How September 2021 Treated My Mathematics Blog


Better than it treated me! Which is a joke I used last month too. But it’s been a rough while but that’s all right, it’ll all turn around as soon as I buy one winning PowerBall lottery ticket. And since my custom, when I do play, is to buy two tickets at once, I look to be in very good shape as of Monday’s drawing. Thank you for your concern.

I posted seven things in September, including the much-delayed start of the Little Mathematics A-to-Z. Those postings drew 1,973 views altogether from 1,414 unique visitors. These numbers are far below the running averages for the twelve months running up to September. The mean was 2,580.6 views from 1,830.4 unique visitors per month. The median was 2,559 views from 1,801 unique visitors. So this implies a readership decline.

Per-posting, though, the numbers look better. I recorded 281.9 views per posting in September, from 202.0 unique visitors. (Again, this is total views, of everything, not just of September-dated essays.) The running mean was 273.7 views per posting from 194.0 unique visitors. The running median was 295.9 views per posting from 204.3 unique visitors. That’s all quite in line with things and suggests if I posted more, I would be read more. A fine theory, but how could it be implemented?

Bar chart showing two and a half years' worth of readership figures. After a fairly steep three-month decline both page views and unique readers rose slightly in August before drooping again in September.
I keep looking at that Insights tab and I never get any better at positioning myself.

31 likes were given to things in September, below the running average of 51.6 and the running mean of 47.5. It’s not much better per posting, though: 4.4 likes per posting in September, below the running mean of 5.2 per posting and median of 4.9 per posting. Comments are down a little, too, 10 given in the month compared to a mean of 18.0 and median of 15.5. That translates to 1.4 comments per posting, below the running mean of 1.9 per posting and running median of 1.6 per posting. So, yeah, if Mathematics WordPress isn’t dying it is successfully ejecting me from its body.


The things I posted in September ranked like this, in order of popularity:

Most popular altogether was How To Find A Logarithm Without Much Computing Power. That’s an essay which links to a string of essays that tell you just what it says on the tin.


WordPress estimates that I published 2,973 words in September, a modest but increasing 424.7 words per posting. My average essay so far this year has grown to 565 words. So far for 2021 I’ve posted 38,988 words. This is terse, for me. There have been years I did that in two months.

As of the start of October I’ve had 144,287 page views from 85,603 logged unique visitors, over the course of 1,651 posts. If you’d like to be a regular reader, please use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button at the upper right corner of this page. If you’d rather have essays sent to you by e-mail, use the button a little below that.

If you have an RSS reader you can use this feed for my essays. If you don’t have an RSS reader, I recommend it. They’re good things. You can get one from This Old Reader, for example, or set up one using 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.

My Twitter account has gone feral and only posts announcements of essays. But you can interact with me as @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, on the Mastodon network. Thanks for reading, in whatever way you’re doing it, and here’s hoping for a good October.

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Author: Joseph Nebus

I was born 198 years to the day after Johnny Appleseed. The differences between us do not end there. He/him.

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