How February 2016 Treated My Mathematics Blog

Once again I spent a month not obsessing about the WordPress-gathered statistics day to day. It was somewhat soothing. But I wasn’t doing well in visiting and commenting on other people’s blogs, and I know that hurts my own readership. The economy of social media runs on sharing attention.

But it was still a decent month around here. The total number of page views dropped below a thousand again, to an official tally of 949. That’s below January’s 998 and December’s 954. It’s a higher readership per day, though. At this rate if February had 31 days there’d have been 1,014 page views. On the other hand, I published 14 things in February, compared to 13 in January. Is the proper correction not the length of the year but how much anyone reads any post?

Well, the number of unique visitors rose. It reached 538 in February, up from January’s 523 and December’s 449. This is a twelve-month high at least. I can’t find older statistics, but I imagine that’s got to be an all-time high, considering.

The number of likes held steady. Well, it dropped from 202 in January to 201 in February. I know better than to think that signifies anything. It’s down from December’s 245, but that’s surely staying right about average. The number of comments rose to 66, up from 53 in January and 56 in December. I think most of that would be people offering requests for the Leap Day Mathematics A To Z.

For a change my top-five articles of the month aren’t dominated by Reading the Comics essays. Well, number 1 and number 5 are, but in comparison that isn’t much at all. The rest of the top five is me pointing to other interesting stuff, which does imply that people like me as a curator more than they like me as an original popularizer. Well, the readership for “Ensembled”, getting at canonical and microcanonical ensembles and statistical mechanics, wasn’t bad. And the early returns for the Leap Day Mathematics A To Z are good too. They had a short time to be read. They were outranked by:

• Reading the Comics, February 6, 2016: Lottery Edition (I suspect the mention of the lottery encouraged readers looking for hints)
• Proportional Dice (a nice little problem to play with)
• Dice and Compass Games (more exposition on the above problem, and pointing to a fun little geometry tool)
• Some Cards Stuff (pointing to a proof about how much shuffling a deck of cards needs)
• Reading the Comics, January 27, 2015: Rabbit In A Trapezoid Edition (which includes a picture of our pet rabbit in a box that he’s since eaten)
• Any Requests? (and what the heck, if you’ve got a letter not yet used, I’ll try to do something with it).

The roster of countries sending me readers was a bit odd this month. The United States was on top, as ever, with 562 page views going to it. I grant I’m in the United States, and post at times convenient to its schedule, and I write in an American idiom. But there’s a lot more English readers outside the United States than inside, and I rarely write about things of particular interest in the United States or disinterest outside. I’ve always wondered why my readership is so close to home.

And then India came in second this month, with 64 readers. I’m glad to see it fluttering up that high. I feel better being read that far from home. Canada, which is close to home but which I’ve only been to twice, changing planes, brought me 41 readers. Germany, which I’ve spent nearly two weeks in, sent 40. Hong Kong, which I’ve been to a fair number of times but always in changing airplanes, 33. I think this is the first time my top-five readership hasn’t been dominated by the United States and the British Commonwealth. (The United Kingdom was next in line, at 26 page views, and Australia 19 after that. And then there’s a whole bunch of countries in which English isn’t a primary language.)

Single-reader nations this time around were Argentina, Bangladesh, Barbados, Cambodia, European Union (not a nation), Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Korea, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, and Ukraine. Bangladesh, the European Union, the Netherlands, and Sweden were there last month too. The European Union is on a three-month streak but still isn’t a nation. And I still don’t know what WordPress even means by that. Singapore sent me three page views, down from twelve the month before. Poland didn’t send me any readers, which is shockingly unpopular even for me.

Search terms bringing people here? I’m happy to provide some. Among those that turned up:

• how many teapizoids can you get in a rectangle (what gets me is there were multiple hits for this misspelling)
• what is happening to the toby comic by corey pandolph? (and that’s interesting: after years of being in reruns Pandolph has started writing new installments. The strip has picked up “eight years later”, which seems like about how long Toby, Robot Satan has been idle. I’m glad to see this strip resume.)
• origin is the gateway to your entire gaming universe. (and why wouldn’t it be?)
• math theory penguins (I was with you up to the word `penguins’)
• are any coins unfair (no! But coin tosses can be)
• population charlotte nc 1975 (I’d tried interpolating what it might have been back then; I’d meant to do a series of essays about different ways to interpolate data, and might again someday)
• true almost verywhere (not waffling about true or false: “almost everywhere” is a term of art with a precise meaning)

The month starts with 33,200 page views in total, from a recorded 12,782 distinct viewers. I’m tempted to give a prize to whoever logs number 33,333. WordPress credits me with 566 WordPress.com followers. If you’re not sure whether you’re a follower, well, there’ a “Follow Blog via Email” button over on the right side of the page. And I realize I’m not sure where they do put a “Follow Blog on WordPress” button for people who’re logged in to WordPress already. Maybe I need to worry about that. I’m also on Twitter, as @Nebusj, and I’d be happy with being followed there too.