WIP: Teaser from "Ms. Liberty Splits Up the Superb Squadron"

In the lull between bells, the campus walks were deserted and their scent trails stale, the pupils all in their classes this late morning. They worked them hard at the College of Mages, and no student would have a break until after a lunch of bread and fishy oil and the moments they could snatch for chatting, flirtation, naps, or mischief, before they were forced to plod on to other debates in other classrooms.

The sunlight was weak in this place, a thin draught of heat unlike the fierce burn of home, particularly in late winter. The Sphinx lay on a stone slab outside the Hall of Instruction, wishing for the comfortable give of sand and listening to the voices from inside: an instructor teaching her first year pupils about the Lists.

The Sphinx combed her hair with a paw. Black strands, dull from infrequent brushing, had fallen in front of her face — discolored claws slid through them, dirt-darkened to a matching color. A fly crawled across her tawny flank, and her limber tail swatted it away as she listened.

“How do we know,” a student asked. “What is Beast and what is Man?”

The instructor’s voice was mild, although she had answered this question before at the lecture’s beginning. “The races that are Human and the races that are Beasts are set forth in the Lists.”

“What if the listmakers were wrong?” a student asked. There was brief, shocked silence at the words before the instructor said “We do not believe that they were wrong.”

The words’ quiet conviction made her hackles rise, the fine fur at the nape of her neck, where it shaded between hair and mane, bristle. Irked and restless, she rose, abandoning her puddle of sunlight to move along the gravel paths of the College, in and out of the pine and cedar shadows.

An itch between the pads of her paws, furry grooves full of sensitive hairs, told her that somewhere in the crypts below the college, Carolus was teaching a class on summoning ghosts. There was electricity and regret in the air, and spiritual energy stirred on the breeze, pulled here and there by forces of attraction and repulsion.

A wiggle of ectoplasm circled her ear, an incipient ghost trying to figure out whether or not it wanted to be born. Another flick of her tufted tail, as big as a fat feast carp, dispelled it back into shredded wisps, and it did not reform as she passed out of range.

She patrolled along the high iron fence that kept the townsfolk out and the students in, intricate ironwork that held containment sigils, woven together so thick and strong that passing through the gates felt like sliding through velvet and steel curtains, heavy weights catching at her. She resisted their impediment to pause outside, surveying the street.

Only one passerby paid her much attention ““ some northerner newly come to town, country dust still thick on him and his eyes wide with wonder at the city’s nature as it unfolded strange thing after strange thing. Including her, who he eyed with trepidation as he moved along the street. He was a mouse, a boy who would snap beneath one pounce.

She watched him with her wide golden eyes, knowing their unnerving nature. Outside the city, Beasts were more dangerous ““ her uncanny fellows stalked the humans through the wilderness, and claimed hundreds each year, but she had become Civilized in her role as the doyenne of the College of Mages. She was legendary to the students — generations had tried to evade her detection when sneaking in or out of the grounds. Though she was forbidden to harm them, they acted as though she would. As though she was still dangerous.

Perhaps she was.

#sfwapro

August 8, 2015 edit: Hey folks, Pinterest has changed their analytics. Here’s the resource I used to update mine: https://help.pinterest.com/en/articles/pinterest-analytics. And for what it’s worth, I realized a lot of you were looking for info and stumbling across this through using them so they’re worth paying attention to!

Pinterest has rolled out Pinterest Analytics. To add it to your site in order to see what’s getting pinned, you need to verify your site. Here’s the instructions for doing so.

Pinterest Analytics

Some notes: even after I’d verified, Analytics wasn’t appearing in the upper right-hand corner as specified. I logged out and back in, and then chose the “Switch to the New Look” option. At that point, I went back and read the instructions and realized Analytics will not work until you have switched over to the new look, which to me seems pretty similar to the old look.

I didn’t see any data on there at first, just the message, “We don’t have any data yet! Please wait for us to calculate it for you,” but I could see the options: Site Metrics, Most Recent, Most Repinned, and Most Clicked, as well as an Export button (always so handy). A day later, the same message was still displaying, but when I drilled down to look at the past seven days, I found I did have some data for the time since I’d validated my website. Pinterest Analytics aren’t semi-real time, the way Google Analytics are. Today’s data is not available until tomorrow.

Site metrics Pinterest will show you, along with my scores for the first few days:

Pins/Pinners:
Pins is the number of times people have pinned from your site, i.e. bookmarked a particular page by pinning an image from it. Pinners is the number of people who have done this. So these are people who are not accessing your site through Pinterest (at least they don’t have to be), but who are using Pinterest to save bookmarks. I a single individual pinned five pages from your site, pins would be five, pinners would be one.

• Day one: 1 pin from 1 pinner
• Day two: 0 pins, 0 pinners
• Day three: 0 pins, 0 pinners
• Day four: 0 pins, 0 pinners
• Day five: 5 pins, 3 pinners

Repins/Repinners:
Repins is the number of times your content was repinned, meaning someone saw a page that had already been pinned on Pinterest and decided to save it to one of their boards. Repinners is the number of people who did this. So if someone pinned two pages, and one person repinned both of them, repins would be two while repinners would be one.

• Day one: 0 repins, 0 repinners
• Day two: 10 repins, 10 repinners
• Day three: 2 repins, 2 repinners
• Day four: 2 repins, 1 repinner
• Day five: 3 repins, 3 repinners

Impressions/Reach:
Impressions is the number of times your image(s) appeared to someone on Pinterest, either in the main feed or through viewing a board or search results. Reach is the number of people who saw one or more of your image. I’ve bolded day five’s result, which surprised and pleased me.

• Day one: 247 people saw 474 total images
• Day two: 324 people saw 1063 total images
• Day three: 242 people saw 1347 total images
• Day four: 159 people saw 247 total images
• Day five: 856 people saw 2957 total images.

Clicks/Visitors:
Clicks is the number of times people clicked on an image and viewed your site. Visitors is the overall number of people who did so.

• Day one: Three images were clicked on, each time by a different person. As a note of interest, Google Analytics claims only one visitor from Pinterest that day.
• Day two: Eight images, eight different visitors. (Google Analytics reports 6.)
• Day three: Twelve images, one visitor. (Google Analytics reports 4.)
• Day four: Two images, two visitors. (Google Analytics reports 2.)
• Day five: Three clicks, three visitors. (Google Analytics reports 3 as well.)

Factors that might have affected those numbers:

• Day three: I re-organized my boards so one with a lot of links pointing back to my site was in the top row. I submitted that board as a StumbleUpon bookmark. And I made one of my boards, fabulous female protagonists, a group board and invited some other people to pin to it.
• Day four: I was completely absent from Pinterest activity.
• Day five: I pinned a new piece from my site onto a personal board that collects similar pieces from my site.

The most repinned images are images attached to pieces with interesting content. The most repinned one is also one of the most popular pages on my site, 5 Things to Do in Your First 3 Paragraphs. This emphasizes one of the most important points for anyone working with SEO and web traffic stuff: good content is the most crucial thing.

And it’s also interesting to note the discrepancies between what Pinterest and Google Analytics is reporting, which emphasizes something about this sort of investigation: the numbers may be fuzzier than you think they are.

So why would you want to know any of this? Mainly to know if Pinterest is a successful way to drive traffic. It looks to me, based on this, that it’s quite capable of driving traffic and I really like those (relatively) high Impressions/Figure. Beyond that, it’ll let me know if some images are consistently getting pinned more often (or less often) so I can try to figure out why in order to use that knowledge when employing images in the future.

Why be interested in Pinterest as a social medium overall? Well, the jury’s still out in some ways. But it offers a chance to organize information in a new way. I’ve been planning to write up all my class descriptions on the blog and add them here, for example. There’s also some weird gender stuff going on around popular perceptions of it that someone needs to take apart (imo). Here’s an infographic about who’s using Pinterest.

Are you using Pinterest? If so, how do you use it?

Recent Social Media Links of Interest:

WordPress is looking to the future and will be doing more content curation. A lot of folks are hosting their blogs on WordPress and may want to look and see what has a chance of affecting them.

Facebook Changes: Facebook’s redesigned their news feeds. What are they and how do they affect reaching readers? Facebook’s also acquired storytelling social network Storylane.

Twitter: A guide to some Twitterspeak, some instances of which I’m not convinced are actually used by anyone.

On the tools side of things, I’ve been messing with Followerwonk. I’ll write that up next week.