Published in April and May

May went by in kind of a blur. I’ll be as surprised as anyone to see what I published in May. Actually, it looks like I haven’t written a clips post in a while, so this one will fill in what I wrote for publication in April and May. Ready? Let’s go.

Publications

My last piece for Avvo, about the seminal Supreme Court case McCulloch v Maryland published in April. My first piece for Earth911, a fun little introduction to the art of furoshiki, also ran in April. Since then, I’ve written a few more substantial pieces for Earth911.

• How to Help Save the Monarchs (they also discussed this piece on Episode 4 of the somewhat awkwardly named podcast, Sustainability in Your Ear).
• Choose the Best Lawnmower
• Should You Visit an Animal Sanctuary When You Travel?

I’ve got several more in the pipeline for them, so stay tuned.

I only had one piece in ParentMap, but I’m very excited about it. They ran my second international travel piece, Where to Go Instead of Iceland.

Blog

I’m still trying to figure out how to read blog statistics now that I’m self-hosted. Monster, WordPress, and AdSense all show statistics, and the numbers are never the same. Anyway, it seems like traffic is up but not enough to generate any payments. So there’s that.

I read somewhere that bloggers were supposed to promote old posts as well as new ones, so I scheduled tweets about a bunch of old posts as a test. My most popular post for the month of May was a book review I wrote in 2014 for Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce. But that wasn’t one of the posts I tweeted.  Go figure.

Whatever the reason, four out of five top posts this month were old ones:

2. Aida at Seattle Opera (a new post)
3. The Looney (Tunes) World of Marriage of Figaro
4. When the de la Cruz Family Danced – Book Review
5. Tosca Weekend

At least according to WordPress. Monster Insights offered a slightly different list of top posts for May:

1. Aida at Seattle Opera
2. When the de la Cruz Family Danced – Book Review
3. String at Village Theatre
4. Live Theater Film Experience – Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: Le Mouvement
5. Constitutional Dog Whistle – Article 1 §9.1

Whichever list is more reliable, it seems like people are at least as interested in my old posts as my new ones. I guess I’ll keep tweeting both and try to compete with old-me for more readers.

Where are You?

I’ve noticed that Iceland dropped out of my list of top countries visiting the blog. I guess it’s not surprising, since I haven’t written much about Iceland lately. But what is unusual is that Peru has jumped into my top 3. I haven’t written about Peru ever – although I’d love to visit someday.

I did get invited to a blogging contest where the prize was a trip to Peru, so maybe the sponsoring agency spent some time poking around on the blog when they were deciding whether to invite me? (I didn’t enter because I didn’t meet the minimum traffic requirements. But it sure would be cool to get comp plane tickets for blogging.

Will blog for tickets is a motto I can get behind.

Referrals were interesting this month, too. Earth911 jumped to #3, behind Twitter and Facebook. Even though I’ve only written a few things for them so far, my byline on their site has sent the blog more traffic than Avvo and ParentMap ever did in a month, even though I have written for them a lot more.  Should I add environmental topics to the blog?

Welcome Back

Unlike WordPress, Monster tells me how much of my traffic is new visitors vs. returning visitors. When I first moved URLs, I was getting about 80% new and 20% return visitors. This month the proportion shifted to 75/25, and I think that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s just old readers finding their way to the new site, but either way, I’m glad people are finding enough stuff to like that they are coming back for more.

I’ve never gotten a lot of comments on this site, which I haven’t minded much since so many people have horror stories. But I’d love to hear from regular readers sometimes. Let me know what you like or find interesting, so I can spend more time on it. But if you’re just here to read, I understand. That’s what I do, too. In any case, welcome back! I’m glad you’re here.