First of all, I would like to say this about this tweet:
And that is: I don’t feel threatened at all so nyah.
(And if you want to help them out, please, do send any Calvin and Hobbes strips with mathematical themes over their way.)
Back to my usual self-preening. January 2018 was a successful month around here, in terms of people reading stuff I write. According to WordPress, there were some 1,274 pages viewed from 670 unique visitors. That’s the largest number of pages viewed since March and April 2016, when I had a particularly successful A To Z going. It’s the greatest number of unique visitors since September 2017 when I had a less successful but still pretty good A To Z going. The page views were well above December 2017’s 899, and November’s 1,052. The unique visitors were well above December’s 599 and November’s 604.
I don’t have any real explanation for this. I suspect it’s spillover from my humor blog, which had its most popular month since the comic strip Apartment 3-G died a sad, slow, baffling death. Long story. I think my humor blog was popular because people don’t know what happened to the guy who writes Gasoline Alley. I don’t know either, but I tell people if I do find out anything I’ll tell them, and that’s almost as good as knowing something.
Still, this popularity was accompanied by readers actually liking stuff. There were 112 pages liked in January, beating out the 71 in December and 70 in November by literally dozens of clicks. It’s the highest count since August of 2017 and summer’s A To Z sequence. There were more comments, too, 39 of them. December saw 24 and November 28 and, you see this coming, that’s the largest number of comments since summer 2017’s A To Z sequence.
The popular articles for January were two of the ones I expected, one of the Reading the Comics posts, and then two surprises. What were they? These.
- How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
- How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw
- Wronski’s Formula For Pi: Two Weird Tricks For Limits That Mathematicians Keep Using
- Revealed: Barney Google Lead Time, Desire To Mess With My Head
- Reading the Comics, January 22, 2018: Breaking Workflow Edition
Yes, it’s clickbait-y to talk about weird tricks for limits that mathematicians use. In my defense: mathematicians really do rely on these tricks all the time. So if it’s getting people stuff that’s useful then my conscience is as clear as it is for asking “How many grooves are on a record’s side?” and (implicitly) “How many kinds of trapezoid are there?”
If I’m counting right there were 50 countries from which I drew readers, if “European Union” counts as a country and if “Trinidad and Tobago” don’t count as two. Plus there’s Hong Kong and when you get down to it, “country” is a hard concept to pin down exactly. There were 14 single-reader countries. Here’s the roster of them all:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 879 |
| India | 89 |
| Philippines | 59 |
| United Kingdom | 37 |
| Canada | 28 |
| Singapore | 15 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 11 |
| Netherlands | 11 |
| Sweden | 11 |
| Belgium | 9 |
| Algeria | 8 |
| Austria | 8 |
| Australia | 7 |
| France | 7 |
| Italy | 7 |
| Switzerland | 7 |
| South Africa | 6 |
| Brazil | 5 |
| Slovenia | 5 |
| Argentina | 4 |
| Germany | 4 |
| Japan | 4 |
| Pakistan | 4 |
| Indonesia | 3 |
| Spain | 3 |
| Denmark | 2 |
| Egypt | 2 |
| European Union | 2 |
| Greece | 2 |
| Iraq | 2 |
| New Zealand | 2 |
| Portugal | 2 |
| South Korea | 2 |
| Thailand | 2 |
| Ukraine | 2 |
| Bulgaria | 1 |
| Czech Republic | 1 |
| Ireland | 1 |
| Malaysia | 1 |
| Mexico | 1 (**) |
| Namibia | 1 |
| Norway | 1 |
| Russia | 1 (*) |
| Saudi Arabia | 1 |
| Sri Lanka | 1 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 1 |
| Turkey | 1 |
| Uruguay | 1 (*) |
| Vietnam | 1 |
There were 53 countries sending me readers in December and 56 in November so I guess I’m concentrating? There were 15 single-reader countries in December and 22 in November. Russia and Uruguay were single-reader countries in December; Mexico’s been a single-reader country for three months now.
WordPress’s Insights panel says I started the month with 57,592 page views recorded, from 27,161 recorded unique visitors. It also shares with me the interesting statistics that, as I write this and before I post it, I’ve written 16 total posts this year, which have drawn an average two comments and seven likes per post. There’ve been 900 words per post, on average. Overall this year I’ve gotten 39 comments, 110 likes, and have published 14,398 words. I don’t know whether that counts image captions. But this also leads me to learn what previous year statistics were like; I’ve been averaging over 900 words per post since 2015. In 2015 I averaged about 750 words per post, and got three times as many likes and about twice as many comments per post. I’m sure that doesn’t teach me anything. At the least I won’t learn from it.
If all this has convinced you to read my posts, please, keep reading them. You can add them to a WordPress reader by way of the “Follow nebusresearch” sticker on the center-right of the page. Or you can get it delivered by e-mail using the “Follow Blog Via E-Mail” button underneath it. If you’ve got your own RSS reader, you can follow from this feed. There’s probably more ways to follow this, too. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, try @Nebusj, because that’s me and I like having company there.
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