‘Cause I’m the Statsman: Blog Summary 2023

In a previous post I noted I was knee deep in digital bits trying to get everything transitioned to both the new computer platform and probably more tedious, resetting all the backups/trackers/counters etc. for 2024.  The latter feels like I am back at work crunching numbers and traversing through spreadsheet cells.  Didn’t really enjoy it back in the grind and certainly have better things to do now that I am not getting paid for it.  However, it “has” to be done (wink).  It is a nice way for our Intrigued staff to quickly see all the great things we did all year and I know they like to reference it in their end-of-year performance reviews.  Truth is, I forgot to publish the 2022 Blog Summary last year.  The end of the year was a mess and didn’t want to put my still whining elbow through the countless hours poring over the tracking documents.  We just gave the staff all “exceeded” and then picked up the end of the year extravaganza bar tab.  Win win I say! (especially for the legal department who are apparently a bunch of lushes).  Decided to go ahead and get the 2023 summary done while dealing with PC downloads and file transfer wait times… and yes, my elbow still hurts.

2023 was an in interesting year for sure.  Brad and his staff  (Jan and Allyson) were old hats by then and regularly cranking out new adventures from their travel filled year.  My Intrigued photo queue went ANOTHER year behind thanks to numerous trips to the likes of Texas, Las Vegas, Alabama and Florida.  You have to give me some credit though as I was able to get a lot of the new tins out in record time (and now I have 21 new lifer birds from our recent trip to Arizona to add to the backlog – I am sure there are worse problems to have hehehe).  We hit our self-imposed quota of at least 6 posts a month and reached all new levels for reader engagement (kudos to our great readers for sharing in our adventures).  Still amazed by many of our fellow bloggers that are far more prolific.  The birding front was wonderful as well.  Hit the 400 lifer plateau and The Average Year (link here) was a huge success.  In 2022, both Ron and I came up short on our 300 species goal.  2023 a completely different story.  Both cresting over that mark setting even higher goals for this year.  Brad also came in strong and will undoubtedly be moving into the Small/Medium Year bracket for this year.

On the flip side of that good news, the race season took a serious hit thanks to the “Root of All Evil” adding the first DNS (Did Not Start) to my racing career.  Even though I religiously continued all the therapy exercises while on our trip, it is still not recovered and likely heading back to therapy next week for one last ditch effort before having words with the surgeon.  Unfortunately, there were some truly sad times within the extended Intrigued family as Brad and his family lost a beloved family member.  2022 brought a lot of sadness to Linda and I and having our friends go through similar difficulties less than a year later was heartbreaking.

2024 is still young, but shaping up to be a great year.  Now in our 17th year of blogging on our Intrigued platforms (The Mothership and its younger sister site Wildlife Intrigued).  Several ’24 trips are all lined up (both Linda and I as well as Brad and Jan) – looking forward to bringing you the stories and pictures from our experiences.  Hopefully we can continue to grow our presence and always looking forward to the reason we put the work in – to engage our wonderful readers, hearing your feedback, getting your take on our tins and truly learning together.

A few quick shout outs.  A big thanks to Linda who has to put up with me (I really am a handful).  She is my secret weapon – trip planner, financial wizard, nourishment provider, injury soother, bail provider (just in case hehehe) and truly a bird whisperer.  Ron continues to push me on the birding front, dragging me out into the field, helping with those difficult IDs, keeping me posted with opportunities showing up on the birding forums and willing to throw himself in harm’s way to protect me (well, that is what he says…but I’ve seen him run screaming halfway across a field after seeing a Tick).  Brad and his team have been a big help in keeping this blog from being work – also does a good job of catching my grammar/syntax errors.  In my defense I was forged in the shape of and speak the language of a “coder”.   To our staff – you continue to be the best and to all our friends out there spanning the globe, buckle in, 2024 should be a fun ride.

Well, it is time to look back on ’23 and bring you the performance stats.   If you are curious about the details, hit the jump to see the 2023 Life Intrigued blogs stats and accomplishments (Mothership and the Wild side).

Thanks again to all my readers that keep us committed month after month.  Cheers Everyone! (that is a dry toast of course as the year end extravaganza ran us out ha).

Note, all comparisons are against the 2021 stats.

  • According to the WordPress Stats: Total Posts 90 (surprisingly 10 less than ’21).   3,036 comments (up 1,592!) along with 4,035 likes (slightly down by 806) – thank you thank you thank you for all the support.
  • Total blog pages this year (according to MS Word): 1,216 (a pick up of 277 pages and suspect a new record for us)
  • Total number of words this year (according to MS Word): 126,272 (a gain of 15,184 which isn’t surprising with the increase in pages)
  • Post topics (some posts had multiple categories) 2023 / 2021 difference
    • Birds: 62 / -10 – still a lot, but surprisingly down a bit!
    • Fail: 1 / 1 – finally got one of these done last year
    • General: 5 / -1 – down one due to missing a race from the elbow incident
    • Guest Features: 32 – Let’s hear it for Brad and his team Jan and Allyson (we even made it on his annual Christmas card quiz!)
    • Insects: 1 / -3 – we need to focus on giving our smaller species some more attention this year
    • Nature (new for ’23): 11 – we are branching out!
    • Observation: 69 / -16 – I think this is really just being less generous with that tag.   We certainly had plenty of observations..which is what we are all about ha.
    • Phoadtography: 0 / -1 – one of those categories that will probably fall off going forward as those shots typically make it into the “fail” category
    • Products: 0 / 0  – eh
    • Projects: 5 / -3  – you are going to be seeing a lot more of these in ’24.  Even thinking hard about moving those to a video format to cover all the projects we take on for the Halloween event.
    • Ramblings: 0 / 0 – definitely good for you although I’ve done a few rants in the comments.
    • Recollection: 6 / -3 – it is what it is
    • Service: 0 / 0 – Linda says I’m a happier person when not railing on the service industry anyway.
    • Wildlife: 74 / -1  – still on target.  Over the years, the Wild side of Intrigued has slowly come to the forefront.
  • Posts this year by month
    • Jan: 9 – a good start to the year!
    • Feb: 6
    • Mar: 8 – liking this trend.
    • Apr: 6 – back down to earth
    • May: 7
    • Jun: 8
    • Jul: 6
    • Aug: 6
    • Sep: 6
    • Oct: 11 – rocking it!
    • Nov: 9
    • Dec: 8 – really finished the end of the season strong
  • Comments this year by month- combined from Mothership and Wildlife stats (comments / likes)
    • Jan: 203 / 366
    • Feb: 194 / 363
    • Mar: 289 / 452
    • Apr: 293 / 331
    • May: 287 / 350
    • Jun: 206 / 255
    • Jul: 298 / 304
    • Aug: 281 / 273
    • Sep: 137 / 246
    • Oct: 213 / 316
    • Nov: 291 / 413
    • Dec: 344  / 361
  • Post with Most Likes
  • Post with Most Comments
  • Number of images used:
    • Birds – 477 – should be no surprise there
    • Other Wildlife Photos – 85 – big jump in our non-feathered friend features.
    • Insects – 16  – we can bring this up for sure
    • Other Photos – 569 – definitely a high water mark for Intrigued as a whole.  This is heavily weighted to the Halloween event.
    • Videos – ? – this has become hard to track without going back to every post and checking – more than 1 and definitely less than 100.
    • Nature – 38  – mentioned earlier this is a new category.
    • TOTAL: 1,185 – a massive jump from previous years.
  • Completed Life List Items:
    • Thanks to the incident, missed one of my smaller ultras, but did manage to come back and redeem myself at the 50 miler at the end of the season.
    • Hit a run total record this year with over 1,350 miles – a bit shocked actually with the missed time from the injury and all the traveling.  I will say my legs felt it by the end of the year and still trying to get them ready to go this year.
    • Blogging for the 16th year, successfully hitting the self-imposed 6 post/month quota.  Still fun after all these years.
    • Upped my birding life list to 400!!!

That’s a wrap.  Apologies for missing the ’22 summary which throws off the year to year comparisons.   At least this summary is out early this time.  2023 is officially closed – once again, a big heartfelt thank you to our readers, your time spent with us is truly a blessing and greatly appreciated.

30 thoughts on “‘Cause I’m the Statsman: Blog Summary 2023”

    1. Thank you Sam! One of the reasons I take the time to compile these every year (except last year ugh) is to remind the team what we do get accomplished in those short 12 months and that isn’t counting all the time in the field. Thanks for dropping by and checking out our stats!

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  2. Good stats. I think I get annual summaries from WP, but I never pay much attention to them. Since I post every day, there are a lot of rather large numbers. One thing that really annoyed me (there are a lot of things that annoy me about WP) is my total comment count was sitting a 99K. I was watching for 100K to see who made the 100,000th comment, but it sat on 99K forever and then jumped to 101K. Egad!

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    1. I get those annual summaries as well from WP, but I’ve done several checks based on my trackers and they are off every year – thus I take matters into my own hands and chunk them out myself. You are far more productive than we are – in awe at your ability to make daily posts. Too bad about the gap in WP comments stats (see first part ha). We are not at that level of comments yet, but I’ll start keeping an eye on it and see how it progresses. Did you like my Beatles reference in the title?

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    1. Thank you and you are quite welcome! We are very appreciative of our readers and the precious time they are willing to give us to read our works – these stats are a quick way for us to tell how we are doing. Thank you for taking the time to stop by and have a great rest of the week!

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  4. Wow, Exceeded?! Now I can use my bonus to get that camera/lens combo I’ve been looking at in the store window. Seriously, the entire satellite office for Wildlife Intrigued are happy to help and are humbled to be part of such an enterprise. Now, if I can only recruit more staff writers . . .

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  5. Kudos to you all. i was happy when I reached 500 followers a year ago and this past year had 10,000 views. Nice to be able to share images, thoughts and musings with others about something one actually enjoys and likes doing. No matter the previous life, everyone had a “grond” at one time or another. In my former life “we” called them editors.

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    1. Thank you Jerry, congrats on your progress as well. True on the past lives comment – I didn’t have editors, but I cannot even count the number of managers and leads over those many years – some have been forgotten, some I continue to respect to this day and some shall never be spoken of again (especially the two that sealed the deal on my retirement decision). I am sure Brad had similar situations at our employer. Now I just have to keep one other person happy and all my days are good! Take care and thanks for dropping in!

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  6. What are “stats”?

    Seriously, very impressive stuff when you consider a bit of it was very likely enjoyable. At least I enjoyed the resulting output. Not asking for a bonus, just appreciate y’all’s efforts.

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    1. Well, I would define it as that incredibly mundane, brain rotting, soul sucking, time bending, often pointless effort undertaken on a routine basis that my former employer used to pay me absolutely ridiculous amount of money to do – still soul sucking today, but I do it for Scooby Snacks ha.

      The Intrigued brand has been around for a while now, started many many moons ago as something new to try to pair up with my observations on life (more on the Mothership) and a resurgence in photography which led to the Wild side being formed. I just really enjoy sharing with our readers what we find in the field and honestly, on the personal front I’ve been able to track my progress behind the glass for these many years. Makes me cringe whenever I look back at those shots in the early years ha. Also provides an excellent diary of sorts pretty much detailing my thoughts, places we visited, special moments in life etc. – will be a great tool to look back on when the memory starts to fade! Best of all we have had the ability to meet great people and fellow wildlife/nature enthusiasts like yourself and Gini along the way WIN – WIN. Take care and thanks again from dropping by.

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    1. Thank you! Sometimes we so deep in the minutia we forget about the overall body of work. These summaries help put it all in that bigger perspective. Appreciate you dropping in and have fantastic rest of the week!

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    1. 100% agree with you Vic. Looking back at those long days and nights frustratingly staring at the screen trying to slay those spirits. o this day I can’t see the word Oracle or Java and not shudder a bit – clearly why I premature greyed hehehehe!

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      1. I dabbled in Oracle a bit. Most of my work was in Access, connected to SQL…some Cold Fusion, too. I had to harvest email addresses out of an email server (that I can’t remember the name of) and make them work together. I was a Texas government spammer. Ha. Plus, HTML programming…

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        1. Ugh, just reading Cold Fusion makes me angry as hell – was responsible for the web/app standards and was constantly fighting the Cold Fusion pockets at our facilities that would have temp work quickly crank a tool and then completely unable to support it once that developer was let go…then come begging for corporate IT to support the craptastic code. Trust me, I’ve had to deal with every web tool in the industry at one point or another including basically debugging the first versions of X11R4/Motif/Perl/Java/Javascript and on and on. All while working for a company that probably still has 60% of their financials and factory systems on a combination of Cobol and VAX. Brad and I had quite the “fun”. Life was better in the early years in engineering design systems where I just had to worry about Assembly/Fortran/C/C++ and all home grown code. Now I have to go wash my eyes out to get that Cold Fusion out of my vision ha.

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          1. Yeah. Cold Fusion was a jacked up PITA. I cursed…loudly.

            I never worked with Perl or Java. Did some Javascript & CSS. WordPress uses PHP and I have never worked with it, either.

            In my early college years, I worked on a punchcard machine, stacking them into a gi-hugic mainframe. I did RPG, Assembler & Cobol (and hated VTOC). I never got into Fortran, C or C++. Prior to that, my first programming was my senior year of high school with Apple IIs & BASIC.

            I used Dreamweaver quite a bit with the HTML but, a lot of the time, I just hacked out code in notepad.

            I just remembered the email protocol system…Novell’s GroupWise. I had to pull email addresses out of that and connect them to Access, with SQL on the backend. I had to do a data dump and pick it back up. I sent out mass emails to all of the Texas Veterans.

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            1. I am happy to say I missed the punch card phase (and even the ticker tape phase my brother went through ..he hit the punch card years though and of course made the punchcard wreaths for Xmas). My first class in HS was on the Apple IIs with the amber screen monitors..with Basic of course. Did the Pascal/Fortran stuff later in HS and then was indoctrinated in the hardcore languages and systems in college. Then got hired and had to languish for two years back in Fortran and a bit of COBOL until the company caught up with my education and I got to go back to C/C++ then the Java years. I also used some Dreamweaver for my HTML editing, but like you, a text editor was my usually my go to medium – I still hack the WP html code manually. You were a professional spammer hehehehe. I didn’t have the Groupwise experience. Brad and I started out on Lotus123 (if I remember correctly) then had to spend a majority of our careers with Lotus Notes. I remember the “can we finally go to Outlook” arguments from our facilities – “NO, AND YOU WILL SIT THERE AND LIKE IT”.

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            2. My state job with NC (law enforcement…I was non-sworn) was my only IBM computer. I never used Lotus but, did use a database software that I don’t even remember the name of. I had to keep track of all of my Inspectors reports. I was hired in 1992 and left the state in early 2001.

              Some years later, our organization contacted the Netscape people and they crafted a NCDOT/DMV-specific browser for us with email. It was really cool. We had a spinning DOT symbol in all of our browsers. So…my first introduction to a browser was Netscape. Years later, we got the Oracle database.

              I was working in Texas from 2002-2011.

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            3. Trust me, you missed nothing with Lotus – unfortunately, easy to make quick automations, that went rampant through our company and then attrition left them all unsupported and nobody knowing how they worked – the number of calls we received in corporate IT about this or that Notes app not working was a nightmare…”But it’s fast” sigh. We’ve had similar paths Vic – I was responsible for our corporate version of Netscape as well which was a preconfigured version with our defaults and security built in – best part…I had access to all the browser caches and history when there were “concerns” about specific employees. My favorite phone calls during that time started with “Do you track where we browse to…” ummm, hell yeah hehehe. I got to spend a lot of time with the Netscape developers and started my Internet career incorporating my alma-mater’s NCSA’s http protocols into our engineering systems. Putting me in way-back machine Vic ha!

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