And with the start of the month it’s my chance to do my usual self-examination. In this I look over what was popular, and how popular, and draw no usable conclusions from this. The month didn’t end as I had hoped, owing to family matters. But then nothing ever does quite go as one hopes. We just have to carry on anyway. But looking over WordPress’s review of readership around here:
Huh. August was a busy month, with 1,421 recorded page views. The last several months had been 1,058 and 1,077. This is the third-highest number of page views since April of 2016 at least. And that’s from 913 unique visitors, which is the second-highest number of unique visitors I’ve got on record. (March 2018 continues to taunt me with 999 unique visitors.) People found something they liked.
They liked 57 things, which compares to July’s 37 by being larger. It’s still an anemic total, though. June had 94 likes, and even that is way down from a year ago. August 2017 had 147 likes. And there was a time there’d be 345 likes in a month. That time was April 2016. Comments drifted slightly downward, to 27 from July’s 28 or June’s 30. I count that as holding still, anyway. As ever, I need to do better writing things that encourage responses.
The roster of most popular articles suggests that I’m catching on as a reference for the record-groove counting problem. Just under 200 page views were of that alone. The next-most-popular piece had only 67 views. Don’t think I’m not considering studying power-law scaling of my posts. If you have no idea what I’m on about, don’t worry. I may get to it. But here’s the most popular posts for the past month:
- How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
- A Venn Diagram of the Real Number System
- Reading the Comics, August 3, 2018: Negative Temperatures Edition
- Reading the Comics, August 14, 2018: Condensed Books Edition
- I’m Looking For Topics For My Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z
I’m still taking nominations for the A-To-Z, by the way, and shall be for a while yet. Also, discussions of fun mathematics which don’t fit the A-To-Z format may yet belong in the Mathematics Blog Carnival, to appear here at the end of September. Please let me know of anything that’s educational or playful or just fun that you’d like to see shared with more people. Can be your own writing; can be something you think more people should know.
What countries of the world, plus the European Union, sent me readers in August? And how many? Here’s the official roster as WordPress make it out.
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 802 |
| Philippines | 232 |
| Canada | 52 |
| Turkey | 44 |
| India | 40 |
| United Kingdom | 31 |
| Australia | 30 |
| European Union | 26 |
| France | 18 |
| Germany | 12 |
| Bhutan | 8 |
| Italy | 7 |
| Singapore | 7 |
| Belgium | 6 |
| Czech Republic | 6 |
| Netherlands | 6 |
| Peru | 6 |
| Puerto Rico | 6 |
| Spain | 6 |
| Israel | 5 |
| Pakistan | 5 |
| Sweden | 5 |
| Brazil | 4 |
| Finland | 4 |
| Mexico | 4 |
| New Zealand | 4 |
| Nigeria | 4 |
| Norway | 4 |
| Algeria | 3 |
| Indonesia | 3 |
| South Africa | 3 |
| South Korea | 3 |
| United Arab Emirates | 3 |
| Denmark | 2 |
| Malaysia | 2 |
| Vietnam | 2 |
| Argentina | 1 |
| Austria | 1 (*) |
| Chile | 1 |
| Colombia | 1 |
| Egypt | 1 |
| Estonia | 1 |
| Ethiopia | 1 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 1 |
| Ireland | 1 (*) |
| Latvia | 1 |
| Luxembourg | 1 |
| Panama | 1 |
| Portugal | 1 |
| Romania | 1 (*) |
| Slovenia | 1 |
| Sri Lanka | 1 |
They list 52 countries sending me any readers. This is the same as in July. There were 16 single-reader countries, again the same as in July. I know, I’m worried I made a mistake with the data too. Ah, but here. Austria, Ireland, and Romania are on two-month streaks as single-reader countries. Nobody’s been on the roster more than two months in a row. Serbia just missed the half-year milestone.
The Insights panel would have me believe I started September on 66,380 page views, from 32,601 recorded unique visitors. I’ll go along with that gag. For the year to date, I’ve posted — well, I forgot to take a snapshot of the data before Sunday’s Reading the Comics post published. If we pretend the 2nd of September was part of August, though, then: I’ve had 105 posts so far this year; 14 in August and 15 in the Greater August that included this past Sunday. I’ve accumulated 269 total comments, for an average of 2.6 comments per post. This is the same average I had at the start of August. I gathered a total of 633 likes, for an average of 6.0 likes per post this year. Start of August I’d had 6.4 likes per post. Counting Sunday’s post I had 97,634 total words published so far this year, 14,551 of them in August. In July I had 14,032 words in only twelve posts. My words-per-post average is up to 930. Start of August it had drifted down to 885.3.
If you’d like to read my posts you’ve got options. They all involve reading, though. Maybe having them read to you. But all my posts are available by RSS feed. If you like the WordPress reader, there’s a button at the upper-right corner of the page. And if you’d like to see messages announced on Twitter, I’m @Nebusj there. And yes, I am sniffing around Mathstodon.xyz, the mathematics-themed instance of the Twitter-like social site Mastodon. Just browsing its public feed can be fun. There’s a mix of people sharing neat stuff they ran across, little puzzles that’ve been bothering them, and legitimate current research. I do not have an account there and might not make one at all. But I’m thinking about whether I ought. Will tell you if and when I do.
nebusresearch 