I am again looking at the past month’s readership figures. And I’m again doing this in what I mean to be a lower-key form. November was a relatively laconic month for me, at least by A-to-Z standards.
I had only 15 posts in November, not many more than would be in a normal month. The majority of posts were pointers to earlier posts yet. It doesn’t seem to have hurt my readership, though. WordPress says there were 2,873 pages viewed in November, for an average of 191.5 views per posting. This is a good bit above the twelve-month running average leading up to November. That average was a mere 1,912.8 views for a month and 81.6 views per posting. This is because that anomalously high October 2019 figure has passed out of the twelve-month range. There were 2,067 unique visitors logged, for 137.8 unique visitors per posting. The twelve-month running average was 1,294.1 unique visitors for the month, and 81.6 unique visitors per posting. So that’s suggestive of readership growth over the past year.
The things that signal engaged readers were more ambiguous, as they always are. There were 60 things liked in November, or an average of 4.0 likes per posting. The twelve-month running average had 57.5 likes for a month, and 3.5 likes per posting. There were 11 comments given over the month, an average of 0.7 per posting. And that is below the twelve-month running average of 17.2 for a month and 1.1 comments per posting. I did have an appeal for topics for the A-to-Z, which usually draws comments. But they were for unappealing letters like W and X and it takes some inspiration to think of good mathematics terms for that part of the alphabet.
I like to look over the most popular postings I’ve had but every month it’s either trapezoids or record grooves. I did start limiting my listing to the most popular things posted in the two prior months, so new stuff has a chance at appearing. I make it the two prior months so that things which appeared at the end of a month might show up. And then that got messed up. The most popular recent post was from the end of September: Playful Math Education Blog Carnival 141. It’s a collection of recreational or education-related mathematics you might like. I’m not going to ignore that just because it published three days before October started.
November’s most popular things posted in October or November were:
- My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Unitary Matrix
- My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Statistics
- How October 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog
- When Is (American) Thanksgiving Most Likely To Happen?
- My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Wronskian
I have no idea why these post reviews are always popular. I think people might see there’s a list or two in the middle and figure that must be a worthwhile essay. Someday I’ll put up some test essays that are complete nonsense, one with a list and one without, and see how they compare. Of course, now you know the trick and won’t fall for it.
If WordPress’s numbers are right, in November I published 7,304 words, barely more than half of October’s total. It was my tersest month since January. Per post it was even more dramatic: a mere 486.9 words per posting in November, my lowest of the year, to date. My average words per posting, for 2020, dropped to 678.
As of the start of December I’ve had 1,568 total postings here. They’ve gathered 119,685 page views from a logged 68,097 unique visitors.
This month, all going well, I will finish the year’s A-to-Z sequence, just in time. All this year’s A-to-Z essays should be available at this link. This year’s and all past A-to-Z essays should be at this link.
You can be a regular reader, without showing up in my readership figures, by adding my essays’ feed to whatever your RSS reader is. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can get a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then add this or any RSS feed to your friends page from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn as you like.
If you’d like to follow on WordPress, you can add this to your Reading page by clicking the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on the page.
My essays are announced on Twitter as @nebusj. Don’t try to talk with me there. The account’s gone feral. There’s an automated publicity thing on WordPress that posts to it, and is the only way I have to reliably post there. If you want to social-media talk with me look to the mathematics-themed Mathstodon and my account @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz. Or you can leave a comment. Dad, you can also e-mail me. You know the address. The rest of you don’t know, but I bet you could guess it. Not the obvious first guess, though. Around your fourth or fifth guess would get it. I know that changes what your guesses would be.
Thank you all for reading. Have fun with that logic problem.
nebusresearch 
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