20,000: My Math Blog’s Statistics

I reached my 20,000th view around here sometime on the final day of 2014, which is an appealingly tidy coincidence. I’m glad for it. It also gives me a starting point to review the blog’s statistics, as gathered by WordPress, which is trying to move us to a new and perfectly awful statistics page that shows less information more inconveniently.

The total number of page views grew from 625 in October to 674 in November all the way to 831 in December 2014, which just ties my record number of viewers from back in January 2013. The number of unique visitors grew from October’s 323 to November’s 366 up to 424 total, which comes in second-place to January 2013’s 473. I don’t know what I was doing in January 2013 that I’m only gradually getting back up to these days. The number of views per visitor went from 1.93, to 1.84, back up to 1.96, which is probably just a meaningless fluctuation. January 2013 had 1.76.

My most popular articles — with 25 views or more each — were Reading The Comics posts, mostly, with the exceptions being two things almost designed to be clickbait, although I mean them sincerely:

1. Reading the Comics, December 14, 2014: Pictures Gone Again? Edition, in which I work out one of the calculus-y expressions and find it isn’t all that interesting.
2. Reading the Comics, December 5, 2014: Good Questions Edition, in which I figured out a Dark Side Of The Horse comic was using a page of symbols from orbital perturbation problems.
3. Reading the Comics, December 27, 2014: Last of the Year Edition?, which it wasn’t, and which let me talk about how Sally Brown is going to discover rational numbers if Charlie Brown doesn’t over-instruct her.
4. Reading The Comics, December 22, 2015: National Mathematics Day Edition, which celebrated Srinivasa Ramanujan’s birth by showing a formula that Leonhard Euler discovered, but Euler’s formula is much more comic-strip-readable than any of Ramanujan’s.
5. What Do I Need To Pass This Class? (December 2014 Edition), which gathered and reposted for general accessibility the formula and the charts so people can figure out what the subject line says. Also what you need to get a B, or A, or any other desired grade. (Mostly, you needed to start caring about your grade earlier.)
6. How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw, my life’s crowning achievement. (Six. If you find a seventh please let me know and I’ll do a follow-up post.)

The country sending me the most readers was, as ever, Bangladesh with 535 viewers. Well, two viewers, but it’s boring just listing the United States up front every time. The United Kingdom (37) and Canada (33) came up next, then Argentina (17), which surprises me every month by having a healthy number of readers there, Australia (12), Austria (11), and the Netherlands (10), proving that people in countries that don’t start with ‘A’ can still kind of like me too. The single-reader countries this month were the Czech Republic, Greece, Macedonia, Mexico, Romania, and South Africa. That’s far fewer than last month; of November’s 17 single-reader countries only Romania is a repeat.

Among search terms that brought people here were popeye comic computer king — I don’t know just how that’s going to end up either, folks, but I’m guessing “not that satisfyingly”, since Bud Sagendorf was fond of shaggy-dog non-endings to tales — and which reindeer was in arthur christmas (they were descendants of the “Original” canonical eight, though Grand-Santa forgets some of the names), daily press, “the dinette set” answer for december 11, 2014, and solution to the comic puzzle, “the dinette set”. in the daily press, december 12, 2014, and answer to the comic puzzle, “the dinette set”. in the daily press, december 12, 2014, which suggests maybe I should ditch the pop-math racket and just get into explaining The Dinette Set, which is admittedly kind of a complicated panel strip. There’s multiple riffs around the central joke in each panel, but if you don’t get the main joke then the riffs look like they’re part of the main joke, and they aren’t, so the whole thing becomes confusing. And the artist includes a “Find-It” bit in every panel, usually hiding something like a triangle or a star or something in the craggly details of the art and that can be hard to find. Mostly, though, the joke is: these people are genially and obliviously obnoxious people who you might love but you’d still find annoying. That’s it, nearly every panel. I hope that helps.