October paid less attention to my mathematics blog than did September. I expected that. I published rather fewer pieces in October as the A To Z project had finished. And there’s some extent to which publishing anything is valuable in getting readership. How important I don’t know. I’ve never tried testing the relationship between how many readers I get and how many articles I post. I imagine the number of confounding factors would make their relationship vague. But I could run it anyway, as an example of how to do that kind of calculation.
It also makes me wonder whether republishing older essays is worthwhile. Or at least posting links to older content. I worry about boring longtime readers, although I’m not sure how many of those I even have. And it happens two of my most popular essays this month were fairly old bits of writing. I like to list the top five around here, but there was a three-way tie for fifth place. Big in October were:
- How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
- Reading the Comics, September 24, 2017: September 24, 2017 Edition
- Something I Did Read: Literature’s Greatest Opening Lines, As Written By Mathematicians
- Reading the Comics, September 16, 2017: Wait, Are Elviney and Miss Prunelly The Same Character Week (an ongoing debate!)
- The Summer 2017 Mathematics A To Z: What I Learned
- Reading the Comics, October 21, 2017: Education Week Edition
- Counting From 52 to 11,108
That “here’s a thing I read” also seems to be a reliably popular post suggests maybe I need to do a weekly post about just other mathematics stuff I’d read.
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 632 |
| United Kingdom | 76 |
| India | 67 |
| Philippines | 60 |
| Canada | 31 |
| Germany | 16 |
| Slovenia | 16 |
| Singapore | 15 |
| Australia | 12 |
| France | 11 |
| Austria | 10 |
| Romania | 7 |
| Spain | 7 |
| Malaysia | 6 |
| Brazil | 5 |
| Kuwait | 5 |
| Netherlands | 5 |
| Turkey | 5 |
| Belarus | 4 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 4 |
| Italy | 4 |
| South Africa | 4 |
| European Union | 3 |
| Poland | 3 |
| Slovakia | 3 |
| South Korea | 3 |
| Argentina | 2 |
| Denmark | 2 |
| Indonesia | 2 |
| Iraq | 2 |
| Ireland | 2 |
| Mexico | 2 |
| Norway | 2 |
| St. Kitts and Nevis | 2 |
| Sweden | 2 |
| Thailand | 2 |
| Ukraine | 2 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2 |
| Albania | 1 |
| Bangladesh | 1 |
| Belgium | 1 (*) |
| Bulgaria | 1 (*) |
| China | 1 |
| Hungary | 1 |
| Japan | 1 |
| Latvia | 1 |
| Macedonia | 1 |
| New Zealand | 1 (*) |
| Russia | 1 |
| Switzerland | 1 |
| Taiwan | 1 |
I make that out to be 51 countries sending me readers at all, down from September’s 65. There were 13 single-reader countries, down from September’s 20. Belgium, Bulgaria, and New Zealand were single-reader countries for two months in a row, and no country’s on a three-month single-reader streak. “European Union” is back after a month’s absence. I’m still surprised by the number of readers from the Philippines I’ve drawn two months in a row now.
All together there were 1,069 page views from 614 unique visitors in October. That’s down from 1,232 page views and 672 unique visitors in September, and an up-and-down split from the 1,030 page views from 680 unique visitors in August. In August there were 21 posts here, in September 20, and in October 13. I kind of get the feeling people like me, but only a certain amount of me, and then they drift off.
The number of ‘likes’ went back to cratering, down to 64 over the month of October. There’d been 98 in September and 147 in August. The number of comments fell too, to a meager 12 from September’s 42 and August’s 46. The A To Z format definitely looks more inviting and welcoming to commenters, I have to conclude.
October finished out with my page here having collected 54,336 total page views from some 25,288 admitted unique visitors. I believe there were a few more visitors but some of them were copying.
Insights says that the most popular day for page views was Monday, which drew 18 percent of page views, down just a bit from September’s 20 percent. In a major upset 6 pm was not the most popular hour for readers, though. 7 pm was, when 8 percent of page views came in. I’m not sure how that happened; 6 pm is when I set most stuff to post and readers seem to follow. Maybe it’s a Daylight Saving Time issue. Oh, come to think of it, this is one of the few weeks that Greenwich Time and Eastern Time aren’t in Daylight-Saving/Summer-Time synch, isn’t it? I started out with this as a joke but perhaps that’s really going on. (No, I guess not. 12:00 am is still my most popular hour on my humor blog.) Anyway, I’m figuring to skip future mentions of what Insights tells me about popular days or hours. I can’t figure how they’re indicating anything more than “I’m about equally popular-ish any hour of any day of the week”.
WordPress says I’m starting November with 709 WordPress.com followers, which is down from September’s 717. Well, I’m sure all 709 of them are live, active accounts from people who’ve used them more recently than three years ago when they posted twice. If you’d like to follow my mathematical chats here you can add it to your reader. Go to the upper right corner of this page and click the ‘Follow NebusResearch’ button. If you’d rather get things by e-mail, there should be a ‘Follow Blog Via E-Mail’ button there too. And if that’s all fine enough but you’d like to see me limited to about 22 words at a time, try out @Nebusj on Twitter. Thanks.
