When I opened my blog stats page this morning I noticed that the all time views had topped 1 million! It’s actually well over that, as I didn’t install the stats plug-in until May 2008, but began the blog in July of 2007. So there are probably at least 100,000 more views, I just can’t prove it. No matter, I’ll take this and be quite pleased with it. Recent high traffic to my post about Comic Sans from 2009 put it over the top, traffic from a mere link in a YouTube video about that silly font. Views of my recent Thor Logo Study have been good, though. On we go…

If you’ve tried to access my blog’s home page in the last 24 hours, you probably got an error message. I’ve been working on this problem, and I believe it’s now fixed. Please report any broken links or error messages you get while visiting my blog. Thanks!

We’re riding out the storm at my mother’s place in central NJ with only iPhone access to the Internet, so I won’t be posting here for a while. I will have occasional updates on Facebook. Stay dry, everyone!

Very sorry to hear of the passing of Ray Bradbury, a favorite author of my teen years. That’s my copy of “Martian Chronicles” printed in May, 1951. “The night came down around them, and there were stars.”

Image © Alan Moore and Steve Moore.

If you’re a long-time Alan Moore fan like me, you might be interested in the GLYCON blog by Irish Moore fan Pádraig Ó Méalóid (who I think puts all those accents in his name to drive typists mad). Pádraig has been given permission by Alan and sometimes his collaborators to publish there rare, obscure and sometimes unpublished Moore work. Up most recently is a small pamphlet of four poems, “Technical Vocabularies,” two each by Alan Moore and Steve Moore, who also published the pamphlet in a limited edition of 101 signed copies. Interesting work: Alan’s poems are earthy and playful, Steve’s are more fantastic and wishful. Previous entries have more work by Alan you may never have heard of, let alone seen. A site worth visiting from time to time for certain.

Four years ago today I put my website online and started this blog. Still enjoying both, so no plans to change things! As of yesterday, I’ve put 568,683 words on the blog. Not as much about logos and lettering as I’d prefer in the past year, but when I get busy there’s less time for that, so I guess it’s not such a bad thing, really. WordPress stats have recorded 756,611 views on the blog, and I didn’t start using that feature right away, so I missed some. Still quite a lot, and my Logo Studies continue to get the most traffic, with Batman in the lead.

I don’t really understand the stats on my website provided by Lunarpages, my web host, but the numbers are quite large. From what I can glean, there seem to be about 5,000 unique visitors a month to the entire website, and far more “hits,” which are probably mostly searches that don’t result in actual visits. Is that good? Seems so to me.

Recently I joined FaceBook, after resisting that social media site for years, and after an initial adjustment period, I’ve grown to enjoy it, and check in there frequently, posting at least once a day. Twitter is still not something I have any desire to take part in, but that could always change in the future. Is Facebook increasing my blog or website traffic? I can’t tell, doesn’t seem to be making a large difference.

To all of you reading this far, my fans and constant readers, thank you! I’ll try to keep things interesting here in the coming year.

Photo of Alan Moore and Pádraig Ó Méalóid by Brian J. Showers.

From Pádraig Ó Méalóid, an avid Alan Moore fan and friend, comes his latest interview with the man of letters HERE. I enjoyed reading it, and learned a few things!

Starting now. Back soon. Talk amongst yourselves…

Yup, it’s the third anniversary of this blog and website today, tomorrow we begin our fourth year. On my blog administrator pages I noticed a few weeks ago that I was also approaching 1,000 posts. “Wouldn’t that be interesting to have it hit exactly 1,000 on the anniversary,” I thought in a geeky way. Then I counted forward, assuming a post a day, which is what I aim for, and…without any special jiggering, there it was, hitting 1,000 today. Weird how those things work sometimes. How close have I come to my post-a-day goal? 365 days times three is 1095, so I missed 95 days, or an average of 2.6 days per month. Not bad.

Then I got to wondering how many words I’ve written here, and I found a WordPress plugin that does that, adding total word count to the bottom of my blog home page. As I write this I am at 439,854 words, not counting this post, or about the length of three good-sized novels. Funny, one question I’m often asked at cons or in interviews is, “Do you think you’ll ever do any more writing?” Okay, it’s not fiction, but it certainly takes time, and for things like my logo studies, a good deal of thought and research.

Some time over the past year the blog stat plug-in I’m using started counting visits to the blog Home Page, and that now leads in most visited by a long shot, 163,000 plus. Next most popular are my Batman Logo Study posts, with Part 1 at over 20,000 visits. They’re perennial favorites, every few months a new site lists them, and they find new viewers. My Logo Links page is close behind with over 15,000 views. All the other posts are at less than 10,000.

Okay, enough patting myself on the back. Thanks to all of you for visiting and reading, it provides me with the kind of feedback I never get from my regular comics work, and makes it fun to turn on the computer every day. Onward into year four we go!