Tag: 2020

How 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog


I like starting the year with a look at the past year’s readership. Really what I like is sitting around waiting to see if WordPress is going to provide any automatically generated reports on this. The first few years I was here it did, this nice animated video with fireworks corresponding to posts and how they were received. That’s been gone for years and I suppose isn’t ever coming back. WordPress is run by a bunch of cowards.

But I can still do a look back the old-fashioned way, like I do with the monthly recaps. There’s just fewer years to look back on, and less reliable trends to examine.

2020 was my ninth full year of mathematics blogging. (I reach my tenth anniversary in September and no, I haven’t any idea what I’ll do for that. Most likely forget.) It was an unusual one in that I set aside what’s been my largest gimmick, the Reading the Comics essays, in favor of my second-largest gimmick, the A-to-Z. It’s the first year I’ve done an A-to-Z that didn’t have a month or two with a posting every day. Also along the way I slid from having a post every Sunday come what may to having a post every Wednesday, although usually also a Monday and a Friday also. Everyone claims it helps a blog to have a regular schedule, although I don’t know whether the particular day of the week counts for much. But how did all that work out for me?

Bar chart of annual readership figures. After rising for several years both readership and unique visitor counts stabilized in 2020 to about the same numbers they'd been the year before.
I find it interesting that apparently my readership is just a couple of plateaus and if the trend of the last decade points to anything, it’s another year at about this level before doubling again, if I can hold out that long.

So, I had a year that nearly duplicated 2019. There were 24,474 page views in 2020, down insignificantly from 2019’s 24,662. There were 16,870 unique visitors in 2020, up but also insignificantly from the 16,718 visiting in 2019. The number of likes continued to drift downward, from 798 in 2019 to 662 in 2020. My likes peaked in 2015 (over 3200!) and have fallen off ever since in what sure looks like a Poisson distribution to my eye. But the number of comments — which also peaked in 2015 (at 822) — actually rose, from 181 in 2019 to 198 in 2020.

There’s two big factors in my own control. One is when I post and, as noted, I moved away from Sunday posts midway through the year. The other is how much I post. And that dropped: in 2019 I had 201 posts published. In 2020 I posed only 178.

I thought of 2020 as a particularly longwinded year for me. WordPress says I published only 118,941 words, though, for an average of 672 words per posting. That’s my fewest number of words since 2014, though, and my shortest words-per-posting for the year going since 2013. Apparently throwing things off is all those posts that just point to earlier posts.

And what was popular among posts this year? Rather than give even more attention to how many kinds of trapezoid I can think of, I’ll focus just on what were the most popular things posted in 2020. Those were:

I am, first, surprised that so many Reading the Comics posts were among the most-read pieces. I like them, sure, but how many of them say anything that’s relevant one you’ve forgotten whether you read today’s Scary Gary? And yes, I am going to be bothered until the end of time that I was inconsistent about including the # symbol in the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival posts.

I fell off checking what countries sent me readers, month by month. I got bored writing an image alt-text of “Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and most of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink” over and over and over again. But it’s a new year, it’s worth putting some fuss into things. And then, hey, what’s this?

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and most of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink.
Now that I’ve had readers from Greenland I just have to try getting a reader from … that bunch of islands north of Scandinavia. Svalbard, I guess? They’ve got upwards of eight people on them, one of them might turn up here by accident someday.

Yeah! I finally got a reader from Greenland! Two page views, it looks like. Here’s the whole list, for the whole world.

Country Readers
United States 13,527
Philippines 1,756
India 1,390
Canada 1,123
United Kingdom 1,040
Australia 506
Germany 410
Singapore 407
Italy 244
Brazil 232
South Africa 173
Thailand 157
Austria 153
Sweden 143
Japan 142
Finland 138
Netherlands 138
Indonesia 134
France 131
Spain 118
Malaysia 108
Denmark 91
Turkey 88
United Arab Emirates 86
European Union 82
Hong Kong SAR China 81
Argentina 73
Mexico 68
Poland 66
Russia 65
Taiwan 63
New Zealand 60
Belgium 59
Switzerland 59
Norway 58
Pakistan 57
South Korea 57
Romania 51
China 49
Saudi Arabia 49
Colombia 47
Israel 47
Greece 45
Ireland 43
Hungary 40
Portugal 39
Puerto Rico 33
Vietnam 32
Croatia 31
Kenya 30
Egypt 28
Nigeria 25
Oman 24
Chile 23
Czech Republic 22
Jamaica 20
Bangladesh 19
Macau SAR China 19
Qatar 19
Peru 18
Serbia 18
Costa Rica 16
Zimbabwe 16
Albania 15
Bahrain 14
American Samoa 13
Slovenia 13
Sri Lanka 13
Bulgaria 12
Ghana 12
Nepal 12
Ukraine 12
Kazakhstan 11
Trinidad & Tobago 11
El Salvador 10
Lebanon 9
Uganda 9
Cyprus 8
Dominican Republic 8
Ecuador 8
Estonia 8
Honduras 8
Iceland 8
Jordan 8
Belize 7
Brunei 7
Lithuania 7
Slovakia 7
Algeria 6
Iraq 6
Azerbaijan 5
Cameroon 5
Guyana 5
Kuwait 5
Morocco 5
Bahamas 4
Cayman Islands 4
Georgia 4
Luxembourg 4
Macedonia 4
U.S. Virgin Islands 4
Uruguay 4
Venezuela 4
Belarus 3
Bolivia 3
Cambodia 3
Guam 3
Guatemala 3
Laos 3
Latvia 3
Myanmar (Burma) 3
Palestinian Territories 3
Panama 3
Sierra Leone 3
Tanzania 3
Afghanistan 2
Benin 2
Bosnia & Herzegovina 2
Fiji 2
Greenland 2
Tunisia 2
Uzbekistan 2
Barbados 1
Bermuda 1
Bhutan 1
Côte d’Ivoire 1
Cuba 1
Faroe Islands 1
Kyrgyzstan 1
Libya 1
Malawi 1
Malta 1
Mauritius 1
Mongolia 1
Nicaragua 1
Northern Mariana Islands 1
Rwanda 1
Seychelles 1
St. Lucia 1
St. Martin 1
Yemen 1

This is 141 countries, or country-like constructs, all together. I don’t know how that compares to previous years but I’m sure it’s the first time I’ve had five different countries send me a thousand page views each. That’s all gratifying to see.

So what plans have I got for 2021? And when am I going to get back to Reading the Comics posts? Good questions and I don’t know. I suppose I will pick up that series again, although since I took no notes last week, it isn’t going to be this week. At some time this year I want to do another A-to-Z, but I am still recovering from the workload of the last. Anything else? We’ll see. I am open to suggestions of things people think I should try, though.

How December 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog


And a happy new year, at last, to all. I’ll take this chance first to look at my readership figures from December. Later I’ll look at the whole year, and what things I would learn from that if I were capable of learning from this self-examination.

I had 13 posts here in December, which is my lowest count since June. For the twelve months from December 2019 through November 2020, I’d posted a mean of 15.3 and a median of 15 posts. So that’s relatively quiet. My blog overall got 2,366 page views from 1,751 unique visitors. That’s a decline from October and November. But it’s still above the running averages, which had a mean of 1,957.8 and median of 1,974 page views. And a mean of 1,335.7 and median of 1,290.5 unique visitors.

There were 51 likes given to posts in December. That’s barely below the twelve-month running averages, which had a mean of 54.6 and a median of 52 likes. The number of comments collapsed to a mere 4 and while it’s been worse, it’s still dire. There were a mean of 15.3 and median of 15 comments through the twelve months before that.

Bar chart of about two and a half years' worth of monthly readership figures. There's a huge spike in October 2019. More recently was a rise leading up to October 2020, with two months of steady decline after that.
Yeah, being at home at 7 pm New Year’s Eve was far better than what I’d be doing in a normal year, being off at the New Year’s Eve pinball tournament playing with the cool confidence and expertise that follows knowing nothing I did could affect my standings for the state finals. After two strong hours of play I would fall completely apart and finish in 12th place.

If it’s disappointing to see numbers drop, and it is, there’s some evidence that it’s all my own fault. Even beyond that this is my blog and I’m the only one writing for it. That is in the per-posting statistics. There were 182.0 views per posting, which is well above the averages (132.0 mean, 132.6 median). It’s also near the averages in November (191.5) and October (169.1). Likes per posting were even better: 3.9, compared to a running average mean of 3.5 and running average median of 3.4. The per-posting likes had been 4.0 and 4.4 the previous months. Comments per posting — 0.3 — is still a dire number, though. The running-average mean was 1.1 per posting and median of 1.0 per posting.

It suggests that the best thing I can do for my statistics is post more. Most of December’s posts were little but links to even earlier posts. This feels like cheating to me, to do too often. On the other hand, I’ve had 1,580 posts over the past decade; why have that if I’m not going to reuse them? And, yes, it’s a bit staggering to imagine that I could repost one entry a day for four and a third years before I ran out. (Granting that lot of those would be references to earlier posts. Or things like monthly statistics recaps that make not a lick of sense to repeat.)

What were popular posts from November or December 2020? It turns out the five most popular posts from that stretch were all December ones:

It feels weird that How Many Of This Weird Prime Are There? was so popular since that was posted the 30th of December. (And late, at that, as I didn’t schedule it right.) So in 30 hours it attracted more readers than posts that had all of November and December to collect readers. I guess there’s something about weird primes that people want to read about. Although not to comment on with their answers to the third prime of the form 10^n + 1 … well, maybe they’re leaving it for other people to find, unspoiled. I also always find it weird that these How-A-Month-Treated-My-Blog posts are so popular. I think other insecure bloggers like to see someone else suffering.

According to WordPress I published 7,758 words in December. This is only my fourth-most-laconic month in 2020. This put me also at an average of 596.8 words per posting in December. My average for all 2020 was 672 words per posting, so all those recaps were in theory saving me time.

Also according to WordPress, I started January 2021 with a total of 1,581 posts ever. (There’s one secret post, created to test some things out; there’s no sense revealing or deleting it.) These have drawn a total 122,051 views from 69,848 logged unique visitors. It’s not a bad record for a blog entering its tenth year of publication without ever getting a clear identity.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, you can follow the RSS feed for my essays without ever showing up in my statistics. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can get one by signing up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then add this, or any RSS feed you like, to your reading page at https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or at https://www.livejournal.com/syn. Or for the easier way about you can use the “Follow Nebusresearch” on this page to add to your WordPress reading.

My Twitter account has gone feral. While it’s still posting announcements, I don’t read it, because I don’t have the energy to figure out why it sometimes won’t load. If you want to social-media thing with me try me on the Mastodon account @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz. Mathstodon is a mathematics-themed instance of that microblogging network you remember hearing something about somewhere but not what anybody said about it.

And, yeah, I hope to have my closing thoughts about the 2020 A-To-Z later this week. Thank you all for reading.

How November 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog


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.

Bar chart of monthly readership figures. After a great spike in October 2019 there's a general, steady rise from June through October 2020. November 2020 is about 90% the height of October 2020's local maximum.
I’ve gotten far more successful at taking these statistics screenshots right at the transition from one month to another now that there’s nothing to do but refresh web browsers. Ill winds, you know?

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:

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.

How October 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog


I’m still only doing short reviews of my readership figures. These are nice easy posts to make, and strangely popular, but they do take time and I’m never sure why people find them interesting. I think it’s all from other bloggers, happy to know how much better their blogs are doing.

Granted that: I had, for me, a really well-read month. According to WordPress, there were 3,043 pages viewed here in October 2020. This is way above the twelve-month running average of 2,381.5 views per month. Also this is the second-largest number of page views I’ve gotten since October 2019. That month, too, was part of an A-to-Z sequence. I wrote something that got referenced on some actually popular web site, though, last year. This year, all I can figure is spillover of people on my other blog wanting to know what’s going on with Mark Trail.

(If you read any web site that regularly talks about Mark Trail, poke around the comments. There’s people upset about the new artist. It’s not my intention to mock them; anything you like changing out from under you is upsetting. But it is soothing to see people worrying about, ultimately, a guy who punches smugglers while giant squirrels talk. On my other blog I plan to have a full plot recap of that in about two weeks.)

Bar chart of monthly readership and unique visitor statistics for this blog. There was an enormous peak in October 2019; there's been slow growth leading up to October 2020.
I still don’t believe this ‘Start earning money now’ claim and I don’t know anyone who would.

There were more unique visitors in October 2020 than any other month besides October 2019, also. WordPress recorded 2,161 unique visitors, well above the twelve-month running average of 1,644.2. It’s much the same for interactions as well: 79 things were liked, compared to the running average of 59.8, and 18 comments, above the 17.1 running average.

October was another month of 18 posts, and I have a running average of 17.6 posts per month now. I’m surprised by that too. I feel like any month that isn’t an A-to-Z sequence I have twelve posts, but there we go. This all means the per-post October averages were above the per-post running averages.

What were the most popular recent posts? Here recent means “from September or October”? That I’m glad to share:

All told, in October I published 12,937 words, down a bit from September. This was an average of 718.7 words per posting in October, which still brings my year-to-date average post length up to 697 words. It had been 694 at the start of October.

As of the start of November I’ve published 1,554 posts here. They’ve gathered 116,811 page views. I like how nearly but not quite palindromic that number is. It even almost but not quite stays the same under a 180 degree rotation. These pages overall have drawn 66,030 logged unique visitors.

I still plan to have an A-to-Z essay this and every Wednesday until we run out of alphabet. You can see that, and all this year’s essays, at this link. This year’s and all past A-to-Z essays should be at this link.

You can be a regular reader here adding my essays’ feed to whatever your RSS reader is. If you don’t have an RSS reader, get a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. You can add any RSS feed to your friends page from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn as you like. Or if you have a WordPress account you can add this to your Reading page by clicking the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on the page. Or

My essays are announcedon Twitter as @nebusj. Don’t try to talk with me there. I haven’t had the energy to work out why Safari only sometimes will let Twitter load. If you actually want to social-media talk with me look to the mathematics-themed Mathstodon and my account @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz. If you really need me, leave a comment. Thank you all for reading.

Denise Gaskins hosted the 142nd Playful Math Education Blog Carnival


It’s the final week of the month and so the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival has published again. The host this time is Denise Gaskins, who also runs the project. You can read the 142nd Blog Carnival essay here, and find something interesting or delightful or useful.

If you’d like to host the carnival some month, you can sign up here. Most of 2021 is open, as I write this. I’ve had the chance to host several times. It’s a novel challenge, and something that pushes me to look beyond my usual familiar mathematics reading. You might find it similarly energizing.

How September 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog


I continue my tradition of doing these monthly readership reviews just a little too far into the month to feel sensible. Well, I’m trying to publish more things on the weekdays and have three of those five committed, while the A-to-Z goes on.

In September I posted only 18 pieces. That’s all right. There was more to them: 15,922 words posted in total. This comes to an average of 936.6 words per posting, way up from August’s 634.3. It’s my most wordy month this year, so far. My year-to-date average post has been 694 words, around here.

Those 18, on average enormous, posts drew 2,422 page views. I like seeing that sort of number, since it’s above the twelve-month running average of 2,383.3 page views. There were 1,643 unique visitors, again above the twelve-month running average of 1,622.8. And I’m really amazed by that since the twelve-month running average includes that fluke last October where something like five thousand more people than usual came in and looked at my post about linear programming.

Bar chart of monthly readership for the past two and a half years. There's an enormous spike in October 2019. The last four months through October 2020 show a more steady rise.
I know what it means, but I choose to believe the 1.48 views per visitor means everybody loads a second page, glances at it, and then closes the browser tab before they’ve got through the whole thing. More silly that way.

It was an engaged month, too. There were 80 things liked in September, above the average of 62.3. And 32 comments, beating the 17.4 average.

The per-posting figures were similarly above the twelve-month running averages. 134.6 views per posting, above the 125.3 running average. 91.3 unique visitors per posting, above the 85.0 running average. 4.4 likes per posting, compared to a 3.3 running average. 1.8 comments per posting, compared to a 1.0 running average. I’m going to be felling good about this month until that happens again.

I wanted to look at the most popular posts from August and September around here. August because, you know, there’s stuff posted the last week of the month that gets readers early in the new month. It doesn’t seem fair to rule them out as popular posts just because the kalends work against them. Turns out nothing from late August was among the most popular stuff. There was a tie for fifth place, though, as sometimes happens. So here’s the six most popular posts of September:

I always feel strange when the monthly readership post is one of the most popular things here. It implies I should do more of just writing up past glories.

October started with me having 1,535 posts here. They have collected 113,769 views, from 63,868 logged unique visitors.

Each Wednesday, I hope to publish an A-to-Z essay. You can see that, and all this year’s essays, at this link. This year’s and all past A-to-Z essays should be at this link. And I am open for topics starting S, T, or U, if you’d like to see me explain something.

You can be a regular reader here by clicking the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on the page. Or add my essays’ feed to whatever your RSS reader is. If you don’t have an RSS reader, get a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. You can add any RSS feed to your friends page from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn as you like.

My essays are announcedon Twitter as @nebusj. My twitter is nearly abandoned, though. Only sometimes does Safari let it load. If you actually want to social-media talk with me look to the mathematics-themed Mathstodon and my account @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz. It’s low-volume over there, but it’s pleasant. If you really need me, well, leave a comment. I try to get back to those soon enough. Thank you for reading.

How August 2020 Saw People Finding Non-Comics Things Here


I’d like to take another quick look at my readership the past month. It’s the third without my doing regular comics posts, although they do creep in here and there.

I posted 19 things in August. That’s slightly up from July. I’m not aiming to do a post-a-day-all-month as I have in past A-to-Z sessions. It’s just too much work. Still, two posts every three days is fairly significant too.

There were 2,040 page views in August, a third month of increasing numbers. It’s below the twelve-month running average of 2,340.3, but that twelve months includes October 2019 when everybody in the world read something. Well, when six thousand people read something, anyway. There were 1,384 unique visitors, as WordPress figures them, in August. Again that’s below the twelve-month running average of 1,590.3. But, you know, the October 2019 anomaly and all that. Both these monthly totals are above the medians, for what that’s worth.

Bar chart of monthly readership for the last two and a half years. There's a slight increase in August compared to July 2020.
I couldn’t wait for 8:00 pm exactly. … Also, hey, exactly 888 followers, says the ticker, although I know that includes people who forgot they had a WordPress account back in 2013. It’s still a nice round number.

65 things got liked in August, barely above the 62.8 running average. There were 18 comments, a touch above the running average of 16.8.

Prorating things per post, eh, everything is basically the same. 107.4 views per posting, compared to an average of 126.2. 72.8 unique visitors per post, compared to a running average of 85.3. 3.4 likes per posting, compared to an average of 3.5. 0.9 comments per posting, compared to an average 1.0.

The most popular post in August was an old Reading the Comics post. The most popular posts from August this past month were:

You see what I mean about comics posts sneaking back in. Apparently I could have a quite nice, low-effort blog if I just shared mathematics comics without writing anything in depth. Well, I know it’s not fair use if I don’t add something to posting the comic.

As of the start of September I’d had 1,517 posts total here. They’d gathered 111,336 views from a logged 62.216 unique visitors.

I posted 12,051 words in August, my most verbose month by about 800 words. The average post was 634.3 words, which is well down from the start of the year. It’s all those Using My A to Z Archive posts. An A-to-Z essay I always aim for being about 1,200 words and it always ends up about 2,000. And it keeps getting worse.

This coming month I’m still planning to do an A-to-Z post every Wednesday. All of this year’s A-to-Z essays should go at this link. This year’s and all previous A-to-Z essays should be at this link. Also, I’m hosting the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival later this month and would appreciate any suggested blogs worth reading. Please give a mention in comments here.

And I’m always glad to have you as a regular reader. You can be one by clicking the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on the page. Or you can add the RSS feed for essays to whatever your reader is. If you don’t have an RSS reader, get a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. You can add any RSS feed to your friends page from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn as you like.

My essays are announced on Twitter as @nebusj, However, Twitter doesn’t like working with Safari regularly, so I don’t read it. If you actually want to social-media talk with me look to the mathematics-themed Mathstodon and my account @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz. It’s low-volume over there, but it’s pleasant. Thank you for reading.

How July 2020 Showed People are Getting OK With Less Comics Here


I’d like to once again take a short look at my readership figures, this time for July 2020. All my projects start out trying to be short and then they billow out to 2,500 words. I don’t know.

I posted 18 things in July. This is above what I do outside A-to-Z months, even without the Reading the Comics posts. There were 1,560 page views in July, which is a higher total than June offered. It’s below the twelve-month running average of 2,323.2 views per month. That stretch includes the anomalously high October 2019 figure, though. Take that out, my page view average was 1746.5, so I’m getting a better sense of how much people want to see me explain comic strips.

There were 1,005 unique visitors here in July. I’m always glad to see that above the 1,000-person mark. The twelve-month running average was 1,579.0 unique visitors, which is a bit higher. That includes the big October 2019 surge, though. Take that out and the running average was 1,144.2 unique visitors, closer to where I did end up.

This is dangerous to observe, but the median page view count the previous twelve months was 1,741; the median unique visitors count was 1,130. Medians are less vulnerable to extremes in a sample (extreme highs or lows), so maybe that’s a guide to whether the month saw readership grow or what. I’ll keep this up until I have no clear answers yet.

Bar chart of monthly readership for about two and a half years. There's a ridiculously high peak at October 2019. The monthly readership and unique visitors rose in July after a big drop for June 2020.
Oh, yeah, I don’t know what this offer about earning money is supposed to be but I also know anyone talking about earning money blogging is pulling a scam.

There were 74 things liked in July, above the running average of 60.3. There were 26 comments, comfortably above the running average of 16.3. A-to-Z months have an advantage in comments, certainly.

Rated per posting, the views and visitors were less good. 86.7 views per posting, well below the mean of 129.2. 55.8 unique visitors per posting, below the 87.2 average. But, then, 4.1 likes per posting, above the 3.5 average. And 1.4 comments per posting, above the 1.0 running average.

I want to start looking at just the five most popular posts of the month gone by. That got foiled when three posts all tied for the fifth-most-popular posting. Well, I can deal. The most popular things posted this past month were:

I started the month with 1,498 posts, that have gathered altogether 109,307 views from a logged 60,842 unique visitors.

I published 11,220 words in July, even though so many of my posts were just heads-up to older pieces. It works out to an average 863.1 words per posting in July. My words per post for the year 2020, so far, has dropped to 663. It had been 672 the month before.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, please use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on this page. Or add my RSS feed to whatever reader you have. If you lack an RSS reader, get a free account at Livejournal or Dreamwidth: their Friends pages can load RSS feeds from whatever source. (Also, if you see any blog you like, try adding /rss or /feed or /rss+xml or /rss+atom to the end of its URL. One of these will often work.) The automated announcement of posts on my Twitter account of @nebusj although that’s been going through a stretch of not letting me on again. I’m trying to hang out more on the mathematics-themed Mathstodon account at @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz. Thank you for reading.

How June 2020 Taught Me How Many People Just Read Me For The Comics


As part of stepping back how much I’ve committed to writing, I had figured to not do my full write-ups of monthly readership statistics. Too many of the statistics were too common, month to month; I don’t need to keep trying to tease information out about which South American countries got a single page view any given month. But I’m not quite courageous enough to abandon them altogether, either.

In June I published 13 pieces, which is a pretty common number. A-to-Z months usually have more than that — last year I managed a several-month streak where I published every single day — but I’m deliberately trying not to do that this time. The number of page views dropped, though. There were 1,318 page views in June, from a recorded 929 unique visitors. That’s way below the twelve-month running averages of 2,289.3 views from 1,551.2 visitors. It’s my lowest page view count since June of 2019, when everybody had that mysterious drop in readers. It’s my lowest visitor count since December 2019.

Bar chart of monthly readership and unique visitor count. After several months holding steady around two thousand page views, June saw a drop to about 1,300 page views.
Mostly I’m not including the map of countries that sent me any readers because I hate having to look up whether it’s Mercatur or Mercator in describing the map projection. You’d think the spell checker would help me, but I have managed to misspell Cincinnati(?) enough times that it won’t tell me when I’m doing that wrong, so I can’t trust it on other words now. Also I’m not positive that WordPress is using Mercator rather than some other casually-similar-looking projection and somehow that’s a distinction I treat as important for my alt text?

There were 22 comments given in June, above the average of 15.4, thanks in part to how A-to-Z sequences appeal directly for comments. There were 43 likes, which is down from the running average of 60.1.

In all, a stunning rebuke to cutting back on my comic strip content. Maybe, anyway. Viewed per posting, it’s a less dramatic collapse. Per posting, there were 101.4 views, compared to an average of 129.2. That’s about four-fifths my average, rather than the three-fifths that the raw numbers implied. There were 71.5 unique visitors per posting, compared to an average of 86.8. Again, that’s a one-fifth drop rather than the two-fifths that the raw figures said I had. 3.3 likes per posting, compared to an average of 3.6. That’s barely a drop. And 1.7 comments per posting, compared to an average 1.0.

The most popular pieces … you know, I don’t need to support the popularity of my grooves-on-a-record-album or the count of different trapezoids. Let me list the five most popular pieces published in June, from June. You can almost see the transition from comics to A-to-Z:

I started July having posted 1,480 things here, gathering 107,748 views from a recorded 59,837 unique visitors. So somewhere along the lines I’ve missed visitor #60,000. Sorry, whoever you were.

I’d published 9,771 words in June, at an average 751.6 words per posting. My average post length so far this year has been 672 words. I’m curious how this will change with me writing one big piece a week, and then a bunch of shorter ones around it.

And I’m always happy to have more readers, even as I’m afraid of answering their comments. You can “Follow Nebusresearch” using the button on this page. Or you can add my RSS feed to whatever reader you like. I do announce posts on my sometimes-accessible @Nebusj Twitter account, and I’m trying to post announcements of new A-to-Z essays to my account on the mathematics-themed Mastodon account, @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz. Thanks for reading, however many of you remain.

How May 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog


I don’t know why my regular review of my past month’s readership keeps creeping later and later in the month. I understand why it does so on my humor blog: there’s stuff that basically squats on the Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday slots. And a thing has to be written after the 1st of the month. So it can get squeezed along. But my mathematics blog has always been more free-form. I think the trouble is that this is always, in principle, an easy post to write, so it’s always easy enough to push off a little longer, and let harder stuff take my attention. It’s always a mystery how my compulsive need to put things in order will clash with my desire to procrastinate my way out of life.

Still, to May. It was another heck of a month for us all. In it, I published only 13 posts, after a couple of 15-post months in a row. Since the frequency of posting is the one variable I am sure is within my control that affects my readership, how did getting a little more laconic affect my readership?

Bar chart of monthly readership for two years, five months, of work. The last three months have been fairly uniform at about two thousand readers each. October 2019 was abnormally high, around 8500 readers.
You have no idea how upset I am that I didn’t aimlessly hit ‘reload’ just eleven more times in May.

It’s hard to tell, thanks to the October 2019 spike. But my readership crept up a little. There were 1,989 pages viewed in May. This is below the 12-month running average of 2,205.3, but the twelve-month average still includes that October with 8,667 views. There were 1,407 unique visitors, below but still close to the running average of 1,494.0 unique visitors. There were only 35 likes given, below the average of 60.8. But there were 18 comments, above the running average of 14.9. Of course, the twelve-month running average includes December 2019 when nobody left any comments here.

Taking the averages per posting gives me figures that look a little more popular. 153.0 visitors per posting, above the twelve-month running average of 124.6. 108.2 unique visitors per posting, above the average 83.8. Only 2.7 likes per posting, below the 3.7 average. But 1.4 comments per posting, above the 1.0 average.

Where did all these page views come from? Here’s the roster.

Country Readers
United States 1,140
India 128
United Kingdom 109
Canada 96
Australia 45
Philippines 41
Singapore 41
China 22
Turkey 22
Germany 21
Italy 17
Netherlands 17
Austria 14
United Arab Emirates 14
Brazil 13
Sweden 13
Finland 11
Denmark 10
France 10
Japan 10
Malaysia 10
Israel 9
Croatia 8
New Zealand 8
South Africa 8
Colombia 7
El Salvador 6
Hong Kong SAR China 6
Hungary 6
Indonesia 6
Norway 6
Poland 6
Taiwan 6
Egypt 5
Greece 5
Pakistan 5
Romania 5
Belgium 4
Qatar 4
Russia 4
Slovakia 4
Spain 4
Albania 3
Chile 3
Jamaica 3
Jordan 3
Mexico 3
Portugal 3
Serbia 3
Switzerland 3
Thailand 3
Ukraine 3
Argentina 2
Cayman Islands 2
Czech Republic 2
Laos 2
Myanmar (Burma) 2
Palestinian Territories 2
South Korea 2
Vietnam 2
Bahrain 1 (*)
Bangladesh 1
Brunei 1
Bulgaria 1
Cyprus 1
Georgia 1
Guyana 1
Honduras 1
Iraq 1
Ireland 1
Kazakhstan 1
Luxembourg 1
Mauritius 1
Nepal 1
Peru 1
Puerto Rico 1
Zimbabwe 1

This is 77 countries or country-like things all told. There’d been 73 in April and 78 in March. 17 of these were single-view countries. There were 12 of those in April and 30 in March. Only Bahrain has been a single-view country for two months in a row, now.

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in darkest pink. Most of the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand are in a fairly uniform light pink. Almost nothing in Africa is pink; nor are the Baltic states, the Arabian peninsula, Iran, or the adjacent former Soviet republics.
Someday I’ll have a reader in Greenland and I won’t know what to say to them.

All these people looked at, including the home page, 278 posts here. That’s comparable to the 265 of April and 255 of March. 153 pages got more than one view, comparable to the 134 of April and 145 of March. 33 got at least ten views, which is right in line with April’s 36 and March’s 35. The most views were given to some of the usual suspects:

The most popular thing posted in May? That was a tie, actually. One piece was Reading the Comics, May 9, 2020: Knowing the Angles Edition, the usual sort of thing. The other was Reading the Comics, May 2, 2020: What Is The Cosine Of Six Edition, a piece I had meant to follow up on. This is because it so happens that the cosine of six is a number we can, in principle, write out exactly. I had meant to write a post that went through the geometric reasoning that gets you there, but I kept not making time. But, for the short answer, here’s the cosine of six degrees.

First, this will be much easier if we (alas) use the Golden Ratio, φ. That’s a famous number and just about 1.61803. The cosine of six degrees is, to be exact,

\cos(36^\circ) = \left(\frac{1}{2} \cdot \phi\right)\cdot\left(\frac{1}{2} \sqrt{3}\right) + \sqrt{1 - \frac{1}{4} \phi^2} \cdot \left(\frac{1}{2} \right)

… which you recognize right away reduces to …

\cos(36^\circ) = \frac{1}{4}\sqrt{3} \phi + \frac{1}{4}\sqrt{3 - \phi}

This is a number pretty close to 0.99452, and you can get as many decimal digits as you like. You just have to go through working out decimal digits, ultimately, of \sqrt{5} . I include the first line because if you look closely at it, you’ll get a hint of how to find the cosine of six degrees. It’s the parts of an angle-subtraction formula for cosine.

WordPress estimates me as having published 7,442 words in May. That’s an average of a slender 496.13 words per posting. My average post for the year has fallen to 656 words; at the start of May it had been 691. To the start of June I’ve published 41,978 words here. I don’t know if that counts picture captions and alt text, and have not the faintest idea how it counts LaTeX symbols.

As of the start of June I’ve published 1,467 things, which drew 106,429 views from a recorded 58,907 unique visitors.

I’m hoping next week to start publishing the All 2020 Mathematics A-to-Z. Posts from it should be tagged so as to appear at this link. If you want to be sure you don’t miss any of them, I’m quite flattered. The RSS feed for all my essays as this link, and if you lack an RSS reader, you’re mistaken! You can get a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal and use their Reading page to read any RSS feed you like. Or you can click the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on this page, and add it to your WordPress reader.

For a short while there my Twitter account of @Nebusj was working. It’s gone back to where it will just accept WordPress’s automated announcements of posts here, though. I can’t do anything with it. I do have an account on the mathematics-themed Mastodon instance, @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, and occasionally manage to even just hang out chatting there. It’s hard to get a place in a new social media environment. You need a hook, and you need a playful bit of business anyone can do with you, which both serve to give you an identity. Then you need someone who’s already established to vouch for you as being okay. The A-to-Z is a pretty good hook but the rest is a bit hard. I’m in there trying, though.

Thanks always for reading, however you do it.

Also, because I will someday need this again: to write the ^\circ symbol in WordPress LaTeX, you need the symbol string ^\circ and do not ask me why it’s not, like, \deg (or better, \degree) instead.

I am getting ready for the 2020 Mathematics A-to-Z


At last I buckled down and took care of a nagging small task that, somehow, I kept putting off dedicating the time to doing. And that’s why my e-mail has gone from 300 things to a scant … wait, 26? That can’t be right. I must have deleted something I shouldn’t have.

But. The other thing I did was finally tag the first couple rounds of my Mathematics A-to-Z glossaries correctly. Now, so far as I am aware, every one of the essays I’ve written in the past six rounds appears on this roster of essays. There’s 181 posts listed there. But about two dozen of them are solicitations for essay topics or index pages or similar things, important but not explaining any particular mathematical topic.

That I have taken care of this hints at my next announcement. I am planning to start the 2020 A-to-Z. My plan is to start soliciting topics soon, and to begin publishing essays sometime in June.

I am going to do things a little different from previous years, though. The main thing is publishing schedule. I plan to publish just one essay per week.

In past years I’ve done two or three essays per week, and that is exciting to do. It’s also a lot of work and, I have to tell you, I’m not up for that much labor. A major part of my coping mechanism for the pandemic has been creative outlets. That, and building my daily walk up to where I should soon be able to hike to Ontario and back in an afternoon.

Still. I grant don’t know just what my limits are. But I feel certain doing more than glossary-type essay per week is beyond my limits. As it is I’m thinking of how I might adapt my self-imposed workload so that it stays a constructive force.

The most important things should be unchanged, though. I’ll ask for mathematical topics to write about, for each letter, and write about the ones that I think I can be interesting about. This might be my own choice if I feel I’m too ignorant of the suggested topics to do any of them competently. I’ll post the essays previously done for various letters, but am open to revisiting a topic, if I feel I can do a much better job given a second try.

Should be exciting, anyway, however it all turns out.

How April 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog


Yes, I feel a bit weird looking at the past month’s readership this early in the month too. I was tempted to go back and look at March’s figures all over again just so I stay tardy. But, no sense putting it off further, especially as I’m thinking to over-commit myself again already.

In April I managed to publish 15 things. This amazes me given that my spirits are about like everyone’s spirits are. I did not repeat having 2,000 readers this past month. But it came surprisingly close. Here’s a look at the readership figures.

There were 1,959 pages viewed over the course of April. This is a bit under the twelve-month running average of 2,127.1. But I’m going to be under the twelve-month running average at least until that October 2019 spike fades into the background. I’m all right with that. There were 1,314 unique visitors, which again is under the running average of 1,440.2 unique visitors in a month.

Bar chart of about two and a half years' worth of monthly readership figures. After three depressed month the readership has popped up two months in a row to about two thousand people. October 2019 is a prominent spike above all this.
So while the total number of page views decreased, the number of unique visitors rose. What this means: I’m getting better at driving people off fast. That’s comforting.

The measures that I think of as showing engagement were poor, as they usually are. There were nine comments received over the month, down from the 15.3 average. More surprisingly there were only 44 likes given over the month, noticeably below the 60.4 average.

Everything looks a bit better when pro-rated per posting. The 130.6 views per posting are above even the twelve-month average for that of 120.8 views per posting. The 87.6 unique visitors per posting beats the average of 81.1. It’s still 0.6 comments per posting, below the average of 1.0. And only 2.9 likes per posting, below the average of 3.8. Can’t have everything, I suppose. But I may be doing something to affect that pattern.

There were, counting my home page, 265 postings that got any kind of views in April. That’s up from the 255 of March and 210 of February. 134 of them got more than one view, down from March’s 145 but up from February’s 108. 36 of them got at least ten views, compared to 35 in March and 25 in February. And what got the most page views? About what you’d expect:

The most popular thing I published in April was Rjlipton’s thoughts on the possible ABC Conjecture proof, which is pretty good performance for a post that just says someone else wrote a thing. I don’t know why my headsup posts like that are so reliably popular. But I suppose if people trust my judgement about stuff that’s almost as good as people trusting my prose.

73 countries or country-like things sent me readers in April. 12 of them were single-view countries. This is down from the 78 countries in March, but up from the 67 in February. There had been 30 single-view countries in March and 19 in February, so I guess people are doing more archive-reading, though. Here’s the details for that:

Mercator-style map with the United States in darkest red. Most of the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand are in a fairly uniform pink. A smattering of African countries are also in pink.
When you hold the mouse over a country that sent you any readers the map pops up with the name of the country and how many views it got. So I went slightly crazy trying to figure out some of those little South Pacific islands until I learned they were lint on my screen. I’d like to know how to zoom into this map.

Country Readers
United States 1,160
Canada 128
India 105
United Kingdom 102
Australia 34
Singapore 31
Germany 29
Poland 21
Romania 21
Austria 15
Brazil 15
Philippines 15
Finland 14
Netherlands 14
China 13
Italy 13
Ireland 12
Kazakhstan 10
South Korea 10
Thailand 10
American Samoa 9
Japan 9
Saudi Arabia 9
South Africa 9
France 8
Spain 8
Hong Kong SAR China 7
United Arab Emirates 7
Albania 6
Belgium 6
Indonesia 6
Portugal 6
Turkey 6
Kenya 5
Israel 4
Malaysia 4
Slovenia 4
Sweden 4
Switzerland 4
Argentina 3
Croatia 3
Egypt 3
European Union 3
Greece 3
New Zealand 3
Russia 3
Trinidad & Tobago 3
Uruguay 3
Vietnam 3
Bangladesh 2
Czech Republic 2
Denmark 2
Dominican Republic 2
Estonia 2
Greenland 2
Mexico 2
Norway 2
Peru 2
Puerto Rico 2
Serbia 2
Taiwan 2
Bahrain 1
Bosnia & Herzegovina 1
Bulgaria 1
Hungary 1
Kyrgyzstan 1
Lithuania 1 (**)
Malawi 1
Nigeria 1
Pakistan 1
Seychelles 1
Sri Lanka 1
St. Lucia 1

Lithuania has given me a single view each of the last three months. No other countries are on a similar streak.

WordPress says I published a mere 8,566 words in April. That’s my most laconic month since January. With 15 posts, that gives me an average of just under 571.1 words per posting, which is my shortest of the year. It brings my average words per posting for the year down to 691; it had been 721 at the start of April. As of the start of May I’d published 50 posts and 34,536 words since the start of the year.

As of the start of May I’ve posted 1,454 pieces altogether. They’ve drawn 104,439 views from 57,501 acknowledged unique visitors.

I’d be glad, always, to have you as a regular reader. You can put this blog in your WordPress reader by using the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on the upper right corner of the page. If you prefer to use an RSS reader, the feed is available to you. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can get one as your friends page with a free Dreamwidth or Livejournal account. And, excitingly, my Twitter account @Nebusj has resumed working. I’ll maybe even get back into the habit of using it. I am also on the mathematics-themed Mastodon instance @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, and trying to figure a good habit for that. We are all on journeys of discovering our new habits, though.

Thank you for reading this. I hope you read more, and maybe comment some. Please take care.

How March 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog, Finally


And now I can close my books on March 2020. Late? Yes, so it’s late. You know what it’s been like. It was a month full of changes of fate, not least because on the 10th I volunteered to tape the empty slot hosting Denise Gaskins’s Playful Math Education Blog Carnival, and right after that the world ended. Hosting such an event I can expect to bring in new readers, although the trouble organizing things meant I didn’t post until the last day of the month. Still, I could hope to see some readership bump. How did that all turn out?

In March I posted 15 things, which is about as busy as I could hope to manage for a month that’s not eaten up by an A-to-Z sequence. And that for a month when I didn’t feel I could point out my series on information theory as explained by the March Madness basketball tournament. I believe the frequency of my own posting is the one variable in my control that affects my readership numbers. And this looks to be true. There were 2,049 page views here in March. This is a bit below the twelve-month running average of 2,072.3 views, but remember, that figure has the October 2019 spike in it. Take October out of it and the running average was a mere 1,472.7 page views.

Bar chart showing two and a half years' worth of monthly readership figures, both page views and unique visitors, captured at the very start of April.
Not denying that it’s nice I was ready at exactly midnight, between the 31st of March and 1st of April, Universal Time to catch a screenshot where no April views had been gathered. I’d just rather have been out messing around at the hipster bar where we play pinball Tuesday nights instead.

There were 1,267 unique visitors in March. That’s again below the running average of 1,414.1, but again, the October spike throws that off. Without the October spike the running average was 964.3. 1,267 unique visitors is still my fourth-greatest number of unique visitors on record.

There were 61 likes given to any of my posts in March, essentially tied with the running average of 63.4 likes for a month. There were 21 comments, a nice boost from my running average of 13.9.

Per posting, my averages look pretty good. There were 136.6 views per posting in March, above the running average of 117.7. There were 84.5 visitors per posting, above the average 79.7. There were 4.1 likes per posting, above the average of 4.0 for the first time in ages. And there were even 1.4 comments per posting, well above the 0.9 comments per posting average, and my highest average there since January 2019.

So what all was particularly popular? The Playful Math Education Blog Carnival, alas, posted too late to take the top spot, although it’s looking good to place in April. The top five postings last month in order were:

I assume the popularity of that March 11 Reading the Comics post came from people looking for Pi Day strips. Why they ultimately found the 2016 Pi Day comics, rather than another year’s, I don’t know. I think the 2016 was a good year for strips, so maybe that’s what drew people in.

Counting my home page, 255 pages got any views at all in March. That’s up from the 210 of February and 218 of January. 145 of them got more than one page view, up from 108 in February and 102 in January. 35 posts got at least ten views, up from 25 in February and 27 in January.

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in deepest red, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Western Europe, the Baltic states, and South and Southeast Asia in a more uniform pink.
Also, won’t fib here: my least-favorite part of this is trying to think of alt text that describes a map like this. Some month I’m just going to re-run the previous month’s and see if anybody says anything. … Wait, no readers in Japan? That seems unusual.

There were 78 countries or country-like entities sending me readers in March. Hey, one for each episode of the Original Star Trek, nice. That’s up from 67 in February and 63 in January. But this time there were 30 single-view countries, well above February’s 19 and January’s 18. Here’s the list of them:

Country Readers
United States 1,244
Philippines 125
Thailand 80
United Kingdom 75
Canada 69
India 60
Germany 53
Singapore 35
Australia 27
Puerto Rico 26
Italy 17
Finland 16
France 14
Taiwan 12
Turkey 11
Brazil 10
Spain 10
Indonesia 9
Israel 8
China 7
Greece 7
Malaysia 7
South Africa 7
Denmark 6
Pakistan 6
Belgium 5
Hong Kong SAR China 5
Sweden 5
Switzerland 5
United Arab Emirates 5
European Union 4
Mexico 4
Netherlands 4
Saudi Arabia 4
Sri Lanka 4
Bulgaria 3
Croatia 3
Czech Republic 3
Nigeria 3
Norway 3
Qatar 3
Romania 3
Fiji 2
Hungary 2
Luxembourg 2
New Zealand 2
Oman 2
Serbia 2
American Samoa 1 (***)
Bahamas 1
Bangladesh 1
Bermuda 1
Cambodia 1 (**)
Colombia 1
Costa Rica 1
Cyprus 1
Egypt 1 (*)
Georgia 1
Guam 1
Ireland 1 (*)
Jamaica 1
Kenya 1
Latvia 1
Lebanon 1
Lithuania 1 (*)
Macau SAR China 1
Malta 1
Nepal 1
Nicaragua 1
Panama 1
Russia 1
Rwanda 1
Slovenia 1
South Korea 1 (**)
Trinidad & Tobago 1
Ukraine 1
Uruguay 1
Vietnam 1

Egypt, Ireland, and Lithuania were single-reader countries two months in a row. Cambodia and South Korea are single-reader countries three months in a row now. American Samoa is in its fourth month of a single reader for me.

In March I published 10,113 words by WordPress’s counter. This was 674.2 words per posting. So while that’s about five hundred more words than I wrote in February the average post shrank by nearly two hundred words. For the year to date I’m averaging now 721 words per post, down from 755.1 at the end of February.

As of the start of April I had collected 102,481 views from 56,182 logged unique visitors, over the course of 1,439 postings.

If you’d like to be among my regular readers, please do. You can use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on the upper right corner of the page to add this to your WordPress reader. Or you can use the RSS feed https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ to read my stuff without showing up in any of my statistics. If you need an RSS reader, get a free account on Dreamwidth or Livejournal, which still exists. You can use their Friends pages as RSS readers. I’m still officially on Twitter as @Nebusj, and sort-of on the mathematics-themed Mastodon instance as @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, although I haven’t really got the hang of what to do there yet. We’ll see. Thank you for reading.

How February 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog


Oh, yes, so. I did intend to review my readership around here last month. It’s just that things got in the way. Most of them not related to the Covid-19 pandemic; it’s much more been personal matters and my paying job and such. If someone is interested in paying me to observe that I had readers WordPress records as coming merely from the European Union, drop me a note. We can work something out. Heck, slip me ten bucks and I’ll write an essay on any mathematics topic I don’t feel wholly incompetent to discuss. Or wait around for the 2020 Mathematics A-to-Z, coming whenever I do feel up to it.

Also, do please remember that I’m hosting the Playful Math Education Blog Carnival at the end of this month. If you’ve spotted anything on the web — blog, static web site, video, podcast — that enlightened you about some field of mathematics, please let me know. And let me know of your own projects. It’ll be fun.

Now to see what my readership was like back in February, impossibly long ago as that does seem to be.

Bar chart of four and a half years of monthly readership statistics, with the readership having returned to a level after a huge spike in October.
I mean, yes, the anomaly in October makes the rest of my readership look like nothing, but if you look at the apparent floor I’ve had since July and compare it to one or two or three years ago I’m clearly managing to get a nice steady influx of readers and bots that WordPress doesn’t recognize as such.

I posted 11 things in February. January had been 10. There were 1,419 page views in February. That’s just about what January was. It’s below the twelve-month running average of 2,060.3 page views. This looks dire, but it’s about the same as January’s readership. And the twelve-month average does have that anomalous October spike messing things up. If we pretend that October didn’t happen, well, that mean was something like 1460 page views.

There were 991 unique visitors in February. That’s again rather below the twelve-month running average of 1401.1 unique visitors. But again if we pretend there was no October, then the running average was something like 950 unique visitors, so things aren’t all that dire. Just that the occasional taste of popularity spoils you for ages to come.

A mere 36 things got likes here in February, below the running average of 64.1 and I’m not working out what that is with October included. Most of that readership spike didn’t convert to likes or comments anyway. Those were well-liked months but they were also ones that got something posted every single day. There were 12 comments in February, roughly in line with the 13.8 comments running average.

Per post, all these figures look a bit better. There were 129 views per posting, just over the 116.6 running average. There were 90.1 unique visitors per posting, above the running average of 78.6. There were 3.3 likes per posting, below the anemic average of 4.1. There were even 1.1 comments per posting, technically above the average of 0.9. If I could just post something four times per day that October peak would be merely an average month.

The most popular postings in February were mostly the usual suspects. Just one surprised me with its appearance:

The most popular thing written in February were two equally-popular Reading the Comics posts, Symbols Edition and 90s Doonesbury Edition.

There were 210 pages that got any views at all in February, close to the 218 of January. 108 of them got more than one view, just about the same as January’s 102. 25 pages got at least ten views. The previous couple months saw 23 and 27 posts that popular.

67 countries or country-like entities sent me any readers at all in February. That’s up from 63 in January and 60 in December. 19 of them were single-view countries, up from January’s 15 and December’s 18. Here’s the roster:

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in darkest pink. Most of the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceana are in a more uniform pink. Mediterranean Africa and a few scattered other countries are also represented, though not Mongolia or most of the former Soviet republics.
Aw, my Scandinavian readers are all moving on to other stuff.

Country Readers
United States 851
Philippines 85
India 57
Canada 53
United Kingdom 41
Germany 35
Australia 26
Finland 23
Singapore 23
Brazil 19
Thailand 14
Denmark 13
Hungary 13
Hong Kong SAR China 10
South Africa 10
Russia 9
Japan 8
Netherlands 8
New Zealand 8
Vietnam 8
Mexico 7
Indonesia 6
Poland 6
Malaysia 5
Belgium 4
France 4
Italy 4
Sweden 4
Austria 3
Colombia 3
Greece 3
Jamaica 3
Uganda 3
Ukraine 3
Algeria 2
Azerbaijan 2
China 2
Cyprus 2
Ghana 2
Israel 2
Kenya 2
Nigeria 2
Portugal 2
Slovenia 2
Spain 2
Switzerland 2
Turkey 2
United Arab Emirates 2
American Samoa 1 (**)
Argentina 1
Bulgaria 1
Cambodia 1 (*)
Croatia 1
Dominican Republic 1
Egypt 1
European Union 1
Ireland 1
Libya 1
Lithuania 1
Northern Mariana Islands 1
Peru 1
Puerto Rico 1
Saudi Arabia 1 (**)
Slovakia 1 (**)
South Korea 1 (*)
Sri Lanka 1
Taiwan 1

Cambodia and South Korea were single-view countries in January also. American Samoa, Saudi Arabia, and Slovakia have been single-view countries for three months.

In February I posted 9,699 words by WordPress’s counter. That’s 881.7 words per posting. For the year my average post, as of the start of the month, was 755.1 words per post. Some months are talky. I had started the month with 100,432 page views, just missing out on being number 100,000 myself. And these came from a logged 54,920 unique visitors. And I had posted a total of 1,424 things from the dawn of time to the 1st of March, which by some strange fluke was itself fifty thousand years ago.

Well, I hope to keep posting and to review March a little closer to the 1st of April, which looks to be about fifty thousand years in the future. To follow along with me, add the feed https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ to your RSS reader. If you need an RSS reader, sign up for a free account on Dreamwidth or Livejournal; you can put RSS feeds on your Friends page. Or if you prefer a more old-fashioned way that shows up in my statistics here, use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button at the upper right corner of this page and follow it through your WordPress account. Or follow my fallow @Nebusj account on Twitter where new posts get announced at least. As ever, thank you for reading. Be well, please.

How January 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog


Let me now take a moment to review my readership figures for the last past month. I know February is already off to a sluggish start for me as a writer. I’ve had, particularly, my paying job demanding more mental focus than usual. But I got a wonderful crop of comic strips to discuss last week, so that’ll be some nice fun posts to write over the current week.

The month was, in readership, almost a repeat of December 2019. There were 1,436 page views from 951 unique visitors. December saw 1,386 page views from 909 unique visitors. These figures are both well below the twelve-month running average of 2,055.2 page views from 1,393.2 unique visitors. I am going to be filing a lot of reports like that, at least until either the great spike of October 2019 fades into history. Or I get another like it.

Bar chart of several years' worth of readership figures, by month. The great spike in October is moving into the past; January's is nearly a duplicate of December's.
I finally did it! I caught my statistics right at midnight server time! … Wait, this says 950 visitors in January, while the statistic now says 951. Did I get this before the 11:59 UTC page views were logged?

There were 34 things liked here in January, down even from December’s figure and about half the twelve-month average of 66.5. There were also seven comments in January, not quite half the twelve-month average of 15.0. But, compared to December’s 0, that’s a great rise.

The per-post figures look generally better. This is because January was a laconic month, with a mere ten posts. And two of them were statistics-review posts. But that gives me 143.6 views per posting, above the average of 114.2. And 95.1 visitors per posting, above the average of 76.6. There were 3.4 likes per posting, below the average of 4.2. And 0.7 comments per posting, a statistic I didn’t need my spreadsheet to calculate. But that’s still below the twelve-month running average of 1.0.

218 pages, including my home page, got any page views in January. There’d been 224 getting such in December. 102 pages got more than one view in January, which is exactly the count that got more than one view in December. This underscores what a duplicate month January was. 23 got at least ten views, down from 27, so that’s a difference finally.

The most popular posts in January included two perennials, that one linear programming post that got linked from somewhere, and one that seems like it must have fit some weird search engine term:

Really, though, why would a comics post from January 2019 get back to the top of the pile suddenly?

63 countries sent me any page views at all in January, down from 60 in December and 94 in November. There were 15 single-view countries, down fro 18 the previous month and 24 the month before that. Here’s the roster:

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in darkest pink. Western Europe, South Asia, Australia, and much of South America are in a more uniform pink.
Oh, hi, Tunisia. Nice to see you! I hope everything’s okay. Uganda’s the landlocked African country to show up here and that’s honestly going to help me remember where Uganda is now.

Country Readers
United States 847
United Kingdom 65
Philippines 60
Canada 58
India 47
Germany 41
Australia 37
Argentina 35
Brazil 22
Singapore 21
Spain 19
Finland 12
Japan 12
Thailand 9
Sweden 8
France 7
Netherlands 7
Romania 7
South Africa 7
Norway 6
Greece 5
Italy 5
Malaysia 5
Mexico 5
Nigeria 5
Uganda 5
Austria 4
Denmark 4
Guyana 4
New Zealand 4
Russia 4
Costa Rica 3
Croatia 3
Hungary 3
Israel 3
Lithuania 3
Poland 3
Serbia 3
Switzerland 3
U.S. Virgin Islands 3
Vietnam 3
Bahrain 2
Brunei 2
Hong Kong SAR China 2
Ireland 2
Pakistan 2
Taiwan 2
Turkey 2
American Samoa 1 (*)
Bangladesh 1
Belgium 1
Cambodia 1
Chile 1
Ecuador 1
Indonesia 1
Panama 1
Portugal 1
Saudi Arabia 1 (*)
Slovakia 1 (*)
Slovenia 1
South Korea 1
Tunisia 1
United Arab Emirates 1

American Samoa, Saudi Arabia, and Slovakia were single-view countries in December. None of these were also single-view countries in November.

In January I published 6,158 words, says WordPress. I don’t know how that counts things like subject lines and image captions. It’s a shame there’s literally no way to find out, ever. But with that spread over ten posts, I have an average of 616 words per posting for the month, and so far for the year. My average post for 2019 was 861 words. This was driven up by things like the A-to-Z sequence.

As of the start of February I’d posted 1,413 things on this blog. They attracted 99,013 views from a recorded 53,928 unique visitors. I’m trying to not watch obsessively as I approach 100,000.

If you’d like to take a chance at being reader number 100,000, please visit this page, or click on the “Follow Nebusresearch” button at the upper right corner of this page. If you don’t care about being reader 100,000, I don’t mind. You can use your RSS reader to watch the https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ at your leisure. And my automated-but-lost-to-me Twitter account @Nebusj posts announcements of things as they are published.

Thank you for reading, whatever way you choose to do it.

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