September 2013’s Statistics

And as it’s the start of the month I have a fresh round of reviewing the statistics for readership around here. I have seen a nice increase in both views — from 367 to about 466 total views — and in visitors — from 175 to 236 — which maybe reflects the resumption of the school year (in the United States, anyway) and some more reliable posting (of original articles and of links to other people’s) on my part. (Maybe. If I’m reading this rightly I actually only posted nine new things in September, which is the same as in August. I’m surprised that WordPress’s statistics page doesn’t seem to report how many new articles there were in the month, though.) My contrarian nature forces me to note this means my views-per-reader ratio has dropped to 1.97, down from 2.10. I suppose as long as the views-per-reader statistic stays above 1.00 I’m not doing too badly.

The most popular articles the past month were:

1. From ElKement: Space Balls, Baywatch, and the Geekiness of Classical Mechanics, which is really just pointing and slightly setting up ElKement’s start to a series on quantum field theory which you can too understand;
2. How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw, which is a persistent favorite and makes me suspect that I’ve hit on something that teachers ask students about. If I could think of a couple other nice little how-many-of-these-things problems there are I’d post them gladly, although that might screw up some people’s homework assignments;
3. Reading the Comics, September 11, 2012, which is another persistent favorite and I can’t imagine that it’s entirely about the date (although the similar Reading the Comics entry for September 11 of 2013 just missed being one of the top articles this month so perhaps the subject lines are just that effective a bit of click-baiting);
4. What Is Calculus I Like?, about my own realization that I never took a Calculus I course in the conditions that most people who take it do. I’d like more answers to the question of what experiences in intro-to-calculus courses are like, since I’m assuming that I will someday teach it again and while I think I can empathize with students, I would surely do better at understanding what they don’t understand if I knew better what people in similar courses went through;
5. Some Difficult Math Problems That You Understand, which is again pointing to another blog — here, Maths In A Minute — with a couple of mathematics problems that pretty much anyone can understand on their first reading. The problems are hard ones, each of which has challenged the mathematical community for generations, so you aren’t going to solve them; but, thinking about them and trying to solve them is probably a great exercise and likely to lead you to discovering something you didn’t know.

I got the greatest number of readers from the United States again (271), with Canada (31) once more in second place. The United Kingdom’s climbed back into the top three (21), while August’s number-three, Denmark, dropped out of the top ten and behind both Singapore and the Philippines. I got a mass of single-reader countries this time, too: Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belgium, Cambodia, the Czech Republic, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Qatar, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, and Thailand. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are repeats from last month, but my Estonian readership seems to have fled entirely. At least India and New Zealand still like me.