I admit, I didn’t keep my discipline in March as well as I did in February and January. I checked partway through to see how my readership was doing. But I also knew it’d be pretty good. Long strings of daily posts are good for WordPress readership. Probably they’re good for everybody. And I made it through March without missing a day! So these A To Z projects seem good for me on several counts.
For March 2016, I had a record 1,557 page views, from a record 734 distinct visitors. The previous record had been in November, with 1,215 page views, most of those spillovers from the Apartment 3-G collapse. February had given me 949 page views from 538 visitors. January, 998 page views from 523 visitors.
The number of likes was up, to 322. That’s not a record. My record was back in June, when 518 ‘likes’ were clicked. That was my first A To Z project. I can’t explain the difference there. Still, 322 likes is up from February’s 201 and January’s 202. Comments were also up. There were 84 in March, compared to 66 in February and 53 in January. That’s not like the June 2015 high of 114. But I’m pretty sure WordPress counts my pages linking back to earlier pages as if they were comments. So I could make these numbers as high as my patience allowed.
For all that my A To Z has unquestionably brought in readers, none of the individual A To Z essays was among the most-read essays in March. That probably reflects people just reading them on the blog’s main page. There shouldn’t be a need to click on an individual essay’s page to read the whole thing. And you can even read and post comments from the main page, which I think’s an advantage of the theme here (P2 Classic). Anyway, the most popular posts for March were:
- Reading the Comics, March 3, 2016: Let Popeye Do Mathematics Edition, which I guess shows that people like seeing Popeye calculate stuff.
- Terrible And Less-Terrible Things with Pi, assembled for Pi Day. It links to my essays about one truly awful and one not-too-bad way to calculate the digits of Pi.
- Calculus For Breakfast, pointing over to Robert Austin’s blog and a question about convenient ways to measure how big things are.
- Only Fractions, talking about a moment in the wonderful movie Only Yesterday that my love and I recently saw.
- Algebra, Explained, which just pointed over to my humor blog and an episode of the old-time radio series Vic and Sade. In it, neither Vic nor Sade appear. But Uncle Fletcher does his best to try helping Rush with his algebra. It’s not very productive. It is funny.
The United States sent me 1,009 readers in March. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time it alone sent me over a thousand page views. In second place was India, with 77, and I suspect I know who to thank for that attention. Canada was just barely edged out, with 72 page views. And the other top-five countries were Germany (57) and the United Kingdom (44), surprising everyone who hasn’t seen past months’ data.
The countries sending me a single reader in March were Bahrain, China, Czech Republic, European Union (not a nation), Greece, Macedonia, Norway, Palestinian Territories, Saudi Arabia, and Slovakia. The European Union’s the only repeat from February. For that matter, it’s on a four-month streak even though I’ve yet to find anyone who can tell me what the “European Union” entry signifies. Singapore only sent me five readers, up from three.
It’s a dull set of search terms this month. Discarding the 379 (!) “unknown search terms” we’ve got:
- origin is the gateway to your entire gaming universe. (Of course.)
- who discovered boyle’s law (It’s complicated.)
- dethany (She’s the character who’s taken over Bill Holbrook’s comic strip On The Fastrack.)
- jokes and puns from rome (?)
- labels on apples broom hilda cartoon (Happy to help.)
- comic strip math problem solving dividing polynomials (Um … good luck?)
The month starts with my blog having got 34,755 page views total, from some 13,516 recorded visitors. And it counts me as having 573 followers on WordPress, ten on e-mail, and 202 on Twitter. I’d started March with 566 WordPress followers and I have no idea how many on e-mail or Twitter. But if you’d like to follow me on Twitter, I’d be glad for it. And I’ve finally put my Follow-on-WordPress button in a nice prominent space in the upper right corner of the page. At least I hope it is.
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