How June 2021 Treated My Mathematics Blog

It’s the time of month when I like to look at what my popularity is like. How many readers I had, what they were reading, that sort of thing. And I’m even getting to it earlier than usual in the month of July. Credit a hot Sunday when I can’t think of other things to do instead.

According to WordPress there were 2,507 page views here in June 2021. That’s down from the last couple months. But it is above the twelve-month running mean, leading up to June, which was of 2,445.9 views per month. The twelve-month running median was 2,516.5. This all implies that June was quite in line with my average month from June 2020 through May 2021. It just looks like a decline is all.

There were 1,753 unique visitors recorded by WordPress in June. That again fits between the running averages. There were a mean 1,728.4 unique visitors per month between June 2020 and May 2021. There was a median of 1,800 unique visitors each month over that same range.

Hey, remember when I tracked views per visitor? I don’t remember why I stopped doing that. The figures were volatile. But either way had a happy interpretation. A low number of views per visitor implied a lot of people found something interesting. A high number of views per visitor implied people were doing archive-binges and reading everything. I suppose I could start seriously tracking it now but then I’d have to add a column to my spreadsheet.

The number of likes given collapsed, a mere 36 clicks of the like button given in June compared to a mean of 57.3 and median of 55.5. Given how many of my posts were some variation of “I’m struggling to find the energy to write”? I can’t blame folks not finding the energy to like. Comments were up, though, surely in response to my appeal for Mathematics A-to-Z topics. If you’ve thought of any, please, let me know; I’m eager to know.

I had nine essays posted in June, including my readership review post. These were, in the order most-to-least popular (as measured by page views):

• In Which I Feel A Little Picked On
• I’m looking for topics for the Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z
• History of Philosophy podcast has episode on Nicholas of Cusa
• How did Compute!’s and Compute!’s Gazette’s New MLX Work?
• How May 2021 Treated My Mathematics Blog
• Iva Sallay teaches you how to host the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival
• History of Philosophy podcast has another episode on Nicholas of Cusa
• Here’s some Matlab/Octave code for your MLX simulator
• How did Compute!’s Automatic Proofreader Work?

In June I posted 7,852 words, my most verbose month since October 2020. That comes to an average of 981.5 words per posting in June. But the majority of them were in a single post, the exploration of MLX, which shows how the mean can be a misleading measure. This does bring my words-per-posting mean for the year up to 622, an increase of 70 words per posting. I need to not do that again.

As of the start of July I’ve had 1,631 posts here, which gathered 138,286 total views from 81,404 logged unique visitors.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, this is a great time for it, as I’ve almost worked my way through my obsession with checksum routines of 1980s computer magazines! And there’s the A-to-Z starting soon. Each year I do a glossary project, writing essays about mathematics terms from across the dictionary, many based on reader suggestions. All 168 essays from past years are at this link. This year’s should join that set, too.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, thank you! You can get all these essays by their RSS feed, and never appear in my statistics. It’s easy to get an RSS reader if you need. This Old Reader is an option, for example, as is NewsBlur. Or you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn to add RSS feeds to your Reading or Friends page.

If you’d like to get new posts without typos corrected, you can sign up for e-mail delivery. Or if you have a WordPress account, you can use “Follow NebusResearch” to add this page to your Reader. And I am @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, the mathematics-themed instance of the Mastodon network. Thanks for reading, however you find most comfortable.