I hadn’t quite intended it, but February was another low-power month here. No big A-to-Z project and no resumption of Reading the Comics. The high points were sharing things that I’d seen elsewhere, and a mathematics problem that occurred to me while making tea. Very low-scale stuff. Still, I like to check on how that’s received.
I did put together seven posts for February — the same as January — and here’s a list of them in descending order of popularity:
- When should I refill my tea?
- Some topological fun
- My best tea-refilling strategy
- Monte Carlo pioneer Arianna Wright Rosenbluth dead at 93
- Why not make an iceberg?
- How January 2021 Treated My Mathematics Blog
- In Our Time podcast has episode on Émile du Châtelet
I assume the essay setting out the tea question was more popular than the answer because it had a week more to pick up readers. That or people reading the answer checked back on what the question was. It couldn’t be that people are that uninterested in my actually explaining a mathematics thing.
That’s it for relative popularity. How about for total readership?
I had expected readership to continue declining, since I’m publishing fewer things and having my name out there seems to matter. But the decline’s less drastic than I expected. There were 2,167 page views here in February. But in the twelve months from February 2020 through January 2021? I had a mean of 2,137.4 page views, and a median of 2,044.5. That is, I’m still on the high side of my popularity.
There were 1,576 logged unique visitors in February. In the twelve months leading up to that the mean was 1,480.7 unique visitors, and the median 1,395.5.
The figures look more impressive if you rate them by number of postings. In that case in February I gathered 309.6 views per posting, way above the mean of 157.9 and median of 135.6. There were also 225.1 unique visitors per posting, again way above the running mean of 109.9 and median of 90.7.
I’ll dig unpopularity out of any set of numbers, though. There were only 47 likes granted here in February, down from the running mean of 55.8 and median of 55.5. That is still 6.7 likes per posting, above the mean of 3.9 and median of 4.0, but it’s still sparse likings. There were a hearty 39 comments given — my highest number since October 2018 — and that’s well above the mean of 17.0 and median of 18. Per posting, that’s 5.6 comments per posting, the highest I have since I started calculating this figure back in July of 2018. The mean and median comments per posting, for the twelve months leading up to this, were both 1.2.
WordPress’s insights panel tells me I published seven things in February, which matches my experience. I still can’t explain the discrepancy back in January. It says also that I published 3,440 words over February, my quietest month since I started tracking those numbers. It put my average post at 590 words for February, and 573.3 words for the whole year to date.
I start March, if WordPress is reliable, having gathered 126,829 views from 73,273 logged unique visitors. This after 1,595 posts in total.
If you’d like to be a regular reader, I’d be glad to have you. You can read without showing up in my statistics by adding my RSS feed to whatever your RSS reader is. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can make one by signing up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then you can add feeds from here, or any web site with an RSS feed. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ for Dreamwidth or at https://www.livejournal.com/syn for Livejournal. More blogs than you think have RSS feeds, even if they’re not advertised. Try adding /feed or /?feed=atom to the end of a blog’s URL. It may work!
If you have a WordPress account you can add me to your Reader by clicking the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on this page. I’ve also re-enabled the “Follow NebusResearch By E-mail” option, for people who want to see posts before I’ve fixed the typos. The typos will never be fixed. Every time an author looks at an old blog post there are three more typos, even if they’ve corrected the typos before.
My Twitter account is still feral; it announces posts but I don’t read it. If you want to social-media-engage me the way to go is @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz on the Mastodon microblogging network.
Thank you all for reading, whatever way you do that.
nebusresearch 
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