June 2014 In Mathematics Blogging

And with the start of July I look over how well the mathematics blog did in June and see what I can learn from that. It seems more people are willing to read when I post stuff, which is worth knowing, I guess. After May’s near-record of 751 views and 315 visitors I expected a fall, and, yeah, it came. The number of pages viewed dropped to 492, which is … well, the fourth-highest this year at least? And the number of unique visitors fell to 194, which is actually the lowest of this year. The silver lining is this means the views per visitor, 2.54, was the second-highest since WordPress started sharing those statistics with me, so, people who come around find themselves interested. I start the month at 16,174 views total and won’t cross 17,000 at that rate come July, but we’ll see what I can do. And between WordPress and Twitter I’m (as of this writing) at exactly 400 followers, which isn’t worldshaking but is a nice big round number. I admit thinking how cool it would be if that were 400 million but I’d probably get stage fright if it were.

If one thing defined June it was “good grief but there’s a lot of mathematics comics”, which I attributed to Comic Strip Master Command ordering cartoonists to clear the subject out before summer vacation. It does mean the top five posts for June are almost comically lopsided, though:

• Reading the Comics, June 16, 2014: Cleaning Out Before Summer, I Guess, Edition
• Reading the Comics, June 22, 2014: Name-Dropping Stuff Edition
• Reading the Comics, June 4, 2014: Intro Algebra Edition
• Something Neat About Triangles
• Reading the Comics, June 27, 2014: Pretty Easy Edition

Now, that really is something neat about triangles in the post linked above so please do read it. What I’m not clear about is why the June 16th comics post was so extremely popular; it’s nearly twice as viewed as the runner-up. If I were sure what keyword is making it so popular I’d do more with that.

Now on to the international portion of this contest: what countries are sending me the most visitors? Of course the United States comes in first, at 336 views. Denmark finished second with 17, and there was a three-way tie for third as Australia, Austria, and the United Kingdom sent sixteen each. (Singapore and Canada came in next with nine each.) I had a pretty nice crop of single-reader countries this month: Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Egypt, Ghana, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Paraguay, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, and Thailand. Hong Kong, Japan, and Switzerland are repeats from last month and nobody’s got a three-month streak going.

Among the interesting search terms to bring people to me:

• names for big numbers octillion [ happy to help? ]
• everything to need to know about trapezoids [ I’m going to be the world’s authority on trapezoids! ]
• what does the fact that two trapezoids make a parallelogram say about tth midline [ I have some ideas but don’t want to commit to anything particular ]
• latching onto you 80 version [ I … think I’m being asked for lyrics? ]
• planet nebus [ I feel vaguely snarked upon, somehow ]
• origin is the gateway to your entire gaming universe [ … thank you? ]
• nebus student job for uae [ Um … I guess I can figure out a consulting fee or something if you ask? ]