stories

6/6/2026: Why Are My Blog Stats Blowing Up When I’m Barely Writing?

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 12 Comments

As alluded to in my last (barely seen) post, which was 98% photos, the writing life’s not been kind to this aspiring dude. At least not in terms of finding the discipline, time, topics, and oh yeah, inspiration. I’ve not seen that beeotch aka The Muse in a while. But when I noticed I’ve received more views in the first five months of 2026 than any other full year, and actually more than thrice my best year, I had to come here to say, WTF, WordPress? Exactly what is going on? Is it robots or genuine views? Either way, can I monetize it?

Read more: 6/6/2026: Why Are My Blog Stats Blowing Up When I’m Barely Writing?

Take a look at these two screen shots. First, is December 2024 – June of 2025. Just over 5,000 views, with almost 4,000 visitors. That alone is a HUGE jump from the years before, which never totaled over 15,000 views.

Now look at December 2025 – June 2026. That’s a MASSIVE jump to 40,000 views and over 36,500 visitors. From someone who’s posting went way, Way, WAY down the last couple of years, that is the exact opposite of what one would expect.

Here’s what the customer support person said:

“Hi there,

I checked the site, and although there is an increase in traffic, it does not appear to be a sudden spike in on-site traffic. The increase has been gradual and started around November 2025. (That’s when I concluded my epic 52,000+ miles in 10 years.)

Also, from the referrer section in Jetpack Stats, I noticed that most of the traffic is coming from search engines, Facebook, and WordPress.com Reader, which are all legitimate sources. In addition, most of the traffic is coming from the United States. All of these indicators suggest that the traffic is legitimate and not bot traffic.”

I don’t quite know what to make of it. Baby I’m showing up in search results, but I’m not getting much in terms of engagement. That means likes and comments and forwards etc. But can I finally start to make money off of this, robots or humans? After a decade of biking and writing, that would be nice. But I’ve never been attuned to the statistics or good at the capitalism game anyway. My brother got those genes, and I got the do goider ones. But hey, it led me to write this blog post, so that’s progress, right?

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Speaking of writing and doing good, I recently volunteered at the ATX TV Festival for the first time. I enjoy the televised motion picture arts as much as the next dude, and I finally signed up in time to work the 15th season (for free, match, or rather a trade). I got to sit in on some cool panels and hear about the business of being a creative, including with some producers,  writers, and actors. See the snaps below for some stars you may recognize.

One of the latter included a guy who shared with me what seemed like a long period of deep eye contact with a sly smile as he passed by my station outside the historic Paramount Theatre in Austin. (Soon it will close for 11 months for a restoration.)

He seemingly stared deep into my eyes or possibly soul, it I have one. It lasted probably only five seconds. But it felt like time slowed down into slow motion. Your dude is straight (not that there’s anything wrong with being otherwise), but he’s a handsome fellow, and those seconds were mesmerizing. It was like, well, a scene from a TV show. And then tonight he was on my TV screen. Pretty cool. Who was this guy? Murray Bartlett of White Lotus Season 1 on HBO; his new show is called Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed on Apple TV.

Anyway, the point of that was to say one of the other volunteers I met is a super nice dude who works in the video production business. From animation to commercials to several short films, he’s made a bunch of stuff. We got to talking and he challenged me to write just five pages for a short film.  It’s usually one page per minute, as we say in the biz. If it’s any good, maybe he’d consider actually making it. I said I would try and write three of them.

Persistent readers (all seven or 12 of you) will recall I wrote a memoir on how to bicycle as a fit but fat older person. It got way too long and sits on the digital shelf collecting digital dust, waiting for mythical money to appear to hire an editor. But a while back I started on a fictional novella. I said I’d keep it to 100 pages and I got pretty close, but haven’t figured out an ending. That stalled when my young writing critique partner decided to take a job as a professor and stop meeting. But I keep imagining it as a movie.

So, now I have this challenge to write just five or 15 pages. They need to be good, solid, tight pages. But first, I have to learn how to write screenplays. That means reading books or watching YouTube videos or something. I have a month to do it, and a week’s already gone by. That’s because the nearby Half Price Books store collection of screenplay tomes is dusty and musty. While I wait for a library book to come in, I should just be finishing the novella and revising it. And now I’ve cracked the laptop open and the knuckles, I’m gearing back up to do some writing again.

And here we are back to the writer’s problems: discipline, time, topics, and oh yeah, inspiration. Yet, humans are a storytelling species, whether we’re any good at it or like it or not. Whether it’s told around a camp fire, in a song, in a book, or on a big or small screen, we love a good yarn. And all of those forms except the campfire are written down. We have songwriters, and authors, and composers, and so on. The words of a play are called the book; when an actor has memorized them, they go off book. And a TV show or movie has a play that is shown on a screen: a screenplay. A good TV show has many factors, but perhaps the most important facet is that it’s well written.

That’s all to say that while I may be becoming slightly less unknown in this tiny speck in a corner of a small room within a huge mansion in a city of millions on a large planet of billions, or rather my blog stats suck slightly less and may not be real anyway, maybe they are. Someday soon I could have a screenplay produced into a short film. Which could become a long film. Who knows? Maybe someday you’ll see the words of a dude up on the big screen. Who’s to say it can’t happen?

By the way, I’ve been told I resemble a combination of the rugged and heroic boyish good looks of Robert Redford with the zaftig every-man working class yet intellectual appeal of Philip Seymour Hoffman. (Okay, the person who told me that was myself to the mirror. That doesn’t mean it’s untrue.) And maybe the only person truly qualified return myself is moi.

Delusions of grandeur aside, I’ve got to get back to somehow miraculously finding and then working and surviving a freaking job to pay the bills… just like everyone else who is not a one percenter or successful movie star. But a dude can dream. Don’t kill my dream, or harsh my buzz, or yuck my yum, as the kids say these days.

Whether you make it to the big leagues of Hollywood or New York publishing or the Emmys or Grammys or Oscars or Tonys, or just write it in a journal for your family to read, go tell your own story. Everybody’s got one. As a dear college mate from Polynesia and the Phillipines used to say, “Let’s talk story.” Make it a good one. I’ll try to do the same.

Copyright 2026 A Dude Abikes. All rights reserved.

4/4/2025: Bike Story Night in Austin, Texas

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 4 Comments

As a dude who’s been telling bits of his bike story here for going on a decade, I was curious to check it out an event called Bike Story Night. The stars aligned, meaning I heard about it in time and wasn’t busy. So, last Saturday I pedaled Soqi the Cannondale over to the University of Texas at Austin, commonly known as UT (you tee). (Check out my post about UT: The University of Texas and Me:  A Short Autobiography.) There I saw a few familiar faces and a few dozen new ones. The premise  is fairly straightforward:  people come together to tell and hear stories about bikes. Here’s a short report.

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My 500th Blog Post: Thank You, Dear Readers!

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 11 Comments

When milestones come and go, as they do for us all, they serve as signposts on the journey of life. Some, like birthdays, just happen. Others, we made happen through an action in the past, like the anniversary of college graduation. And still more are things we create every day with our efforts. Such is the case for this, my 500th blog post. That’s a ton of words in five years if I may say so. (532,738 to be exact, not including this post.) That’s an average of 1,068 words per post, and maybe somewhere around five or six novels. But this is not all about statistics, it’s about what it all means.

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Little Pleasures and Pains in the Life of a Bicyclist

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 1 Comment

If you ride your bicycle regularly, you may have noticed that lots of little stuff happens that probably doesn’t happen for people dependent on cars to get around.  Sometimes it’s big stuff, like you:  go on a long ride, compete in a race, get a new bike, set a personal best on that Strava segment.  The little stuff that goes on, while not as headline-worthy, is just as interesting, to me at least.  There is often more than meets the eye if one is willing to look deeper.  Let’s take a look at four things that happened to A Dude and find out.   

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Recent Days Biking and Walking in Austin, Texas as Told Through Photos and Words

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 4 Comments

Lacking some inspiration I looked back at the last week in photos.  They tell a tale of my ongoing journey cycling through Austin.

Yellow Bike Project chalkboard.

Tonight I went to Yellow Bike Project again to work on Sophie.  For the first time, I left with something that wasn’t better than went I arrived.  Disc brakes can be tricky and for some reason my rear one on the Fairdale isn’t working right.  I’ll need to return Monday when a coordinator more familiar with the brakes is there, but more likely I’ll head by a bike shop.  It’s it’s important to be able to stop!

I don’t mention my diet much these days, but below is one brunch I prepared.  Also, I worked nine days of early voting and the final election day.  Compared to the recent mid-terms with many questions on the ballot, only five races had runoffs, so turnout was very low.  It gave me time to do some reading.  A David Baldacci thriller The Fix, and parts of Napoleon Hill’s classic Think and Grow Rich.  I also got more into Tim Ferris’s The Four-Hour Work Week and the Austin Chronicle.  I do not fare well at crosswords.

It’s nice the word for “go vote” is spelled the same in Spanish and  English.

A brunch of eggs, turkey sausage, avocado, red and sweet potato, cheese, onion, salsa, and blue Powerade Zero. Blue’s a flavor, but unnatural.

On a walk before biking, I found this cool blue bike rack made to look like a bike.

I’m still doing my daily walking.  One way I make sure to get in my 30 minutes is to walk on my way somewhere and then bike the rest.  Or if I’m in a hurry and it’s close by, I bike there and then walk home.  It’s a handy trick and I often see something cool, like the above bike rack.  I don’t always put all the pictures here, though.  For that, you will need to follow me on Strava, the fitness app. That link will take you to my profile.

 

Chanukah at the house of two friends involved a number of brightly lit menorahs, a variety of foods, and hanging out and talking.  I missed the candle lighting and if there were any prayers, but it was not an orthodox religious event.  It’s nice to connect with that part of my heritage (which I wrote about in the post Bicyclists & Jews: Both Are Targets (But They Should Not Be) and hang out with others who may not be traditionally observant but who identify ethnically.  As one comedian put it, “(he’s) not a Jew, he’s Jew-ish.”  Joking aside, I think one can be both.  But speaking of that uniquely Jewish sensibility of humor, one person punned, “Some people light a ninth candle on Chanukah, but they’re in the menorah-ty.”  (For the goyem out there, there are only eight days of Chanukah.)

 

I snapped these two covers of books at Book People, the largest independent bookstore in Texas that’s in downtown Austin.  One speaks to the hope of what bicycles could do, the other reflects my ambivalence about why I am riding my bicycle an average of over 80 miles per week so far this year.  (See 4,000 Miles Biked This Year! + 3,000 Miles Total on Sophie the Fairdale.)

 

Nearby the book store is the international headquarters of a natural grocery chain.  They don’t need any press from me but friends and I have long called it the “food hole” or “whole paycheck.”  But they do have some cool stuff like an ice skating rink on the roof in the winter and this sign abbreviating Austin, Texas, which changes colors.  I had never snapped any pictures, so for your edification, here is a nice series.

The awesome, fun and inspirational monthly gathering of authors of all kinds who read called One Page Salon, hosted by Owen Egerton, had a huge turnout this month.  This was thanks to the Texas Writers League.  Shown with Owen is director Michael Nowlin, a nice guy, author and nice guy who encouraged me not to give up on the possibility of getting published.  It was cool to see a packed house although I only really talked to a few people I already knew.  The TWL is an organization I need to get involved with as I get closer to finishing the first draft of my memoir of two years of cycling quite a few miles.  (4,714 Miles Bicycled in 2017 = 10,000 in 2 Years! A Recap of My “Epic Velocimania” (Day 1)

 

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A jalopy bike I saw in East Austin after One Page Salon.  Notice the seat has no post and the wheel sizes are different. reminds me of the book title It’s Not About the Bike.

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© 2015-18 A Dude Abikes. All rights reserved.

Some Thoughts on My Upcoming Interviews with Bicyclists in Austin, Texas

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 1 Comment

When Pam LeBlanc interviewed me for a profile in the Austin American-Statesman that was published on January 15, 2018, it set into motion a series of most fortunate events that are still bearing fruit.  When I first suggested the idea to her by email in late 2016, it fell flat.  I guess the 5,306 miles I bicycled in 2016 was not that impressive.  But I kept riding, and I kept writing this blog, albeit irregularly.   And I managed 4,714 miles in 2017.   So riding 10,000 miles in two years did catch her attention.

Then Pam, who is a total badass herself I hope to interview one day, expressed interest in putting me in her Fit City blog.  After that, her editor wanted to run the piece in the print edition of the newspaper with photos, I was happily surprised.  My persistence of pedaling and pontificating had paid off.  But the main thing I learned was that if my bicycling story was interesting to the mainstream newspaper of the 11th largest city in the United States (or at least the lifestyles editor), then other peoples’ stories would also have value.

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Two Succinct Stories Famous News Anchor Dan Rather Told Me Today at SXSW EDU

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 1 Comment

When he was a young man of 18 in 1949, Dan Rather was an oil field worker in Texas for a summer.  He was the only boy on the crew; the rest were men, he said.  For digging ditches and other hard labor, he got paid a good wage.  Payday was every Thursday, which was when the rest of his crew played poker.  His first paycheck came and to fit in, he joined the poker game.  But he wasn’t very good so he proceeded to lose his entire wages for the week in that game.  His rent was due so he had no other choice but to ask his father for help.  This experience taught him the value of not gambling and budgeting his money.

After he got married, he told his wife Jean that since he was the man of the house, he would be the one to manage the new couple’s money.  A couple of weeks went by, and the checkbook was a mess.  He had to admit that he wasn’t good at the task, and gratefully relinquished control to his wife, much to his relief.  She’s been in charge of every dime they’ve made ever since.  This taught him humility and trusting other people. Continue reading →