How October 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

Well.

Um.

So, somebody linked to me from somewhere.

And it drew a lot of people who came over, read one or two essays, and then vanished again. Such is the fickleness of fame. But on the 16th of October something drew 4,089 visitors to this site. They looked at 5,003 pages. The next day it was badly faded, 720 views from 570 visitors. Then 228 views from 166 visitors. Two or three days after that I was back to something like the normal number of views per day, for a high-volume era like an A to Z sequence. Still, this is going to throw all my twelve-month running averages off for … a year … or possibly more. Here’s how things looked, though.

So, two thoughts: first, I’m so glad that on the peak day of all this, I got just above five thousand views, since coming in at, say, 4,997 would drive me crazy. Second: boy, this really drives home how huge the Internet is, and how tiny a piece I have of it.

So, yeah, some 8,667 page views, from 6,362 unique visitors. This far blows away every readership statistic I’ve ever had. The twelve-month running average is a relatively feeble 1,442.2 page views from 888.7 unique visitors, for example. I’ll be plummeting back to that soon enough. There were 107 things liked in October, well above the average of 67.8. Still, there were only 17 comments, down from the average of 21.1. Clearly I got people reading without feeling like they were free to say something. For the record, though, I’m grateful to anyone who writes any comment on anything. I do read it promptly. I try to write a response, but will often end up in that sort of faintly anxious productivity death-spiral of figuring I need to make a better reply, which I’ll do better later in the day or maybe tomorrow. It’s not you; it’s me not living up to my resolution to answer things right after lunch each day.

Anyway there were 279.6 views per posting in October, way above the twelve-month average of 98.0. There were 205.2 unique visitors per posting, although really almost all of them went to a single posting. The average is 62.1. Those numbers are gibberish and are going to be gibberish for the next year or so now, unless somebody links to me from somewhere regularly. More meaningful: the number of likes per post, 3.5, comparable yet below the running average of 4.5. Or the comments per posting, 0.5, comparable yet below the running average of 1.3.

Counting my home page there were 311 essays that got any views in October, a bit more than September’s 296. There were 187 that got more than one page view, barely above September’s 172. 51 got at least ten page views, a good bit over September’s 37. And the most popular pieces? Well, there’s the one that got linked to. Besides my home page the top five were:

• My 2019 Mathematics A To Z: Linear Programming
• My 2019 Mathematics A To Z: Hamiltonian
• My 2019 Mathematics A To Z: Differential Equations
• How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
• Reading the Comics, August 2, 2018: Non-Euclidean Geometry Edition

There were 5,317 views of the linear programming essay. So it won’t surprise you that I had a new most popular day ever: the 16th of October, which was actually the Wednesday after the linear programming essay published.

So, like, I don’t want to obsess about even more petty things but could someone check whether, like, Greenland even has the Internet? Because if I’m not reading WordPress’s statistics wrong, I have not once ever gotten a page view from Greenland and that seems improbable. I know, there are like 26 people in Greenland, but still, it’s been nearly a decade. Somebody would have to hit something just by accident.

116 countries or the equivalent sent me readers in October, way above September’s 69 and August’s 65. 24 of them were single-view countries, above the 19 of September and 17 of August. The roster of countries:

Country	Readers
United States	4,314
United Kingdom	488
Canada	396
India	396
Germany	356
France	218
Netherlands	155
Australia	143
Philippines	130
Italy	123
Sweden	116
Brazil	111
Finland	87
Switzerland	85
Poland	81
Spain	76
Japan	75
Singapore	73
South Africa	67
Russia	59
Norway	56
Belgium	54
Ireland	54
Portugal	47
Czech Republic	43
Mexico	38
Turkey	36
Austria	35
China	35
Hong Kong SAR China	34
New Zealand	33
Romania	33
Denmark	31
Slovenia	29
Argentina	28
Colombia	25
Israel	24
Taiwan	24
Greece	22
South Korea	21
Thailand	21
Slovakia	20
Ukraine	19
Hungary	18
Indonesia	18
Serbia	18
Vietnam	16
European Union	15
Croatia	14
Lithuania	14
Chile	11
Peru	11
United Arab Emirates	10
Sri Lanka	9
Bulgaria	8
Ecuador	8
Jordan	8
Kenya	8
Saudi Arabia	8
Uruguay	8
Iceland	7
Lebanon	7
Pakistan	7
Bangladesh	6
Latvia	6
Macedonia	6
Malaysia	6
Tunisia	6
Cape Verde	5
Egypt	5
Guatemala	5
Nigeria	5
Belarus	4
Costa Rica	4
Nepal	4
Puerto Rico	4
Uganda	4
Bahrain	3
Bosnia & Herzegovina	3
Cyprus	3
Georgia	3
Luxembourg	3
Morocco	3
Venezuela	3
Armenia	2
Bolivia	2
Dominican Republic	2
Estonia	2
Malta	2
Myanmar (Burma)	2
Namibia	2
Paraguay	2
Zimbabwe	2
Albania	1
Algeria	1
American Samoa	1
Angola	1
Azerbaijan	1
Cambodia	1
Cameroon	1
Congo – Kinshasa	1
Ghana	1
Guyana	1
Honduras	1
Iran	1
Kuwait	1
Martinique	1
Montenegro	1
Panama	1
Qatar	1
Réunion	1
Rwanda	1
Senegal	1
Sudan	1
Tanzania	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Uzbekistan	1 (*)

Uzbekistan was the only country to also get a single page view in September. The Philippines, after several months in a row being the country that sent me the second largest number of readers, fell to ninth. It didn’t have that many fewer readers in September; it’s just that countries like Canada and India leapt way ahead. Again, somebody linked to me.

From the dawn of time through the start of November 2019 I’d posted 1,355 things. These drew a total 93,862 views from 50,505 logged unique visitors. (The number of unique visitors from the earliest years of this blog were not kept in any way that I know how to access.)

In October, despite publishing 31 pieces, I had a relatively laconic month. I published 24,917 words, an average 803.8 words per posting in October. It’s reduced the average length of a post this year to 915, down from 944 for the year to the start of October. I don’t know.

November should see the conclusion of the Fall 2019 A-to-Z sequence, trusting that my Tuesday and Thursday schedule keps up. If you have thoughts for the last several letters, please add them to the roster here. I’ve been given several great ideas already, but am always happy to have … more … blog friends to disappoint by turning down their topics. Um. Well, I also plan to keep publishing at least one Reading the Comics post each week.

I’d lke to have you as a regular reader, too, even if you just came here to read the one thing. You can use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on the upper right corner of this page. If you use an RSS reader, https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ is the feed for all my posts. If you need an RSS reader, you can use a free Livejournal or Dreamwidth account and add it to your Friends page there. And while I have a Twitter account as @Nebusj, it’s gone fallow after a couple months where Safari would just freeze up rather than let me see anything. I keep thinking to go back and check if that nonsense is still going on. We’ll see if I do.