I expected there to be a fair number of readers here in October. The A to Z project, particularly, implied that. A To Z months are exhausting, but they give me a lot of posts. And I’m as sure as I can be without actually checking that the number of posts is the biggest determining factor in how many readers I attract. There were 23 posts in October, compared to September’s 15 and my summertime usual of 12 to 14.
Then there’s the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival. This posted in September — by six hours — but it was destined to bring new and, I hope, happy readers in. And that happened also. Here’s what the WordPress statistics showed me for the month:
So this was my highest-readership month since the blog started seven years ago. 2,010 page views, from 1,063 unique visitors. That’s also the greatest number of unique visitors I’ve had in one month, and the first time I’ve broken a thousand visitors. September had 1,505 page views from 874 unique visitors; August, 1,421 page views from 913 unique visitors.
There was a bit of an upswing in the number of likes: 94 of them issued in October, compared to September’s 65 and August’s 57. This is on the higher side for this year, but it is down a good bit from the comparable month two or three years ago. In June 2015, for my first A to Z, I drew over 500 likes; I don’t know where likers have gone.
There were 60 comments on the blog in October, partly people who liked or wanted to talk about A To Z topics, partly people suggesting others. It’s the greatest number of comments I’ve had in one month in two years now. September had 36 commenters; August, 27. Have to go back to March 2016 to find a month when more people said anything around here. That, too, was an A-to-Z month, and one of the handful of months when I posted something every single day.
There were a lot of popular posts this month, naturally. This might be the first time in years that none of the top five were Reading the Comics posts. The A to Z and the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival squeezed out very nearly everything:
- Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival #121
- How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
- My 2018 Mathematics A To Z: Jokes
- My 2018 Mathematics A To Z: Hyperbolic Half-Plane
- I’m Looking For Some More Topics For My 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z (although this particular set is closed and, indeed, all written; here’s the search for topics that’s more current.)
52 countries sent me any readers in August. 58 did so in September. There were 16 single-reader countries in August and 14 in September. For busy October?
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 1,172 |
| Philippines | 99 |
| United Kingdom | 94 |
| Denmark | 82 |
| Canada | 65 |
| India | 59 |
| Singapore | 53 |
| Australia | 50 |
| Poland | 27 |
| Slovenia | 24 |
| Brazil | 20 |
| South Africa | 16 |
| Turkey | 15 |
| European Union | 13 |
| Greece | 13 |
| Germany | 12 |
| France | 11 |
| Mexico | 11 |
| Puerto Rico | 11 |
| Spain | 10 |
| Ireland | 8 |
| Malaysia | 8 |
| Italy | 7 |
| New Zealand | 7 |
| Russia | 6 |
| Switzerland | 6 |
| Argentina | 5 |
| Netherlands | 5 |
| Nigeria | 5 |
| Norway | 5 |
| China | 4 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 4 |
| Indonesia | 4 |
| Pakistan | 4 |
| Belgium | 3 |
| Belize | 3 |
| Chile | 3 |
| Kenya | 3 |
| South Korea | 3 |
| Algeria | 2 |
| Austria | 2 |
| Barbados | 2 |
| Croatia | 2 |
| Ghana | 2 |
| Japan | 2 |
| Morocco | 2 |
| Qatar | 2 |
| Romania | 2 |
| Slovakia | 2 |
| Sweden | 2 |
| Ukraine | 2 |
| Albania | 1 |
| Bahrain | 1 |
| Bangladesh | 1 |
| Bulgaria | 1 |
| Cambodia | 1 |
| Colombia | 1 (**) |
| Cyprus | 1 |
| Czech Republic | 1 (*) |
| Georgia | 1 |
| Jamaica | 1 |
| Jordan | 1 |
| Kazakhstan | 1 |
| Macau SAR China | 1 |
| Macedonia | 1 |
| Myanmar (Burma) | 1 |
| Oman | 1 |
| Peru | 1 |
| Portugal | 1 |
| Serbia | 1 |
| Sri Lanka | 1 |
| Taiwan | 1 |
| Uruguay | 1 |
| Vietnam | 1 |
74 countries sending me any readers at all. 23 countries sent me a single reader for the month. Czech republic has sent me a single reader two months in a row now; Columbia, three months in a row.
Insights tells me that I started November with a total of 69,895 page views, from a logged 34,538 unique visitors. As ever, please recall the first couple years WordPress didn’t tell us anything about the unique visitor count, so for all I know there “should” be more.
In October I published 28,733 words, which is nearly double September’s total. Whew. I’d posted 142 things this year by the start of November, and gathered a total of 391 comments and 787 likes for the year to date. This averaged to 3.1 comments per post on average, up from 2.6 at the start of October. And 5.5 likes per posting, down from 5.8 at the start of October. The 142 posts through the start of November averaged 996 words each. That’s up from 946 words per post at the start of October. I’m going to crush myself beneath a pile of words that I meant to be less deep.
If you’d like to add this blog to your WordPress Reader, there should be a button to do so at the upper right corner of this page. It should also be an option in this pop-up menu from the lower right corner. Or you can add this blog to your RSS reader, and read it in any format you like and without me or WordPress being able to track you. If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, I am @Nebusj. Still thinking seriously about getting a Mathstodon account. And if you’re interested in my two biggest projects here, all of my Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z should appear at this link. My biggest ongoing project is Reading the Comics, and its many posts are here. Thank you for reading.
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