My Mathematics Blog, As March 2015 Would Have It

And now for my monthly review of publication statistics. This is a good month to do it with, since it was a record month: I had 1,022 pages viewed around these parts, the first time (according to WordPress) that I’ve had more than a thousand in a month. In January I’d had 944, and in February a mere 859, which I was willing to blame on the shortness of that month. March’s is a clean record, though, more views per day than either of those months.

The total number of visitors was up, too, to 468. That’s compared to 438 in January and 407 in short February, although it happens it’s not a record; that’s still held by January 2013 and its 473 visitors. The number of views per visitor keeps holding about steady: from 2.16 in January to 2.11 in February to 2.18 in March. It appears that I’m getting a little better at finding people who like to read what I like to write, but haven’t caught that thrilling transition from linear to exponential growth.

The new WordPress statistics tell me I had a record 265 likes in March, up from January’s 196 and February’s 179. The number of comments rose from January’s 51 and February’s 56 to a full 93 for March. I take all this as supporting evidence that I’m better at reaching people lately. (Although I do wonder if it counts backlinks from one of my articles to another as a comment.)

The mathematics blog starts the month at 22,837 total views, and with 454 WordPress followers.

The most popular articles in March, though, were the set you might have guessed without actually reading things around here:

• How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw, of course.
• Reading the Comics, March 10, 2015: Shapes Of Things Edition, where I advance the notion that two points can be thought of as a circle, in the right contexts.
• Reading the Comics, March 4, 2015: Driving Me Crazy Edition, which is the one where I corrected some comic strips.
• Reading the Comics, March 26, 2015: Kind Of Hanging Around Edition, which is the one with the Jumble puzzle.
• Calculating Pi Terribly, my semi-ironic contribution to the Pi Day Of The Century. I’ve actually got a couple follow-ups to that to post when I have the time to write them.

I admit I thought the “how interesting is a basketball tournament?” thing would be more popular, but it’s hampered by having started out in the middle of the month. I might want to start looking at the most popular articles of the past 30 days in the middle of the month too.

The countries sending me the greatest number of readers were the usual set: the United States at 658 in first place, and Canada in second at 66. The United Kingdom was a strong third at 57, and Austria in fourth place at 30.

Sending me a single reader each were Belgium, Ecuador, Israel, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Nepal, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The repeats from February were Japan, Mexico, Romania, and Venezuela. Japan is on a three-month streak, while Mexico has sent me a solitary reader four months in a row. India’s declined slightly in reading me, from 6 to 5. Ah well.

Among the interesting search terms were:

• right trapezoid 5 (I loved this anime as a kid)
• a short comic strip on reminding people on how to order decimals correctly (I hope they found what they were looking for)
• are there other ways to draw a trapezoid (try with food dye on the back of your pet rabbit!)
• motto of ideal gas (veni vidi v = nRT/P ?)
• rectangular states (the majority of United States states are pretty rectangular, when you get down to it)
• what is the definition of rerun (I don’t think this has come up before)
• what are the chances of consecutive friday the 13th’s in a year (I make it out at 3/28, or a touch under 11 percent; anyone have another opinion?)

Well, with luck, I should have a fresh comic strips post soon and some more writing in the curious mix between information theory and college basketball.