Monthly Archives: Jan 2025

Checking up on the Blog

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As this website approaches the tenth anniversary of its launch, I took the opportunity to look over the statistics which WordPress records for me. This site is not run for profit, but it is nice to feel that my publications are appreciated.

The view counts for each calendar year are as follows:

  • 2015 – 0053
  • 2016 – 0415
  • 2017 – 1289
  • 2018 – 0987
  • 2019 – 1469
  • 2020 – 2571
  • 2021 – 2800
  • 2022 – 2882
  • 2023 – 2300
  • 2024 – 4664

The first two entries don’t really count as the site didn’t exist until October and there were no meaningful posts on it until March. The third may be artificially inflated as many of the views will have been me checking posts myself to check that they’d uploaded properly. The readership exhibited steady growth from 2019 onwards, albeit with a bit of a dip (not sure why) in 2023. Last year raised the bar substantially, as the previous record was broken by the end of September.

Regular readers (if there are any) may also notice that some changes have been made to the way the blog is organised: Every now and again I go through my old posts deciding which categories and tags are needed based on regularity of use, abandoning some which are no longer needed. Today I have converted many of the most used tags into categories (with many posts inevitably being in more than one) and collapsed most of the menu options into one. I have also invented a few new tags for recurrent subtopics. I hope it makes more sense this way.

UPDATE (4th January)

Four days into the new year I’ve already reached 61 views, thus exceeding 2015’s record.

UPDATE (29th January)

Four weeks into the year I’m on 416, thus exceeding 2016.

Public Domain Day 2025

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As another December concludes, another batch of books, films, songs and paintings goes out of copyright.

This year’s categories are works in Britain (and countries with similar laws) the last of whose authors died in 1954, and works from the United States which were first published in 1929.

Last year the jewel of the public domain crown was Steamboat Willie, the first film to feature Mickey & Minnie Mouse. This year it is The Karnival Kid, the first film in which the mouse speaks. Also in the 1929 United States category are the first Marx Brothers film The Cocoanauts and the final Buster Keaton film Spite Marriage. Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu also make their first appearances in sound films.

Annoyingly there are some noteworthy works from that year originating outside the United States, which are now public domain there but will remain copyrighted in their home countries for some decades, such as Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail and Hergé’s early Tintin cartoons. We do, however, get the first cartoons of Popeye the Sailor Man and Tarzan. We also get the surprisingly-old song Singin’ in the Rain.

Relatively few prominent British authors entered the public domain this year, the most recognisable ones being James Hilton and Francis Brett Young. Also dying that year was the computer scientist Alan Turing, whose most famous publication was his namesake mathematical proof. Of course, many of these works will conversely not be public domain in the United States, so their proliferation over the internet will still be limited.