The 4000th Article
Well, here we are. The 4000th article. I suppose I should be pretty proud. After all, we’ve been keeping this blog daily for over 10 years, and have produced all sorts of interesting literature. We’ve covered a lot here at the Daily SPUF. Between a small handful of writers, we have torn games inside and out, written very long articles about very small things, gone out to local comic conventions, beaten things to death with a digital fish on drugs and spent way too much time with the colour yellow. I wouldn’t say our blog is the most varied blog out there, since most of it covers like three franchises (Team Fortress 2, our initial love, Warframe and Pokemon) but we’ve said a lot over the years.
When we hit 3000 articles, I wasn’t sure we’d hit 4000 articles. That was a long time ago. Nearly 3 years ago. At the same time though, here I am at the 4000th article and, well, I’m pretty sure we won’t hit the 5000th article. That’s a long way off, and, well…
You see, I write this article with a great sadness. I’m really, really, really struggling. I’ve been writing 500 words a day since January 2016 and it’s wearing me down. I’ve written about so much that nothing feels fun any more. And, at the same time, my writing still feels pretty mediocre.
It doesn’t help that the blog itself is kinda failing now. Back in early 2023, we’d get an easy 800+ viewers a day. In August 2023 though, the plugin I use, Jetpack, removed pretty much all the useful features I used it for, and put them in an expensive premium-only package. Gone was the email subscription service. Gone was the automatic posting to social media. And gone was the useful SEO metadata. It basically destroyed our reach and online presence. I still have the plugin, but only because it still carries most of our viewers and stats, since 2016 when I took over the blog and started hosting it myself. At the same time, search engines stopped indexing our most popular articles because they were slightly NSFW. Not in the extreme sense, they just contained links to nude mods. Aabicus has always been tasteful in his pictures, which only contained nude asses, but clearly that’s too much. Even my Skyrim nude mods article, which contains no real nudity and is probably one of the most popular articles on the blog, only gets about 20 views a day now. A fifth of what it used to get on a bad day.
We now get about 200 views a day total. Sometimes 300. And I don’t know how much of that is actual readership or just bots bouncing off pages any more because Jetpack took away the ability to see time spent on a page. I’m still putting in the same effort, but the spark is gone. It used to be that I was writing for myself as well as other people, but when you don’t feel like doing either of those things, it’s hard to continue.
I’ll continue to try and keep this blog daily. I’ve been trying my best, despite my circumstances IRL. But at some point, I’m going to have to take a break. I don’t know when that will be, but over time, I’m going to slow down content, to about a post a week. We’ll become the Weekly SPUF instead of the Daily SPUF.
I’ve tried very hard. And I’m glad to have made it this far. But my energy is all but gone now.
Thank you all for reading this mess of a blog over the years. There’s not many of you left, but I appreciate you all. See you tomorrow for another article. What about? I don’t know yet. I’ve been writing articles in advance for a while now, but these days, tomorrow is always a mystery.
Have a good one, guys. Look after yourselves.