WordPress Engagement
If you have a WordPress blog, it’s important to have different links featured on different platforms so that you can tell the difference from people who click onto your profile page or people who click on a link from a different part of that site. It certainly helps if you have accounts on both Facebook and Instagram since WordPress sometimes interprets an Instagram view as a Facebook one since Facebook owns Instagram. This becomes obvious if you spend more time on Instagram than Facebook. In an episode of Hollywood’s Best Film Directors, Mel Gibson said that he has a rule: you must entertain, educate and elevate. My rule is that you have to interest and intrigue people.
One particular drawback about WordPress is that it never informs its clients which particular users on Facebook are sharing their stuff. You have more chances of identifying sharers on Twitter, YouTube or Pinterest, but even then…there is no guarantee. This is why you need to copy and paste a viewed article into a site’s search engine so that you find it for yourself. You will be surprised with what you may find. I say “may” because people can make their pages private on Twitter and Facebook; same thing for Instagram. As for FetLife, a view is sometimes interpreted by WordPress as a Search Engine view. Medium is better than WordPress because it tells you how long that someone had read your article.
Until late 2022, WordPress was flawed in a way that was akin to a glitch than critical thinking. In previous instances where it was a little over midnight, I noticed that sometimes new views are processed as yesterday’s views. This may have been because I was using a U.S. blogging site with a U.K. I.P. address. Another problem may have been the site’s auto-refreshing every 3 minutes. There’s only so much memory that it can withhold (traffic is called hits for a reason). This was proven when there were constant upgrades of stats within the same minute, especially when I accessed individual stats pages to see what was viewed and where from. The software must have finally given up because there were times when I couldn’t load the specific pages. It’s almost like I had been partially banned.
There was one particular instance of this. On February 27 in 2018, my blog had 240 views courtesy of 156 visitors. Most of the views were because of my Anne Winton article. There was so much traffic that I couldn’t load specific statistics on the following day. In other words, I could only look at the main statistics page to see the top 10 countries and the top 10 viewed articles. Bearing in mind that there had been past occasions where I received 200+ views. On that particular night, I had no problem accessing the stats pages when the views went past 200. My theory is that the transition from Tuesday night to Wednesday morning had messed up the process due to the aforementioned bandwidth problem. Anyway, Anne Winton was an obscure actress who many people wanted to know about. There was an important lesson that I learned about research - sometimes the Google Books search engine can give you things that you wouldn’t otherwise find in a standard Google search.
WordPress isn’t the best site for gathering statistics on how many people visit your blog. On February 18 in 2020, I woke up to see 11 views from supposedly only one visitor despite four views coming from America, two views from Indonesia, two views from Australia, two views from the U.K. and one view from Brazil. Perhaps WordPress is lowballing its customers so that they can only get perfect statistics if they upgrade to Commerce status. The other three statuses are Personal, Premium and Business. I tried Business once, and it wasn’t much of an improvement.
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Looking at the stats of your WordPress blog can teach you a lot about connections. On October 27 in 2021, I made a pretty strong case on a Bruce Lee forum about film producer Ng See-Yuen having a hand in the death of Jet Li’s manager. On October 28, my blog received a lot of views from China! Talk about Chinese whispers! On March 21 in 2022, my article about Natalie Wood was viewed 33 times - 31 of those views were from Facebook, 32 of those views were from the U.S. The two non-FB views inform me that it was first viewed by someone who then forwarded it to somebody else, who then posted it.
There have been episodes of E! News: Daily Pop that disclosed how some celebrities are on social networking sites under secret profiles. One such example who wasn’t named is Jennifer Jason Leigh. She was on FetLife.
I remember when I was going through the California section of the site, and I sent a message to a San Diego woman who had the same age as her. In reality, J.J. Leigh lives in Los Angeles. Her main photo was the bottom half of her face. She didn’t identify herself as Jennifer. Anyway, I sent her some photo loves (similar to Facebook likes), and she sent a surprising message. Bearing in mind that this was after I had posted an article about her which was available on my profile as a link to my May 2016 archive. Her message was: “Thanks. You are just what I needed.”
After I checked my site stats, it turned out that an American had clicked on my article some time before I received the message (this was during a time in my life when I checked my stats on a regular enough basis to detect connections). As for why she would be grateful, my article exposed the real reason why she was replaced from Eyes Wide Shut - a 1999 erotic Stanley Kubrick drama starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Her replacement had been in Ingmar Bergman plays and a Swedish TV film titled In the Presence of a Clown, which was going to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1998. You would think that Tom Cruise would have been powerful enough to prevent Leigh from being fired.
Speaking of Tom Cruise, I had posted an article about him on August 27 in 2021. Three days later, my site received a view from a parental guidance site called uMobix. In the entire history of myself having a blog, I have never seen anyone access it through that parental site. Perhaps Tom’s Google Alert system made him want to investigate. The site’s declaration states: “uMobix is a smartphone and tablet software designed for parents who wish to control their children under 18 years. The buyer of the uMobix software must either own the smartphone or tablet or must have written consent from their children. The software is only to be used for ethical controlling purposes. It’s illegal to use uMobix for monitoring the digital devices of your spouse, girlfriend/boyfriend, or partner.”
It’s nice to be noticed by celebrities. It validates you more. In 2019, I advertised my articles about actresses by sending messages to them on Instagram. When I checked my stats page, it would appear that Mara Wilson, Sasha Grey and Christina Ricci clicked onto those links if not read them entirely. It’s cool to think that Sasha, in particular, has seen my Dark Horse article. Last month, my article about Annabel Schofield received acclaim from the horse’s mouth on Facebook: “I just came across this blog which is dedicated to my book, The Cherry Alignment. I’m beyond touched — but you knew that already. So nice when someone gets it. It’s great to know this person really got it and isn’t a friend of mine! They know more about me than I do! This was such a shot in the arm yesterday. Was feeling really down.”
On November 13 in 2018, my article about Drag Me to Hell had been viewed for the first time in a week. It was previously viewed by lesbians on the L Chat forum. On November 12, I sent a Facebook message to a Scottish writer who wrote a long article about how Ellen Page’s career went down. I told her that it went down because of Ellen dropping out of Sam Raimi’s horror movie (I even showed her the article). On November 13, my article was viewed four times. She must have put two and two together. Speaking of lesbians, I sent a birthday e-mail to a lesbian porn star in 2018 where I included my article about her. When I checked my stats later that day, I found out that someone in Panama had viewed that article. I quickly deduced that she (Lily Cade) was on vacation.
For quite some time in 2022, my blog had been viewed by someone accessing a site called Universal Human Relevance System. Referred to in shorthand as UHRS, it proclaims itself to be a crowdsourcing platform that supports data labelling for various AI application scenarios. Their vendor partners connect them with people - who they refer to as judges - to provide data labelling for the site to scale. All UHRS judges are under NDA, so your data is always secure (or so they say). It sounds like the NSA. Its selling points are: image annotation (“classify images, semantic segmentation, object detection”), search relevance (“identifying query-results, relevance events, entity classification”), video annotation (“video relevance for search query, video tracking, object detection”), speech transcription (“validating audio to text, conversation, and relevance”), text annotation (“identify sentiment of a tweet, and document classification”) and other (“ad hoc data collection tasks, information correction/moderation, and survey”).
On March 20 in 2021, someone accessed my blog through an academic site called NoodleTools. As per usual for WordPress, I don’t know which article was viewed.
