I could give that to my Inquisitor but she's not Level 130 yet so she'd have to do five more levels before she could wear it.

I was hoping for cloth so my Necro could have it and cloth was what I got. On the first boss, anyway.

It had been fun and profitable so far so I carried on. Temple of The Faceless is a fairly compact, to the point dungeon, without a lot of wandering about required. Exactly what I was looking for. I progressed through the next two bosses, checking strats just in case of any more surprises but having very little trouble with either.

That took me up to bedtime so I camped where I was and picked up again where I left off the next morning. There was only one more boss left but it was a dragon and they can be tricky. In the event, though, he went down as easily as the rest. 

I didn't get any more cloth armor but my Bruiser is going to be happy. The rest was all leather. The two sessions were fun, the difficulty just about right for me, requiring a certain amount of attention and concentration but not so much I couldn't take a few screenshots during the fights.

There are several more Fabled instances in the update so I'll most likely take a look at those next. The deciding factor on whether I do or not will be how much fun I'm having. The upgraded loot is nice but I'm all too aware it will be made obsolete by the free handouts at the start of the coming expansion, let alone the quest rewards from the storyline.

Not to mention there's the stuff the pandas are handing out. Which reminds me. As of this week's reset, I must have a new panda quest to do...

So Very Real

Last night was a watershed moment for me. I finally ran out of things I wrote or recorded in the 70s, 80s and 90s that I could refashion or remake into new songs using AI. It's taken me more than six months, hacking away at the past a little more every day, but now it's clear cut and there's nothing left but stumps.

Well, okay, not exactly. I could give the longer pieces another pass or two. See if there's anything I missed. I didn't really pry all that much away from the longer of the two extended pieces of fiction because most of it seemed unsuitable for conversion into song lyrics but maybe a different musical genre would shake something else loose. Everything can't be sad dreampop.

And there might be the odd fragment I haven't found, left lurking somewhere in the house. I can think of a couple of pieces I remember writing that haven't turned up yet. One of them would be perfect. But if they still exist, I've run out of ideas on where to look. They weren't in the loft and that was my last hope.

Or maybe not. There are a couple of outside possibilities. I doubt very much that I'm likely to find any of the printed zines but I have a couple of PC floppy disks I haven't been able to read. If I could get into those... 

And before I got the PC in the mid-90s I'm pretty sure I wrote everything on my Amiga 500. Which I still have. And the disks. The problem there is that I'd need a CRT monitor to plug the Amiga into and I got rid of the last of those just after the pandemic, when I was having a clear-out. One more piece of evidence to support my belief that decluttering is never a good idea.

I was looking into it and it seems you can get various adapters to connect an Amiga to an HDMI display but my experience with such things in the past has not always been great and honestly I don't think I can be bothered. If I'm honest, I don't even want to dig the Amiga out from the inaccessible hidey-hole I buried it in when I was almost sure I'd never want to use it again...

No, I think I'm just going to have to accept that those last, few fragments are gone for good. And that's okay. I've recovered and restored a huge percentage of everything I ever did, most of which I thought I'd never see again and none of which I ever imagined would have such a scintillating afterlife.

It's been a revelation, rediscovering eveything I wrote and recorded decades ago, finding much of it was far better than I remembered and then turning it all into something new that's given me an extraordinary amount of pleasure and satisfaction in its own right. I think it's okay to let a few scraps fall through the floorboards.

There is another very good reason to call a halt to the crate-digging, too. If I don't have any more old stuff to rely on, I'll have to start making some new. That would be a whole different adventure, wouldn't it?

I probably ought to start by finishing the pieces I left unfinished back around the turn of the millennium. One, supposedly a novel, I stopped mostly because I didn't know where to go with it next. The other, an episodic string of vignettes, left off, as I now realize, at a very unhappy moment in the story. Both of those deserve proper endings.

After that, maybe I might even come up with a new idea. That'd be the first this century. I don't believe I've had a new idea since the mid-90s. I'm assuming they still exist. It might be a myth.

New ideas are scary, though, and so is making art. Curating it is a lot more comfortable. Perhaps I'd have a better time organizing what I already have and figuring out some way to present it in public. Not that I have any illusions there's a public out there likely to take an interest but I figure it's better to offer it than not, even if there are no takers.

That's a thought that deserves some analysis, isn't it? Why does any creative act need to be shared? Surely the act of creation is sufficient in itself. And if an audience is required, I am it. I mean, I really appreciate my own work. In making it public, would I be sharing it in a spirit of benevolence, offering up something I feel is valuable and worthwhile for the pleasure and entertainment of others? Or would I just be looking for validation and applause?

Yeah, I don't really care much about all that introspective nonsense. Mostly, I'd like it on the web because that maximizes its chances of survival over a longer time-frame and I'm broadly of the opinion that things should persist whenever possible. Besides, someone might get some use or pleasure out of it one day. Also, it'd be really convenient for me to have it all in one place, even if that was actually several places, as in multiple blogs or websites, with the "one place" in that scenario being the collective wrapper of the internet.

As you may have realized by now, those who've stayed with me this far, this isn't so much a blog post as a conversation I'm having with myself as I try to decide what to do next. Coming to the end of the ongoing project I've been engaged with for most of this year has unsettled me a little and this is me, trying to think it through and figure out what comes next.

And do you know what comes next right now? You won't guess. I'll tell you. 

I'm going to go into the bedroom, open the door to the cupboard where the hot water tank is and rummage through the shelves beneath it, where I keep all the very old clothes I'm never going to wear again but haven't gotten as far as throwing out yet. I'm hoping that among them I'll find a T--shirt I bought in Antequerra about thirty years ago.

That T-shirt, which got too small and old to wear decades ago, has a cartoon on the front of five young women. They aren't characters from a comic or a movie or a show. They're just five people someone drew and presumably sold to someone else, who turned the image into a piece of clothing that ended up in a shop in a backstreet of a middle-sized town in Andalusia, where I found it and bought it for no reason other than I liked the look of the characters.

And then, later, I gave them all names and wrote a story about them. Which is one of the pieces that so far hasn't come to light. 

I don't really think seeing the image again will bring any of the names I gave them back to me. Except I already know what one of them is called because she turns up as a character in that series of vignettes I mentioned.

She's called Cat and I'm hoping if I can find the shirt I'll remember which of the five she is. So let me just go see if I can find it...

... and no, I can't. I have, however, discovered the hot water tank is rusting and needs to be replaced immediately, so that was... lucky?  

Also, a reminder that there are things more pressing in life than either writing blog posts or worrying about what happened to short stories you wrote half a lifetime ago. And with that I think I'll go do something useful for a change.  

 

Notes on AI used in this post

Just the music, which was created using Suno from a guide vocal uploaded by me. Actually, I whistled the tune. Mostly I sing them but some days my voice just isn't willing to co-operate and that apparently was one of those days. 

All the lyrics are mine, adapted from the penultimate paragraph, which reads as follows:

"Rachel sometimes does fireworks for us, just as it gets dark, and I help with the snow statues. If I feel lonely she'll hold me, if I ask. When I'm tired I go up to my little room and close the door. I think Rachel has a room somewhere, but I've never seen it, Rachel is very real. Perhaps she's the real one, not me. Cat and Cathy, I don't know where they go. They're ghosts."

As you can see, I didn't change much, just added some emphasis and extra poignancy. I've found the two techniques that work best for turning prose into lyrics are either to add a few rhymes or to use repetition. It's amazing how effectively repeated lines and phrases substitute for rhymes.

I ran lots of variations and fiddled around with them but in the end, the best one was the very first run. It happens that way more often than you'd think. Suno sometimes seems to get worse the more you ask it to iterate. 

The prompt was

 "strings, cello, soft, sweet, low, husky female vocals, Gentle, soft, quiet, restrained, understated chamber-pop soundscape throughout, production very crisp and clear, female vocals low and husky but soft and sweet, Pitch is generally low, a somber quality indie-pop, dreampop fuzz-pop, simple subdued drums, quiet simple bass, quiet fuzzed guitars, strings"

Again, I find repeating things, particularly at the beginning and end of a prompt, helps a lot. It often seems as if Suno fixates on what it hears first, last or most often. 

If you want to hear it on Suno for some reason, it's here.  It's exactly the same though.