Something I Didn’t Know About Trapezoids

I have a little iPad app for keeping track of how this blog is doing, and I’m even able to use it to compose new entries and make comments. (The entry about the lottery was one of them.) Mostly it provides a way for me to watch the count of unique visits per day, so I can grow neurotic wondering why it’s not higher. But it also provides supplementary data, such as, what search queries have brought people to the site. The “Trapezoid Week” flurry of posts has proved to be very good at bringing in search referrals, with topics like “picture of a trapezoid” or “how do I draw a trapezoid” or “similar triangles trapezoid” bringing literally several people right to me.

What I didn’t know was how many people were actually searching for “trapezium”. I’m not thrown by the word and apparently neither is Google. But I knew also that “trapezium” was allegedly how British English represents “trapezoid”, and a couple times whilst writing I considered including that as an alternate word just to make sure, er, that Google searches had a chance of coming to me. However, I thought of my experience in a British English-speaking nation, Singapore, and couldn’t remember ever hearing “trapezium” there, so I attributed the existence of the word to one of those things that maybe used to be true about British versus American English but which hasn’t been for a long time, like the difference between “billion”.

Still, the evidence of logs seems hard to refute: trapezium really is in current use and people are searching for it. I don’t expect to go back and edit old entries to include a “trapezoid or trapezium” disclaimer, although I might add that to the keywords for general organization of things. And apparently all the while I was in Singapore I missed out on a swinging trapezium scene.

Some of the other statistics about popular posts turned out interesting. Trapezoids are all over the place, as seems reasonable. Some of my Friday the 13th-related posts were also popular this past week; I imagine that’ll be the case any month in which Friday the 13th does come on a Friday. The bizarre one is that “How To Recognize Multiples Of 100 From Not So Far Away” is not just slightly popular this week, but is steadily slightly popular.

While plain old Google.com is my most popular referrer, google.co.uk and google.com.au are in there also. I’m not surprised to find Google India on the roster, nor Russia, but Costa Rica was a surprise. (Google South Africa has also this past week sent as many people my way as Bing or Ask.com have. I suspect this to just be a fluke of low signal, since, alas, I’m not actually popular.)

I’m not surprised that according to WordPress’s estimates the overwhelming majority of my readers come from the United States, nor that the United Kingdom comes in second place. Canada and Australia might as well be tied for third; what Germany’s doing in fifth I don’t know. I’m happy having readers there, I just can’t imagine who. I know I know people in Canada. Just the past week has been a good stretch for me for getting Malaysian readers. Whatever interesting thing it is I’m doing, I’ll attempt more, if I can figure that out.

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