It's been a while since we gave a shareholders' report. After all, it is you, dear reader, that make Life on the Far Side a going concern and keep it growing with your great ideas and donations to the cause.
We chose the event of the 600th published article as an appropriate time to catch everyone up and what's been going down.
First of all, the hit counter is spinning madly. We get about 300 visitors a day, less on weekends and more when our scribblings are actually coherent, or cross-published, whichever comes first. The audience is split almost in half, with about 52% from the US/Canada (but I repeat myself), and 48% from Asia, Russia and Brazil, with a healthy mix of Eurospace in there. The top 2 countries continue to be the US and Indonesia, both of which indicate promising signs of intelligence out there.
We are rapidly approaching a quarter-million pages served, which is likely the morning shift on some sites, but for a one-man show coming from deep in the jungles of Borneo, we think it's pretty damn stunning and we intend to use it as an excuse to drink brandy and smoke cigars.
As for the donations to pay for all the high-tech equipment that brings the Far Side to you each and every...well, OK, once every 3 days on average, we haven't received squat since installing the new Bitcoin system. You may recall that PayPal wanted a whole ream of personal data and copies of IDs and all that. WE told them which part of Elon Musk's alpha-male anatomy would be suitable to filing all that personal data and promptly established a Bitcoin account (for all the freakin' good it's done). It could very well be that the lack of donations is a function of the declining quality of work around here, but we prefer to blame it all on Bitcoin and PayPal.
Radio Far Side is doing considerably better on YouTube than Vimeo, while the Yuku channel is langishing in anonymity. We're about to peak over 4,000 hits on YouTube in the past five months. Yeah, yeah, we know...fardly viral that, but hey, how many does your channel get? Neener neener.
The Wordpress mirror site has suddenly and inexplicably taken off. We're not complaining, you see, we just want to know how we did it co we can repeat the process elsewhere. The Twitter account might actually do best if we gave a damn about it, which we don't. Same with Farcebook. But we still put a little effort into keeping them up to date anyway.
Meantime, back at the ranch...er, jungle, we're preparing for our annual Far Side Thanksgiving report, which is one of the perennial favorites out there in reader-land. We're also fixin' to start a Big New Job, which is taking a lot of time and focus away from our regular musings here, but hey, we're keeping up with the average post count. One of these days, we may even go in an clear out the 173 unfinished articles, too.
Our Big Goal for the Coming Year (OBGCY) is to get more regular readers than Far Side staff. For some damn reason, our payroll seems to be expanding far beyond what would seem reasonable and proprietary for an effort like this.
At the end of the day, we want to thank all the regulars out there and welcome the newbies. We'll try not to scare your right off. It's been a long strange trip (thanks Grateful Dead!) getting to 600. We just can't imagine what things will look like around here when we get to 1,200. Hopefully by then, someone will have figured out how to use Bitcoin. :D
Keep the faith and keep coming back. We'll keep trying to education and inform, not necessarily in that order. Special thanks to the good folks who write in and scold us for trashing up the 'net. We really appreciate your efforts and look forward to more tongue-lashings in the near future.
Once more unto the breech!