How April 2015 Treated My Mathematics Blog

(I apologize if the formatting is messed up. For some reason preview is not working, and I will not be trying the new page for entering posts if I can at all help it. I will fix when I can, if it needs fixing.)

As it’s the start of the month I want to try understanding the readership of my blogs, as WordPress gives me statistics. It’s been a more confusing month than usual, though. One thing is easy to say: the number of pages read was 1,047, an all-time high around these parts for a single month. It’s up from 1,022 in March, and 859 in February. And it’s the second month in a row there’ve been more than a thousand readers. That part’s easy.

The number of visitors has dropped. It was down to 389 in April, from a record 468 in March and still-higher 407 in April. This is, if WordPress doesn’t lead me awry, my fifth-highest number of viewers. This does mean the number of views per visitor was my highest since June of 2013. The blog had 2.69 views per visitor, compared to 2.18 in March and 2.11 in February. It’s one of my highest views-per-visitor on record anyway. Perhaps people quite like what they see and are archive-binging. I approve of this. I’m curious why the number of readers dropped so, though, particularly when I look at my humor blog statistics (to be posted later).

I’m confident the readers are there, though. The number of likes on my mathematics blog was 297, up from March’s 265 and February’s 179. It’s the highest on record far as WordPress will tell me. So readers are more engaged, or else they’re clicking like from the WordPress Reader or an RSS feed. Neither gets counted as a page view or a visitor. That’s another easy part. The number of comments is down to 64, from March’s record 93, but March seems to have been an exceptional month. February had 56 comments so I’m not particularly baffled by April’s drop.

May starts out with 23,884 total views, and 472 people following specifically through WordPress.

It’s a truism that my most popular posts are the trapezoids one and the Reading The Comics posts, but for April that was incredibly true. Most popular the past thirty days were:

1. How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw.
2. Reading The Comics, April 10, 2015: Getting Into The Story Problem Edition.
3. Reading The Comics, April 15, 2015: Tax Day Edition.
4. Reading The Comics, April 20, 2015: History Of Mathematics Edition.
5. Reading The Comics, March 31, 2015: Closing Out March Edition.

I am relieved that I started giving all these Comics posts their own individual “Edition” titles. Otherwise there’d be no way to tell them apart.

The nations sending me the most readers were, as ever, the United States (662), Canada (82), and the United Kingdom (47), with Slovenia once again strikingly high (36). Hong Kong came in with 24 readers, Italy 23, and Austria a mere 18. Elke Stangl’s had a busy month, I know.

This month’s single-reader countries were Czech Republic, Morocco, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Romania, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Romania’s the only one that sent me a single reader last month. India bounced back from five readers to six.

Among the search terms bringing people to me were no poems. Among the interesting phrases were:

• what point is driving the area difference between two triangles (A good question!)
• how do you say 1,898,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (I almost never do.)
• is julie larson still drawing the dinette set (Yes, to the best of my knowledge.)
• jpe fast is earth spinning? (About once per day, although the answer can be surprisingly difficult to say! But also figure about 465 times the cosine of your latitude meters per second, roughly.)
• origin is the gateway to your entire gaming universe. (Again, I don’t know what this means, and I’m a little scared to find out.)
• i hate maths 2015 photos (Well, that just hurts.)
• getting old teacher jokes (Again, that hurts, even if it’s not near my birthday.)
• two trapezoids make a (This could be a poem, actually.)
• how to draw 2 trapezoids (I’d never thought about that one. Shall have to consider writing it.)

I don’t know quite what it all means, other than that I need to write about comic strips and trapezoids more somehow.