With the end of December it’s the time to see what was popular around here, and just how popular it was. I keep figuring I’ll learn something useful from these explorations. Now and then I come to conclusions and one of these months I’ll even act on them.
December was an exhausting month. The last couple weeks of any A To Z sequence always are. These sequences are great fun, of course, or I wouldn’t keep doing them. But fatigue sets in, especially as I discover I’m not getting as far ahead of deadline as I imagined I would be and I get to the difficult letters of the alphabet’s end. And the Fall 2018 A To Z made up for being less frequent than past glossaries — two, rather than three, essays a week — with being crazily longer. So I was exhausted by that. And then the mathematically-themed comics for my Reading the Comics posts completely dried up. Add to that real-life obligations that I would not skip — being with family, and going to pinball events — and I ended up posting 17 things in December. Which is more than usual, yes. A typical month is 12 to 14 posts. But it’s down from the 23 of October and November, and I’m as convinced as I can be without evidence that the number of posts determines how many page views I get.
So October 2018, aided in part by my hosting the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival, had 2,010 page views from 1,063 unique visitors. November I got in 1,611 page views from 847 visitors. December, well, that saw 1,409 page views from 875 visitors.
There were 82 things liked in December. It’s a slight drop from November’s 85, and October’s 94. I suppose it’s a rise in likes per page view, at least. The number of comments utterly collapsed, which probably reflects the end of the A To Z project. In October and November I had appeals for suggested topics; December didn’t have time for them. So what was 60 comments in October and 36 in November dropped to 17 for December. It’s not my least talkative period of the last year, but it’s up there. I need, seriously, to work on opening my posts to more comments. I’d ask people for suggestions how to do that, but who would answer?
The most popular essays around here in December were two perennials, two A To Z pieces, and some comics:
- How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side? So my improved Buggles picture is paying off there.
- My 2018 Mathematics A To Z: Unit Fractions (a topic suggested by Iva Sallay)
- My 2018 Mathematics A To Z: Volume (a topic suggested by Roy Kassinger)
- How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw (a topic suggested by this time I was teaching a class and couldn’t think how to prove what the area of a trapezoid was)
- Reading the Comics, December 4, 2018: Christmas Specials Edition (a topic suggested by a kid making jokes about the story problem on the test, I’m going to guess rather than go back and check)
What countries sent me page views, and in what quantity? These, and these:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 819 |
| Canada | 77 |
| United Kingdom | 68 |
| India | 46 |
| Turkey | 39 |
| Philippines | 31 |
| Singapore | 31 |
| Australia | 27 |
| Denmark | 23 |
| Indonesia | 15 |
| Slovenia | 14 |
| South Africa | 13 |
| Italy | 11 |
| New Zealand | 11 |
| Sweden | 10 |
| Greece | 9 |
| Netherlands | 9 |
| South Korea | 9 |
| Bangladesh | 8 |
| Ireland | 8 |
| Lithuania | 8 |
| Germany | 7 |
| Brazil | 6 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 6 |
| Poland | 6 |
| American Samoa | 5 |
| European Union | 5 |
| Mexico | 5 |
| Russia | 5 |
| Switzerland | 5 |
| Finland | 4 |
| France | 4 |
| Norway | 4 |
| Belgium | 3 |
| Czech Republic | 3 |
| Ghana | 3 |
| Hungary | 3 |
| Israel | 3 |
| Kenya | 3 |
| Pakistan | 3 |
| Serbia | 3 |
| Austria | 2 |
| Chile | 2 |
| Egypt | 2 |
| Libya | 2 |
| Romania | 2 |
| Spain | 2 |
| Taiwan | 2 |
| Ukraine | 2 |
| Vietnam | 2 |
| Albania | 1 |
| Algeria | 1 |
| Argentina | 1 |
| Botswana | 1 |
| China | 1 |
| Colombia | 1 (****) |
| Iceland | 1 |
| Iraq | 1 |
| Japan | 1 |
| Jordan | 1 |
| Kuwait | 1 |
| Latvia | 1 |
| Palestinian Territories | 1 (*) |
| Portugal | 1 |
| Puerto Rico | 1 |
| Saudi Arabia | 1 (*) |
| Sint Maarten | 1 |
| Slovakia | 1 |
That was 68 different countries sending readers, down from November’s 70 and October’s 74. There were 17 single-reader countries, up from November’s 13 and down from October’s 23. The Palestinian Territories and Saudi Arabia were single-reader countries in November too. Colombia’s been a single-reader country five months now. I don’t see how China can be a single-reader country, even given that English isn’t a primary language there. More than one person has to stumble across here just by accident. There’s something going on there.
According to Insights, I start the month and year with 72,915 total page views, from an admitted 36,260 unique visitors.
I published something like 18,587 words here in December, which is a drop from the 26,644 of November. I write “something like” because I don’t know how WordPress tallies stuff like words in captions, and I don’t think it counts words in comments. And the idea of a “word” in a count like this is difficult to make precise and indisputable. So don’t be fooled by the digits into thinking there’s any precision there. Also it’s still 1,093 words per post, which is a bit down from the 1,158 in an average November essay but still.
For the year-to-date, by the end of December, I was writing an average of 1,025 words per post. That is, posts for the whole of the year, rather than just in December. That’s down from the end-of-November average of 1,108 words per post. I averaged 5.2 likes per post, down from the end-of-November average of 5.3. And 2.8 comments per post, up from the end-of-November average of 2.7. That’s certainly not a significant change.
I’m glad to have you as a reader, even if it’s just for this sort of self-preening post. You can put my posts in your RSS reader and enjoy them at your convenience. If you’re using WordPress regularly you can also add me to your WordPress Reader. That’s from the button at the upper-right corner of the page. On Twitter I’m @Nebusj. And just about every Sunday plus, usually, some other day of the week I’ll be Reading the Comics for the mathematics stuff. Thanks for being here.
nebusresearch 
WordPress is among one of the sites blocked by China’s Great Firewall. (Other blocked sites include Google, Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, Blogspot, Dropbox, etc). It is getting exceptionally hard to circumvent the Firewall, even when using paid commercial VPNs. The only way I succeeded bypassing the firewall in 2018 during a trip there was through a software called Lantern: https://mathtuition88.com/2018/08/30/vpn-that-works-in-china-2018-lantern-pro-review/.
Hence, that explains the low viewership from China, it is the same for my blog. Hong Kong is not affected though, they are allowed to view WordPress sites, but their population is much lower than mainland China.
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Aaaah, I see. Thank you. That does explain the mystery.
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