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How All Of 2021 Treated My Mathematics Blog

Oh, you know, how did 2021 treat anybody? I always do one of these surveys for the end of each month. It’s only fair to do one for the end of the year also.

2021 was my tenth full year blogging around here. I might have made more of that if the actual anniversary in late September hadn’t coincided with a lot of personal hardships. 2021 was a quiet year around these parts with only 94 things posted. That’s the fewest of any full year. (I posted only 41 things in 2011, but I only started posting at all in late September of that year.) That seems not to have done my readership any harm. There were 28,832 pages viewed in 2021, up from 24,474 in 2020 and a fair bit above the 24,662 given in my previously best-viewed year of 2019. Eleven data points (the partial year 2011, and the full years 2012 through 2021) aren’t many, so there’s no real drawing patterns here. But it does seem like I have a year of sharp increases and then a year of slight declines in page views. I suppose we’ll check in in 2023 and see if that pattern holds.

Bar chart of annual views and unique visitors from 2012 to the present. After nearly level view counts in 2019 and 2020 there was a good-size rise for 2021. — The number of unique visitors for 2012 is so tiny because they started recording that (so far as they let us know) in, like, late December so that figure is meaningless. The rest seem all right, though.

One thing not declining? The number of unique visitors. WordPress recorded 20,339 unique visitors in 2021, a comfortable bit above 2020’s 16,870 and 2019s 16,718. So far I haven’t seen a year-over-year decline in unique visitors. That’s gratifying.

Less gratifying: the number of likes continues its decline. It hasn’t increased, around here, since 2015 when a seemingly impossible 3,273 likes were given by readers. In 2021 there were only 481 likes, the fewest since 2013. The dropping-off of likes has looked so resembled a Poisson distribution that I’m tempted to see whether it actually fits that.

Bar chart of the annual likes from 2013 to the present. It rose sharply from 2013 to 2015 and has declined in a not-quite-exponential pattern since then. — I know, my first thought was that it looked like an overdamped system receiving a shock, but I don’t think the decline is consistent enough to support that.

The number of comments dropped a slight bit. There were 188 given around here in 2021, but that’s only ten fewer than were given in 2020. It’s seven more than were given in 2019, so if there’s any pattern there I don’t know it.

WordPress lists 483 posts around here as having gotten four or more page views in the year. It won’t tell me everything that got even a single view, though. I’m not willing to do the work of stitching together the monthly page view data to learn everything that was of interest however passing. I’ll settle with knowing what was most popular. And what were my most popular posts of the year mercifully ended? These posts from 2021 got more views than all the others:

No, You Can’t Say What 6/2(1+2) Equals. This was in response to a thing going around Twitter. My @nebusj account has gone feral (Safari didn’t want to load it and I don’t care enough to sort out the problem), but people bring stuff up to me now and then.
How Did Compute!’s Gazette’s MLX Program Work? A bit of retrocomputing work I did, as I finally got enough energy together to answer something I had wondered about since the mid-80s. It turns out to be pretty straightforward.
How To Find A Logarithm Without Much Computing Power This is a compilation post, identifying the pieces from an earlier sequence of essays. But it’s still interesting and useful, if you want to know the hard work of calculating logarithms.
My Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z: Hyperbola This, finally, is something from my big project of the year showing up. I don’t know why ‘hyperbola’ got so popular. I suspect it’s that people have a lot of questions about hyperbolas. And I got to combine that with some thoughts about why hyperbolas seem scary in a way that ellipses don’t.
Reading the Comics, March 14, 2021: Pi Day Edition One of my few comic strip posts for the year. I knew it’d be well-received, though.
Here’s how to get rid of WordPress’s Block Editor and get the good editor back This is a public service and I hope everyone trying to use WordPress to blog can use this. Yes, I have noticed they’re trying to make the good editor annoying, by having menu bars pop up automatically opened. Don’t give up. Even the old editor hit by an annoying stick is better than the Block Editor.
How did Compute!’s and Compute!’s Gazette’s New MLX Work? A follow-up bit of retrocomputing in which I figured out the harder MLX checksum scheme.

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. The Philippines and India are in an intermediately dark red. — Hey look, it’s a naturally occurring International Telecommunication Union zonal map! And at this point may I point out that besides being a lower-tier pop-mathematics writer I am also a lower-tier humor blogger?

There were 143 countries, or country-like entities, sending me any page views in 2021. I don’t know how that compares to earlier years. But here’s the roster of where page views came from:

Country	Readers
United States	13,723
Philippines	3,994
India	2,507
Canada	1,393
United Kingdom	865
Australia	659
Germany	442
Brazil	347
South Africa	296
European Union	273
Sweden	230
Singapore	210
Italy	204
Austria	178
France	143
Finland	141
Malaysia	135
South Korea	135
Hong Kong SAR China	132
Ireland	131
Netherlands	117
Turkey	117
Spain	107
Pakistan	105
Thailand	102
Mexico	101
United Arab Emirates	100
Indonesia	97
Switzerland	95
Norway	87
New Zealand	86
Belgium	76
Nigeria	76
Russia	74
Japan	64
Taiwan	62
Bangladesh	58
Poland	55
Greece	54
Denmark	52
Colombia	51
Israel	49
Ghana	46
Portugal	44
Czech Republic	40
Vietnam	38
Saudi Arabia	33
Argentina	30
Lebanon	30
Ecuador	28
Nepal	28
Egypt	25
Kuwait	23
Serbia	22
Chile	21
Croatia	21
Jamaica	20
Peru	20
Tanzania	20
Costa Rica	19
Romania	17
Trinidad & Tobago	17
Sri Lanka	16
Ukraine	15
Hungary	13
Jordan	13
Bulgaria	12
China	12
Albania	11
Bahrain	11
Morocco	11
Estonia	10
Qatar	10
Slovakia	10
Cyprus	9
Kenya	9
Zimbabwe	9
Algeria	8
Oman	8
Belarus	7
Georgia	7
Honduras	7
Lithuania	7
Puerto Rico	7
Venezuela	7
Bosnia & Herzegovina	6
Ethiopia	6
Iraq	6
Belize	5
Bhutan	5
Moldova	5
Uruguay	5
Dominican Republic	4
Guam	4
Kazakhstan	4
Macedonia	4
Mauritius	4
Zambia	4
Åland Islands	3
Antigua & Barbuda	3
Bahamas	3
Cambodia	3
El Salvador	3
Gambia	3
Guatemala	3
Slovenia	3
Suriname	3
American Samoa	2
Azerbaijan	2
Bolivia	2
Cameroon	2
Guernsey	2
Malta	2
Papua New Guinea	2
Réunion	2
Rwanda	2
Sudan	2
Uganda	2
Afghanistan	1
Andorra	1
Armenia	1
Fiji	1
Grenada	1
Iceland	1
Isle of Man	1
Latvia	1
Liberia	1
Liechtenstein	1
Luxembourg	1
Maldives	1
Marshall Islands	1
Mongolia	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Namibia	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Panama	1
Paraguay	1
Senegal	1
St. Lucia	1
St. Vincent & Grenadines	1
Togo	1
Tunisia	1
Vatican City	1

I don’t know that I’ve gotten a reader from Vatican City before. I hope it’s not about the essay figuring what dates are most and least likely for Easter. I’d expect them to know that already.

My plan is to spend a bit more time republishing posts from old A-to-Z’s. And then I hope to finish off the Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z, late and battered but still carrying on. I intend to post something at least once a week after that, although I don’t have a clear idea what that will be. Perhaps I’ll finally work out the algorithm for Compute!’s New Automatic Proofreader. Perhaps I’ll fill in with A-to-Z style essays for topics I had skipped before. Or I might get back to reading the comics for their mathematics topics. I’m open to suggestions.

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?

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 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.

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:

How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side? which will always be my most popular thing.
The Playful Math Education Blog Carnival #136 which was March’s bit of overcommitting, it turns out, but includes a bundle of intersting things to look at.
A Venn Diagram of the Real Number System which is not actually a Venn Diagram.
How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw and boy is it going to spoil things if I ever think of a seventh trapezoid.
How Two Trapezoids Make This Simpler in figuring out the area of one. I swear, two trapezoids does make it easier.

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.

How All Of 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

I’d promised during my review of the past month that I’d also look at my readership for the whole of 2019. It took a bit longer than I figured, but I’ve gotten there. 2019 was the eighth full year that I’ve been mathematics-blogging. I started in September of 2011 and needed a while to figure out what the heck I was doing. I think I knew what I was doing for roughly half of last year’s A-to-Z sequence. I’ve since forgotten it.

2019 was my most-read year to date: 24,662 page views from 16,718 unique visitors. It’s a heck of growth from even my 2018 figures, of 16,597 page views and 9,769 unique visitors. This 49 percent growth in year-to-year page views is the second greatest I’ve had. 2014-to-2015 saw a 60 percent growth. 2015 is also the first year I did an A-to-Z and I’m certain that made a difference. The 71 percent growth in unique visitors was the greatest growth in that statistic.

Bar chart showing annual readership, which rose significantly in 2012, 2015, 2018 and 2019, and held steady or drifted downward in the other years. — WordPress only started tracking, or at least reporting, unique visitors partway through 2012 which is why the darker unique-visitors bar in these makes it look like I had two visitors who read three thousand posts each that year.

A good part of that is a fluke event, though. One post in my A-to-Z sequence got linked from somewhere and that brought a flood of readers in. Easily something like five thousand people came in, read one or two posts, and left again. I’d still have a record year without that influx. But I don’t see anything else getting a reference like that, so I have to suppose that 2020 is going to be a more challenging year.

Bar chart showing the number of likes over the years; 2014, 2017, 2018, and 2019 were at roughly a thousand likes, with 2015 and 2016 four times and two times that figure. — Again, those 2012 and 2013 figures look suspiciously low, but I can’t think of any changes in how WordPress reported statistics which would make that make sense.

I always talk about how I’m getting fewer likes and even fewer comments than I used to. The yearly statistics show just how big the drop off is. There were 798 things liked in 2019, the lowest number since 2013. I’m not sure that the statistics for 2011 through 2013 are quite right. The jump between 2013’s 262 and 2014’s 1,045 seems suspicious. I’ve had a steady decline since 2015, though.

Bar chart showing the number of comments over the years. 2015 had the unquestioned peak, with 2016 and 2018 next-best, but the progression is a decline from that 2015 high point. — I certainly am not looking at this chart and the Likes chart and thinking that my chance to be a successful blogger came and went in 2015, nope!

And there were 181 comments in all of 2019. That’s half of 2018’s comment count. It’s my lowest number since 2013. I suspect part of the trouble is Reading the Comics posts. They’re good content, yes, but as initial posts they’re fairly closed things. Even the A-to-Z posts, apart from the appeals for subject matter, are pretty closed topics. I’ve clearly forgotten how to write open essays.

Besides my home page there were 797 pages that got at least one page view over 2019. There were 635 that got at least two page views, 304 getting at least ten views, 16 getting at least a hundred, and two that got over a thousand page views. Also, 109 of the pages viewed were Reading the Comics posts. The most popular of these were:

The first and third of these were posted in 2019. The top five essays posted in 2019 would be the linear programming and the Hamiltonian essays, plus:

Apart from the linear programming essay, I understand why these A-to-Z topics should be so popular. They’re big topics, ones that support wide swaths of mathematics.

Over the whole of 2019, people from 148 countries or country-like entities read something here. I feel pretty good about the spread of people, really. The only anomaly is that it’s been yet another year with no Greenland readers. I know there’s 14 people in Greenland but it does seem like someone would have read a page of mine by accident. Madagascar is a similar curious anomaly. 31 countries had only a single page view, which is really not that different to how many single-view countries I’ll have in any one month. Here’s the full roster of reading countries:

Mercator-style map of the world. The United States is in the darkest red, but most of the world has at least some pink in it. The exceptions are some of Saharan Africa, Greenland, Cuba, Madagascar, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. — I normally don’t mind Mercator but it does create this enormous visual over-estimation of how many people in Greenland refuse to read me.

Country	Readers
United States	13,872
India	1,161
United Kingdom	1,153
Canada	997
Philippines	907
Germany	562
Australia	466
France	347
Sweden	294
Singapore	250
Italy	245
Brazil	244
Netherlands	232
South Africa	180
Finland	176
Denmark	175
Spain	166
Russia	148
Poland	146
Switzerland	129
Ireland	121
Hong Kong SAR China	120
Norway	111
Japan	110
Belgium	106
Mexico	106
Pakistan	89
Slovenia	86
Turkey	85
Malaysia	77
New Zealand	74
Austria	66
Thailand	65
Indonesia	63
Portugal	62
Israel	59
Czech Republic	58
China	54
Greece	54
South Korea	54
Romania	52
Taiwan	52
United Arab Emirates	52
Colombia	51
European Union	47
Argentina	42
Ukraine	40
Hungary	39
Vietnam	39
Nepal	36
American Samoa	35
Latvia	32
Macedonia	31
Serbia	31
Slovakia	31
Bangladesh	30
Croatia	28
Chile	25
Kenya	24
Saudi Arabia	24
Nigeria	23
Egypt	18
Lithuania	18
Peru	18
Puerto Rico	18
Sri Lanka	17
Ecuador	16
Bulgaria	15
Jordan	15
Jamaica	14
Morocco	12
Lebanon	11
Belarus	10
Algeria	9
Belize	9
Uruguay	9
Bosnia & Herzegovina	8
Guatemala	8
Iceland	8
Malta	8
Myanmar (Burma)	8
Panama	8
Uganda	8
Costa Rica	7
Estonia	7
Tanzania	7
Cyprus	6
Ghana	6
Guam	6
Iraq	6
Trinidad & Tobago	6
Tunisia	6
Bolivia	5
Cape Verde	5
Georgia	5
Luxembourg	5
Venezuela	5
Zimbabwe	5
Armenia	4
Bahrain	4
Ethiopia	3
Kuwait	3
Mongolia	3
Albania	2
Azerbaijan	2
Botswana	2
Cambodia	2
Dominican Republic	2
El Salvador	2
Fiji	2
Martinique	2
Mauritius	2
Namibia	2
Papua New Guinea	2
Paraguay	2
Rwanda	2
Uzbekistan	2
Angola	1
Bermuda	1
Brunei	1
Burundi	1
Cameroon	1
Congo – Kinshasa	1
Côte d’Ivoire	1
Curaçao	1
Djibouti	1
Faroe Islands	1
Guyana	1
Honduras	1
Iran	1
Kazakhstan	1
Laos	1
Maldives	1
Marshall Islands	1
Moldova	1
Montenegro	1
Nicaragua	1
Oman	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Qatar	1
Réunion	1
Senegal	1
Sint Maarten	1
Somalia	1
Sudan	1
Turks & Caicos Islands	1
U.S. Virgin Islands	1
Zambia	1

I’m delighted there were three countries that had at least a thousand page views. I’ll try not to think how there could have been a fourth thousand-view country if only I’d hit refresh a couple times more when I was in Canada back in June.

So for the whole of 2019 I posted 173,087 words, according to WordPress’s figures. This was the third-greatest number of words I’ve written in a year, after 2016’s 199,465 words and 2018’s 186,639 words. These were spread over 201 posts. That’s my second-greatest number of posts in a year, after 2016’s 213 posts. This implies my average posting was 861 words. This I’m glad to see. It’s the first time in four years that I’ve averaged under 900 words per posting.

For the year, I averaged 1.5 comments per posting. That’s the lowest figure I’ve had for any completed year. It’s under half the average for each year from 2013 through 2018. The average likes per post is a less dire dropoff. For 2019 I had an average 3.8 likes per posting; that’s the first time since 2013 that it’s been fewer than five likes per posting.

Twice over 2019 I set a new record for daily views. My record now was set the 16th of October, when 5,003 page views came in. 720 came in the next day. It was a bit much. That 16th of October, I believe, upset the previous record that was set the 2nd of October. Before that, my greatest number of page views had been some weird day back in … I want to say March 2014. Sometime around then, anyway.

And that’s last year, in reading around here. I remain quite happy to have you as reader here this year. You can do that by using the “Follow Nebusresearch” button that’s currently on the upper-right corner of the page. (I am doing my annual thinking about changing the theme around here, if I can find a new theme that I like at all. If I do change, that might relocate the button.) Or you can use an RSS reader with the feed https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed to view posts as they come in without my being able to track anything. And again, a free account in Dreamdwidth or Livejournal, which both still exist, lets you use their Friends page as RSS reader.

How December 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

I have not been putting off the regular monthly review of my readership statistics because I didn’t like how they looked. I’ve had things occupying my day and haven’t had time to tend the blog is all. That’s come to a stop now, though, and I can look seriously at how things went around here last month. Later, I hope to do a review of the last year.

So, I don’t like how the readership around here looked. I knew there’d be some falling off, as last year’s A to Z project wrapped up. Fewer posts correspond very well with fewer page views, and fewer unique visitors. I wasn’t expecting the fall-off to be this severe, though. Here’s how it looked.

Bar chart of views per month for the last several years. The bars grow quite large in fall of 2019, with a spike about three times anything else's size for October 2019. They've dropped considerably two months in a row. — Still, the views per visitor of about 1.5 is holding around my average. That’s mediocre enough, isn’t it?

There were only 1,386 page views around here in December. That’s the lowest page views count since July. It’s well below the twelve-month running average of 2,057.1 visitors per month, too. The consoling thing: there were “only” eighteen posts in December. This is 77.0 views per posting, which is well below the average of 114.7 views per posting of the past year. But it’s basically identical to November’s record of 77.8 views per posting, and to September’s 81.5 views per posting. October 2019 is and will long remain an anomaly, unless someone else discovers me in some forum.

There were 909 unique visitors in December, again the smallest number since July. And well below the running average of 1,390.3 unique visitors. Per post, it’s 50.5 visitors, which is again way below the running average of 76.7 visitors per post. But it’s right in line with November’s 52.3 and September’s 46.2 visitors per post.

Still there’s things to be discontent about. There were 44 things liked in December, a mere 2.4 likes given per posting. That’s below the running averages of 69.7 likes per month, and of 4.4 likes per post. And then the most shocking statistics of all: zero comments in the whole month. I can’t find that that’s ever happened before, even in the earliest days of the blog when I would hit refresh to make the place seem busier than it is. The running averages are 16.4 comments per month, and 1.1 per post, and it’s hard to believe how far short of that I fell.

Well, there’s not much for me to do but lick my wounds. And to think about what I want in the blog: do I want a chatty comments section? If so, why? I like writing. But I do seem to not be good at blog conversations. I can either work to be better at that, or I can focus on what I am already enjoying. There are good things to say about both approaches.

There were popular posts in December, no matter how much I wasn’t particularly liked. The five posts most often read in December 2019 were:

All told there were 224 pages, including the home page, that got at least a single view in December. That’s down from November’s 300 and October’s 311. 102 of them got more than a single view, down from 160 and 187 the previous few months. 27 got at least ten views, down from 42 and 52 in recent months. Mm.

There were only 60 countries that sent me any page views in December. That’s down from 94 in November and 116 in October, although it’s getting close to September’s 69. There were 18 single-view countries, down from November’s and October’s 24. Here’s the readership figures for them all:

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in darkest red. Canada, Mexico, Brazil, most of Europe, South Asia, and Australia and New Zealand are in a fairly uniform pink too. There are a smattering of African and South American countries also offering readers. — I like to think I did Australia any bit of good by letting a couple dozen of its residents read about comic strips or other such nonsense given everything they’ve been going through, but I’m not positive this doesn’t reflect some people having left ‘curl’ processes running while they were out dealing with the fire crises.

Country	Readers
United States	875
India	62
Philippines	58
Australia	55
Canada	47
United Kingdom	35
Germany	28
Brazil	23
Finland	13
Italy	13
Singapore	13
France	10
Denmark	9
Sweden	9
Israel	8
Belgium	7
Mexico	7
Bangladesh	6
Indonesia	6
Netherlands	6
Pakistan	6
Romania	6
Turkey	6
Russia	5
Spain	5
Switzerland	5
Thailand	5
Poland	4
South Africa	4
South Korea	4
Belize	3
Japan	3
New Zealand	3
Portugal	3
Chile	2
Colombia	2
Egypt	2
Nigeria	2
Serbia	2
Taiwan	2
Ukraine	2
Vietnam	2
American Samoa	1
Belarus	1
Bolivia	1
Bulgaria	1
Czech Republic	1
Georgia	1
Greece	1
Ireland	1
Jordan	1 (*)
Kenya	1
Kuwait	1
Latvia	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Norway	1
Oman	1
Saudi Arabia	1
Slovakia	1
Sri Lanka	1 (*)

Jordan and Sri Lanka were the only single-view countries in November, and neither of them was a single-view country in October too.

In December I had 18 posts. These had a total of 8,842 words, for an average of 491.2 words per posting. I’m surprised there’s so few of them too. This is obviously quite below the year’s average of 861 words per posting. December did a fair bit at bringing my words-per-post count down, too. December ended with my having written 201 posts over the whole year, my second-greatest number ever. And 173,087 words in total, my third-most-verbose year. I’ll get into the statistics for the full year in the look back at all 2019 that I mean to write soon. But 861 words per posting is the median of my words-per-posting average, so far.

From the dawn of time to the start of 2020 I’d had 1,403 posts around here. They drew a total of 97,577 views, from 52,978 logged unique visitors.

If you’d like to read these posts regularly, please do. You’ve already gotten much of the way there. If you have a WordPress account you can use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on the upper right corner of this page to have it appear in your Reader regularly. If you have an RSS reader — and a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal will give you one, by the way — you can add the feed at https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ to it. And, as I’ve warned, my Twitter account @Nebusj posts announcements of things as they’re published. But I haven’t had the spoons to figure out how to actually get at it myself, so it’s not a way to chat with me. I’m not sure what is a way to chat with me. Ask my parents what it’s like.

Nevertheless, thank you for reading, however it is you do it, and however often you do it.

How November 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

A couple months back I switched to looking at comparing monthly readership figures to a twelve-month running average. Running averages offer some advantages in looking for any signal. They make statistics less sensitive to fluke events. The cost, of course, is that they take longer to recognize trends starting. But in October I had a singular freak event, with the A to Z essay on linear programming getting liked to from some forum vastly larger than mine. So that got an extra 4,900 page views in one day, and an extra six hundred or so the next, and so on. Can’t expect that to be regular, though.

There were a “mere” 2,333 page views around here in November. That’s small only compared to October’s spike. It’s a little down from September, but still, it’s above the twelve-month running average of 1,996.9 views in a month. Those views came from 1,568 unique visitors, which compares nicely to the running average of 1,330.3 views per month.

Bar chart of monthly views and visitors for the past two years. There's a spike to a bit under 9000 views from over 5000 visitors in October; it's fallen back to 2,333 views and 1,568 visitors for November. — As with my humor blog this month, I was so delighted that I was able to get the statistics at **exactly** the start of December, WordPress server time, that I forgot to do the URL hacking to get like five years’ data at once. Ah well.

There were 95 likes given to things around here in November, which is also above the running average of 68.8 likes in a month. And 23 comments, once again above the running average of 17.5 comments. So, posting stuff every single day works; who would have guessed, apart from everyone who knows anything about attracting audiences?

Well, more about posting to a predictable schedule, and stuff that people are interested in. But “just post a lot” can work too.

Or can it? November saw 77.8 views per posting, which is close to what September offered. But both are below the twelve-month running average of 114.0 views per posting. There were 52.3 visitors per posting, down from the average of 75.4 visitors per post. It’s back to around September’s 46.2 visitors per post though. There were 3.2 likes per post, down from the running average of 4.4. And there were 0.8 comments per posting, below the average of 1.1. It all implies there’s a best rate for these things. Or that filling out Fridays and Saturdays with mentions of older posts is not all that engaging.

Counting my home page there were 300 pages that got any views at all in November. There’d been 311 in October and 296 in September. 160 of them got more than one view, a bit undre the 187 of October and 172 of September. 42 posts got at least ten views, down from October’s 52 but comparable to September’s 37. The most popular pieces, meanwhile, were:

Nice to see trapezoids back again. Also I’m happy that the versine’s been liked. I’m coming to enjoy this obscure trig function, although not so much as to use it for anything I care about.

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in darkest red, India in a less-dark red, and much of the Americas, Europe, and Pacific Asia in a roughly uniform pink. Not much from Africa, though, nor an arc from Syria through Iran and up to Kazakhstan. — I’m a touch surprised to learn I haven’t had a single page view from Madagascar all this year. Less surprised that I can’t tell whether I’ve had any page views from Comoros. (It’s several islands between Africa and Madagascar and is invisible at WordPress’s mapsize.)

94 countries or country-like entities sent me any page views in November. That’s down from October’s 116, and even September’s 69. 24 of these were single-reader countries, the same count as in October and above September’s 19. Here’s the roster of reading lands:

Country	Readers
United States	1,205
India	172
Philippines	91
Canada	89
United Kingdom	72
Australia	55
Germany	50
Finland	36
Spain	33
Singapore	28
France	25
Hong Kong SAR China	23
Latvia	22
Mexico	21
Malaysia	20
South Africa	19
Ireland	16
Italy	16
Pakistan	16
Brazil	15
Sweden	14
Turkey	14
Poland	13
Netherlands	12
Bangladesh	11
Indonesia	10
Norway	10
Vietnam	10
Austria	9
Belgium	9
Greece	9
Japan	8
Ukraine	8
Israel	7
Nigeria	7
Bulgaria	6
China	6
Malta	6
Romania	6
Switzerland	6
Thailand	6
Belarus	5
Colombia	5
Ecuador	5
Kenya	5
New Zealand	5
Portugal	5
Taiwan	5
Egypt	4
Morocco	4
Myanmar (Burma)	4
Russia	4
Serbia	4
South Korea	4
United Arab Emirates	4
Croatia	3
Czech Republic	3
Hungary	3
Slovakia	3
Tanzania	3
Algeria	2
Cyprus	2
El Salvador	2
European Union	2
Ghana	2
Luxembourg	2
Mongolia	2
Saudi Arabia	2
Slovenia	2
Uganda	2
Albania	1 (*)
Argentina	1
Azerbaijan	1 (*)
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1
Botswana	1
Brunei	1
Chile	1
Denmark	1
Estonia	1
Jordan	1
Laos	1
Lithuania	1
Macedonia	1
Marshall Islands	1
Mauritius	1
Moldova	1
Nicaragua	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Papua New Guinea	1
Puerto Rico	1
Rwanda	1 (*)
Somalia	1
Sri Lanka	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1 (*)

Albania, Azerbaijan, Rwanda, and Trinidad & Tobago were single-view countries in October too. No countries are on a two-month single-view streak. The Philippines are back to being among the three countries sending me the greatest number of page views. Hi, whoever there finds me interesting.

From the start of this blog through the start of December I’ve posted 1,385 things. These have drawn a total of 96,191 page views, from 52,069 logged unique visitors, which does not count people from the earliest couple years.

From the start of 2019 to the start of December I’d posted 183 things, putting me one up over all of 2018 already. Only 2015 (188 posts) and 2016 (213 posts) have had more, to date. I’ve had 164,245 words published so far this year, which is also already my third most verbose year on record. 24,185 of these words were posted in November, for an average post of 808 and one-sixth words per posting in November. That’s below the year’s average of 898 words per post. October’s posts averaged 803.8 words, by the way, so apparently I’ve stabilized some.

Tomorrow I hope to post thoughts on what I learned doing the Fall 2019 A to Z sequence, the traditional close of that sort of project. And I do hope to keep up at least one Reading the Comics post per week. Past that, who can say what I’ll do?

If you’d like to know, you can follow me regularly. The easiest way is to add https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ to your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader, a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal will serve as one: you can add it RSS feeds to your Friends page. If you’ve already got a WordPress account, you can use “Follow Nebusresearch”, a button on the upper right corner of this page. My Twitter account as @Nebusj remains fallow, but still posts announcements, so that hasn’t broken at least.

In any case, thank you for reading, however it is you do it.

How October 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

Well.

Um.

So, somebody linked to me from somewhere.

And it drew a lot of people who came over, read one or two essays, and then vanished again. Such is the fickleness of fame. But on the 16th of October something drew 4,089 visitors to this site. They looked at 5,003 pages. The next day it was badly faded, 720 views from 570 visitors. Then 228 views from 166 visitors. Two or three days after that I was back to something like the normal number of views per day, for a high-volume era like an A to Z sequence. Still, this is going to throw all my twelve-month running averages off for … a year … or possibly more. Here’s how things looked, though.

Bar chart of three and a half years of readership, ending in an enormous peak about four times any other month's readership and unique visitors. — So, two thoughts: first, I’m so glad that on the peak day of all this, I got just **above** five thousand views, since coming in at, say, 4,997 would drive me crazy. Second: boy, this really drives home how huge the Internet is, and how tiny a piece I have of it.

So, yeah, some 8,667 page views, from 6,362 unique visitors. This far blows away every readership statistic I’ve ever had. The twelve-month running average is a relatively feeble 1,442.2 page views from 888.7 unique visitors, for example. I’ll be plummeting back to that soon enough. There were 107 things liked in October, well above the average of 67.8. Still, there were only 17 comments, down from the average of 21.1. Clearly I got people reading without feeling like they were free to say something. For the record, though, I’m grateful to anyone who writes any comment on anything. I do read it promptly. I try to write a response, but will often end up in that sort of faintly anxious productivity death-spiral of figuring I need to make a better reply, which I’ll do better later in the day or maybe tomorrow. It’s not you; it’s me not living up to my resolution to answer things right after lunch each day.

Anyway there were 279.6 views per posting in October, way above the twelve-month average of 98.0. There were 205.2 unique visitors per posting, although really almost all of them went to a single posting. The average is 62.1. Those numbers are gibberish and are going to be gibberish for the next year or so now, unless somebody links to me from somewhere regularly. More meaningful: the number of likes per post, 3.5, comparable yet below the running average of 4.5. Or the comments per posting, 0.5, comparable yet below the running average of 1.3.

Counting my home page there were 311 essays that got any views in October, a bit more than September’s 296. There were 187 that got more than one page view, barely above September’s 172. 51 got at least ten page views, a good bit over September’s 37. And the most popular pieces? Well, there’s the one that got linked to. Besides my home page the top five were:

There were 5,317 views of the linear programming essay. So it won’t surprise you that I had a new most popular day ever: the 16th of October, which was actually the Wednesday after the linear programming essay published.

Mercator-style map of countries of the world, with the United States in darkest red, and great swaths of the rest of the world in pink. Not offering any readers are places like Saharan Africa, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. And, of course, Greenland. — So, like, I don’t want to obsess about even more petty things but could someone check whether, like, Greenland even has the Internet? Because if I’m not reading WordPress’s statistics wrong, I have not once **ever** gotten a page view from Greenland and that seems improbable. I know, there are like 26 people in Greenland, but still, it’s been nearly a decade. Somebody would have to hit something just by accident.

116 countries or the equivalent sent me readers in October, way above September’s 69 and August’s 65. 24 of them were single-view countries, above the 19 of September and 17 of August. The roster of countries:

Country	Readers
United States	4,314
United Kingdom	488
Canada	396
India	396
Germany	356
France	218
Netherlands	155
Australia	143
Philippines	130
Italy	123
Sweden	116
Brazil	111
Finland	87
Switzerland	85
Poland	81
Spain	76
Japan	75
Singapore	73
South Africa	67
Russia	59
Norway	56
Belgium	54
Ireland	54
Portugal	47
Czech Republic	43
Mexico	38
Turkey	36
Austria	35
China	35
Hong Kong SAR China	34
New Zealand	33
Romania	33
Denmark	31
Slovenia	29
Argentina	28
Colombia	25
Israel	24
Taiwan	24
Greece	22
South Korea	21
Thailand	21
Slovakia	20
Ukraine	19
Hungary	18
Indonesia	18
Serbia	18
Vietnam	16
European Union	15
Croatia	14
Lithuania	14
Chile	11
Peru	11
United Arab Emirates	10
Sri Lanka	9
Bulgaria	8
Ecuador	8
Jordan	8
Kenya	8
Saudi Arabia	8
Uruguay	8
Iceland	7
Lebanon	7
Pakistan	7
Bangladesh	6
Latvia	6
Macedonia	6
Malaysia	6
Tunisia	6
Cape Verde	5
Egypt	5
Guatemala	5
Nigeria	5
Belarus	4
Costa Rica	4
Nepal	4
Puerto Rico	4
Uganda	4
Bahrain	3
Bosnia & Herzegovina	3
Cyprus	3
Georgia	3
Luxembourg	3
Morocco	3
Venezuela	3
Armenia	2
Bolivia	2
Dominican Republic	2
Estonia	2
Malta	2
Myanmar (Burma)	2
Namibia	2
Paraguay	2
Zimbabwe	2
Albania	1
Algeria	1
American Samoa	1
Angola	1
Azerbaijan	1
Cambodia	1
Cameroon	1
Congo – Kinshasa	1
Ghana	1
Guyana	1
Honduras	1
Iran	1
Kuwait	1
Martinique	1
Montenegro	1
Panama	1
Qatar	1
Réunion	1
Rwanda	1
Senegal	1
Sudan	1
Tanzania	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Uzbekistan	1 (*)

Uzbekistan was the only country to also get a single page view in September. The Philippines, after several months in a row being the country that sent me the second largest number of readers, fell to ninth. It didn’t have that many fewer readers in September; it’s just that countries like Canada and India leapt way ahead. Again, somebody linked to me.

From the dawn of time through the start of November 2019 I’d posted 1,355 things. These drew a total 93,862 views from 50,505 logged unique visitors. (The number of unique visitors from the earliest years of this blog were not kept in any way that I know how to access.)

In October, despite publishing 31 pieces, I had a relatively laconic month. I published 24,917 words, an average 803.8 words per posting in October. It’s reduced the average length of a post this year to 915, down from 944 for the year to the start of October. I don’t know.

November should see the conclusion of the Fall 2019 A-to-Z sequence, trusting that my Tuesday and Thursday schedule keps up. If you have thoughts for the last several letters, please add them to the roster here. I’ve been given several great ideas already, but am always happy to have … more … blog friends to disappoint by turning down their topics. Um. Well, I also plan to keep publishing at least one Reading the Comics post each week.

I’d lke to have you as a regular reader, too, even if you just came here to read the one thing. You can use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on the upper right corner of this page. If you use an RSS reader, https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ is the feed for all my posts. If you need an RSS reader, you can use a free Livejournal or Dreamwidth account and add it to your Friends page there. And while I have a Twitter account as @Nebusj, it’s gone fallow after a couple months where Safari would just freeze up rather than let me see anything. I keep thinking to go back and check if that nonsense is still going on. We’ll see if I do.

How September 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

I enjoyed a very busy September 2019 around here. This in several senses. For one, I had a posting every day through September. This is a state I sometimes achieve during A-to-Z months. This time around I’m helped by making two days of the week “Exploiting My Archives” posts. All they do is point to older posts. But that still counts as a new post. And I continue to believe without checking that the number of times I post is the one thing within my control that affects my readership. So let’s dig in to the details of that readership, mm? Thanks.

69 countries or country-like polities sent me readers in September. That’s up from the 65 of August and 64 of July. 19 of these were single-page-view countries. That’s up from the 17 of the past two months. Which countries were these all?

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in darkest red. India and the Philippines are nearly equally dark red also. Much of the rest of the Americas, Europe, Russia, and Oceana are about uniformly light pink. Few African countries have any non-grey color to them. — I’m putting the map of the countries first because that way it shows up in the Twitter announcement of this post, and I’d like to have more interesting pictures there when that’s possible.

Country	Readers
United States	1,416
Philippines	164
India	162
United Kingdom	149
Canada	94
Australia	51
Singapore	46
Sweden	31
Germany	25
Ireland	21
Denmark	18
Russia	17
Belgium	16
Finland	16
France	16
Italy	9
Japan	9
Norway	9
Pakistan	9
South Africa	9
Jamaica	8
New Zealand	8
Poland	8
Spain	8
Switzerland	8
United Arab Emirates	7
Brazil	6
European Union	6
Hong Kong SAR China	6
Israel	6
Malaysia	6
Slovenia	6
Mexico	5
Taiwan	5
Thailand	5
Greece	4
Austria	3
China	3
Czech Republic	3
Netherlands	3
Serbia	3
South Korea	3
Trinidad & Tobago	3
Turkey	3
American Samoa	2
Belize	2
Ghana	2
Indonesia	2
Saudi Arabia	2
Zimbabwe	2
Argentina	1
Bolivia	1
Colombia	1
Costa Rica	1
Curaçao	1
Faroe Islands	1
Hungary	1 (*)
Iceland	1
Iraq	1
Jordan	1
Maldives	1
Nigeria	1
Portugal	1 (*)
Puerto Rico	1
Romania	1
Ukraine	1 (*)
Uzbekistan	1
Vietnam	1 (****)
Zambia	1

Hungary, Portugal, and Ukraine had a single page view in August too. Vietnam has settled for one page view a month for five months now. Yes, I’d love to know what the post is.

It’s another month in a row that the Philippines have sent me the second-greatest number of page views. I don’t know why. I’m curious if, like, some teacher found I had a good reference for something and a couple classes have gone looking that up reliably.

But if I were to guess what anyone was reading? Well, 296 pages besides my home page got at least one page view in September. 172 of them got more than one page view. 37 got at least ten views. The most popular pieces? That selection slightly defied my expectations.

It’s the first time a Reading the Comics post hasn’t made the top five since, well, August. The first Reading the Comics post to appear was in ninth place, though. At least record grooves and the real number system diagram are staying popular.

Bar chart showing about four years worth of readership, steadily growing but with a great peak in September 2019. — The heck of it is that I was home September 30 at 7 pm Eastern Time, which is when the month rolls over for WordPress and I could have gotten statistics for exactly September. But I forgot and didn’t think of it for a couple hours, so that’s why it has the update time of 8:58 pm.

So this was a popular month around here, as mentioned. I logged 2,444 page views from 1,387 unique visitors. This is well above the twelve-month running average of 1363.9 views from 845.9 unique visitors. Both figures are my new record highs. And the views-per-visitor average of 1.76 is the highest I’ve logged since November of 2018.

There were 110 things given likes in September, nearly double the twelve-month running average of 64.0. And there were 36 comments, again nearly double the twelve-month running average of 21.1. Which, combined with the fact there were 30 posts, more than double the twelve-month running average of 14.2 in the month, implies …

Well, if we look at things per post, the implication is clear: daily is too much me. There were 81.5 views per posting, compared to the running average of 99.6. There were 46.2 unique visitors per posting, compared to the running average of 63.1. 3.7 likes per posting, compared to the 4.6 running average. 1.2 comments per posting, below the average of 1.4. It does suggest that while posting a lot is good, posting every day is not. Or at least it’s not necessary, if I want to maximize views per posting.

As of the start of October I’d published 122 things this year, for a total of 115,143 words. This was 27,695 words published in September. That’s an average of 923.2 words per post in September, still somehow below the 944 average words per post all this year. I credit the “Exploiting my Archives” posts, which are a couple of sentences each.

From the start of the blog to the start of October 2019 I’d posted 1,324 things. This collected 85,194 page views in total, from 44,139 logged unique visitors.

And I had a new record busiest day. The 6th of September saw 249 page views from 162 unique visitors. I have to suspect that I got mentioned in some online forum.

I do expect to keep publishing at least one Reading the Comics post each week. I also should continue the Fall 2019 A-to-Z, which has settled into a Tuesday and Thursday posting.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, please do. You can use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button in the upper right corner of the page to add my essays to your WordPress reader. If you’d rather read without my ability to detect you, try using the https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ RSS feed. If you need an RSS reader, you can still get a free Livejournal or Dreamwidth account and add any RSS feeds you like through that.

How August 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

And to interrupt all my other writing is the usual review of my readership the past month. I keep this up in confident hope that someday I will learn something that helps me write better. So far what I’ve learned is that posting stuff more often gets me read more often. But this requires me writing more, so plainly that’s out of the question.

Still. In August I posted 13 essays, most of them Reading the Comics and a few that were appeals for A to Z topics. That’s the greatest number of posts I’ve had since March. What did it do for my readership?

There were 1,523 page views recorded here in August. That’s comfortably above the twelve-month running average of 1,355.4. These views came from 993 logged unique visitors, which is also above the twelve-month running average, in this case of 839.3. Don’t think it doesn’t burn me up seven more visitors didn’t come around.

Box chart showing the generally increasing trend of readership over the last four and a half years. — I’m not positive but I think this bar chart has reproduced the skyline of Philadelphia.

There were 70 things liked over the course of August. This, too, was above the twelve-month running average, of 62.9 likes. The number of comments was down, though, with only ten received over the month. The twelve-month running average was 22.5. And it’s oddly low since the start of an A to Z sequence usually brings out comments from people who hope I can explain elliptic integrals or something like that.

There were 117.2 views recorded per posting in August. This is not only of things that got published in August. I can sort of see how to calculate that average but it seems like a great bother to do. My working hypothesis is that my publishing anything encourages my pages to be read. Or viewed, which is as much as anyone makes promises for anymore. 117.2 is above the twelve-month average of 98.3 views per post, anyway. There were 76.4 unique visitors per posting, which is also above the twelve-month average of 62.2. And this worked out to 5.4 likes per posting, above the average of 4.4. The year-to-date average has been 4.5 likes per posting. The comments were dire, with only 0.8 comments per posting on average, about half of the 1.5 comments per posting twelve-month average. The year-to-date average has been 1.7 comments per posting.

` So what was popular around here in August? … One essay that always is, and one that often is. And then some recent posts, to my gratification. … Incidentally there doesn’t seem to be a way to find which posts got the greatest number of likes, as opposed to page views. So I will decide not to worry about those for now. The most popular essays in August were:

Those bottom three were all August postings. There were 231 pages that got at least one view in August, counting the home page which draws the vast majority of views. There were 128 pages that got only a single view. One of them was a page linked to by that check-in on the roller coaster, so, hrm. All right. I won’t take that personally, I tell myself.

WordPress tells me 65 countries or things like countries sent me any readers in August. There’d been 64 in July and 54 in June. 19 of them were single-viewer countries. There were 17 single-view countries the previous two months. And what were they all?

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in dark red, the Philippines and India in slightly less dark red, and then a wide swath of hte world, including much of the Americas, most of Europe and Pacific Asia, in light pink. — That’s me: as popular in Spain as I am in Malaysia.

Country	Readers
United States	901
Philippines	176
India	61
Canada	48
United Kingdom	33
Brazil	27
Australia	24
Denmark	23
South Africa	19
Sweden	18
European Union	14
Singapore	13
Germany	12
France	10
United Arab Emirates	10
Norway	9
Thailand	8
Poland	7
Kenya	6
Indonesia	5
Malaysia	5
Pakistan	5
Russia	5
Spain	5
Greece	4
Hong Kong SAR China	4
Italy	4
Netherlands	4
New Zealand	4
Belgium	3
Colombia	3
Mexico	3
South Korea	3
Switzerland	3
Taiwan	3
Argentina	2
Armenia	2
Austria	2
Croatia	2
Finland	2
Japan	2
Lebanon	2
Morocco	2
Nigeria	2
Puerto Rico	2
Slovenia	2
Chile	1
China	1
Egypt	1 (**)
Estonia	1
Hungary	1
Ireland	1
Israel	1 (*)
Macedonia	1
Panama	1
Portugal	1
Saudi Arabia	1 (*)
Sint Maarten	1
Slovakia	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Turkey	1
Turks & Caicos Islands	1
Ukraine	1
Vietnam	1 (***)
Zimbabwe	1

Israel and Saudi Arabia were single-view countries last month too. Egypt’s been a single-view country three months running. Vietnam’s been a single-view country for four months. And once again somehow the Philippines is the country sending me the second greatest number of readers.

As of the start of September I’d published 92 things in the year. That had 87,448 words in total however WordPress calculates that. That’s 10,340 words published in August, or an average 795.4 words in each of the thirteen posts. I like this trend: my average post for the year, to date, has been 951 words per post.

From this blog’s start, sometime three weeks before the invention of dirt, through the start of September I’ve posted 1,294 things here. They attracted a total 82,747 page views from a recorded 42,752 unique visitors. But the first couple years WordPress was too primitive to record unique visitors.

I’d like to have you as a regular reader. You can read posts on any RSS reader through the feed https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/. If you haven’t got an RSS reader, it turns out that Livejournal still exists and will let you add RSS feeds as friends pages. Dreamwidth does that too. If you like reading through WordPress, and thus giving me statistics to read, you can use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button at the upper right corner of this page.

Historically, I’ve been on Twitter as @Nebusj and announce every post there. But a couple weeks ago Twitter decided it had better things to do than let me connect to it. And I’ve had better things to do than deal with this by, like, logging in using a different web browser or something. I’m still getting announcements posted, since I can see my recent Twitter feed as one of the columns on the right-hand-side of the page here. I don’t know when that will break. But this is your chance to watch and see when it happens! Please someone tell me when it does. Not on Twitter.

I hope tomorrow to be back to the A to Z posts, and to get back to the comics for Sunday.

How July 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

If I had regular readers, one might notice it’s pretty late in the month without my having reviewed readership around here for the past month. This is so. There’s good reason: the first week of August was mostly wiped out by my attending Pinburgh, the world’s largest pinball tournament, and related activities. This included four(!) amusement park visits in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, for some reason, has many amusement parks and they’re all worth a visit.

That’s all time-consuming stuff, though. And it’s not stuff that I can write ahead of time. This offends me, since so much of the structure of these reviews is imposed by the list of what data I have available. I suppose I could do a fill-in-the-blanks template but … why?

Well, here’s the most basic stuff: how many things got views, and how many people came around, in July 2019?

Bar chart showing monthly readership for the last three and a half years. After several months of decline the views has leapt up again. — I know it’s dangerous for me to start making spreadsheets, but I’m confident it will be all right. There are times I’ve gotten over some statistic or other. For example, do you ever see me going on about views per visitor these days? I mean apart from this, right here. I’m sure I have better things to worry about, probably.

That’s … surprising. I had 11 posts in July, most of them Reading the Comics pieces. But this brought 1,356 page views, above a thousand for the first time since April, and the greatest number of page views since March. It’s even slightly above the twelve-month running average of 1330.6 views per month. There were 870 unique visitors in July, which is almost more than the total number of pages viewed in June. The 870 unique visitors are a fair bit above the twelve-month running average of 822.4 unique visitors per month. By the way, I put together a spreadsheet so I can more easily track twelve-month running averages, as well as averages-per-post.

This offers some information I find interesting. By this I mean it’s information I don’t know how to understand. In July there were 11 posts and, on average, 123.3 views per posting. This is not to say each July post got viewed, on average, 123.3 times. It’s that, roughly, every three days there were about 123 pages viewed from my whole catalogue. This average is in line with the twelve-month running average of 121.0 views per posting. It works out to an average 7.1 unique visitors per posting. That’s probably not significantly greater than the 6.7 unique visitors per posting over the previous twelve months.

There were 45 likes given to things in July. That’s down from the previous twelve-month average of 62.3 per month. There were 21 comments in July, basically the twelve-month average of 23.1 comments per month. This is 6.4 likes per posting, compared to the twelve-month average of 8.8. It’s also 3.3 comments per posting, which is basically the twelve-month average of 3.6. Incidentally, my twelve-month average had been 14.3 posts per month. This is helped by some A to Z sequences, which I haven’t yet done this year.

There may be something else helping my readership. Because of scheduling needs I’d put some of my big Reading the Comics posts to publish on Tuesday, rather than Sunday. I did read a site claiming that WordPress posts got the most readership when posted Tuesday through Thursday. I do not know the methodology of this research. Nor whether it’s still valid, since the post also talked about when Google+ posts were most effective. But this is the only thing I did all that different in July. Maybe I’ll keep that going another month or two and see if it makes a noticeable difference.

192 different posts got at least one page view in July. That’s up from the 158 in June and 163 in May. I don’t have twelve-month running averages for this. But here were the most popular posts:

I’d had 99 posts get a single view each, by the way.

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in darkest red, and pink regions for most of North America, Europe, and South Asia, plus Australia and a about half of South America. — I admit I’m disappointed to not have any Iceland readers, but since my dad visited Iceland in June and not July I suppose that’s to be expected.

WordPress tells me that 64 countries or country-like entities sent me at least a single reader in July. 54 had in June and 61 in May. There were 17 single-reader countries for the second month in a row. There had been 16 in May. The roster of countries? It’s this:

Country	Readers
United States	791
Philippines	103
United Kingdom	75
India	64
Canada	37
Australia	34
Italy	18
Brazil	16
Germany	16
Singapore	15
South Africa	15
France	10
Hong Kong SAR China	9
Malaysia	9
Denmark	8
Colombia	7
Ireland	7
Hungary	6
Mexico	6
Pakistan	6
Taiwan	6
Thailand	6
Argentina	5
Spain	5
Sweden	5
Puerto Rico	4
Switzerland	4
United Arab Emirates	4
Finland	3
Greece	3
Kenya	3
Netherlands	3
Nigeria	3
Poland	3
Russia	3
Slovenia	3
Tanzania	3
Ukraine	3
Bangladesh	2
Belgium	2
Ethiopia	2
Japan	2
Norway	2
Slovakia	2
South Korea	2
Sri Lanka	2
Turkey	2
Botswana	1
Burundi	1
China	1
Costa Rica	1
Czech Republic	1
Egypt	1 (*)
European Union	1
Fiji	1
Guam	1
Israel	1 (*)
Latvia	1
Macedonia	1
Nepal	1
New Zealand	1
Saudi Arabia	1
Serbia	1
Vietnam	1 (**)

Egypt and Israel were single-reader countries in June. Vietnam’s been a single-reader country two months running. I’m surprised to have so few New Zealand readers. And I continue to wonder if the Philippines aren’t reading me by some mistake. Again, I’m not one to turn away readers. It’s just that I write a blog here that’s very steeped in contemporary United States culture and I’m surprised anyone else would me relevant.

By the start of August I had published 79 posts on the year, with a total of 77,108 words. 9,656 of those words were published in July. That’s an average of 878 words per post in July. It’s an average 976 words per post for all of 2019 so far. At the start of July my average post for the year had been 992 words.

For 2019 through the start of August I’d recorded 348 likes, an average of 4.4 likes per posting. That’s slightly down from the start of July’s 4.5 likes per posting. There’d been 136 comments recorded, an average of 1.7 comments per posting. That’s an increase from the average 1.5 comments per posting logged at the start of July. But that count includes some pingbacks, the bits where one post refers to another.

As of the start of August I’ve posted 1,281 things to this blog. They had recorded 81,223 page views, from a logged 41,759 unique visitors.

If you’d like to be a regular reader I’d be glad to have you. There’s a “Follow Nebusresearch” button in the upper right corner of this page. Clicking it will add my posts to your WordPress Reader. If you don’t want to read through WordPress, you can use any RSS reader you like. The feed is https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ and please use it.

Rabbit, rabbit. pic.twitter.com/qDmb7NJNso

— Joseph Nebus (@nebusj) August 1, 2019

I’m @nebusj on Twitter, and each post gets an announcement there. It also gets announcements of my humor blog’s posts. Those might not be to your taste, but, you don’t know for sure until you read some. And I do at least try to start the month with rabbit pictures.

How June 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

The amazing thing to consider is that anyone had anything to do with my mathematics blog in June. Apart from last month’s review-of-my-readership and a post pointing out some stuff I’d written about counting goldfish, all my posts were Reading the Comics. Those are fine, of course. They’re popular and they keep me writing even when I’m feeling burned out. But they’re also reactive pieces; I feel a certain passivity when I write them. What I’m saying is I’m gathering the energies to do a new A To Z sequence and so I’ll be bothering my art supplier soon for some fresh banners and the like.

So in June 2019 I posted nine things, my lowest in a long while. I’m of the unshakable belief that the number of things I post is the biggest factor I can control regarding how much anyone reads my writings. So how did that affect my readership?

Bar chart showing slightly over four years of monthly readership totals, which were generally growing above a thousand readers per month until the last three months when things started declining. — I’m glad I worked out how to look at several years’ worth of statistics at one time, rather than the maybe two years WordPress wants to show by default. It gives such a greater sense of the sweep of history of readership around here, which encourages me to panic that my most popular days are behind me and all I have to look forward to is burnout and the evaporation of my few remaining intersted readers.

911 page views for June, from a reported 595 unique visitors. This is down from May’s 981 page views and 721 visitors for ten posts. And April’s 1,020 views and 668 visitors for twelve posts. This actually implies a slightly improved view-per-post ratio as I publish less stuff. I think this is an artifact of my having a couple things in the back catalogue that always get read, though, regardless of any new material I have.

Still, this is appreciably below the twelve-month average of 1344.4 views. And way below the twelve-month average of 829.6 unique visitors. It’s a bit above the mean views-per-post, at least. Also the mean viewers-per-post. That’s, again, probably an artifact of older posts.

Because, after all, look at what the most popular posts were in June. This includes a three-way-tie for the fifth-most-popular post:

There were 40 ‘likes’ given in June, down from May’s 43 and back to April’s 40. It’s below the twelve-month average of 66.8, though. It’s even below the twelve-month average of likes-per-posting, too. There were eleven comments in June, under May’s twelve and April’s 14. The twelve-month average is 24.7, so, there we go. At least an A To Z offering typically gets people eager to suggest topics.

Incidentally there were 158 posts that got at least one view in June. This apart from the front page which is what the greatest number of people or people-like Internet objects look at. There were 163 posts that got at least one view in May.

54 countries or things like countries. 61 did in May. In June? 57. So that all seems to be holding steady. There were 17 single-reader countries in June, one more than in April and in May. Which all countries were they? These all:

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in the darkest red, reflecting my readership being greatest in that country. Most of the Americas and Western Europe are in a lighter red, as are India, New Zealand, and Australia. Plus Russia and Japan, somehow, as well as a smattering of other nations. — Victoria II challenge: create this sphere of influence for the United States. Expert level: by 1870.

Country	Readers
United States	551
India	50
Philippines	39
United Kingdom	38
Canada	30
Australia	16
Germany	14
Netherlands	14
Singapore	11
Hong Kong SAR China	10
Brazil	9
Malaysia	9
France	7
Italy	7
Finland	6
Spain	6
Sweden	6
Switzerland	6
Denmark	5
Norway	5
Pakistan	5
South Africa	5
Japan	4
Nepal	4
Estonia	3
Indonesia	3
New Zealand	3
Poland	3
Puerto Rico	3
Greece	2
Guam	2
Hungary	2
Ireland	2
Mexico	2
Peru	2
Portugal	2
Russia	2
Slovenia	2
Turkey	2
Ukraine	2
Argentina	1
Bangladesh	1 (*)
Belize	1
Bermuda	1
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1
Chile	1
Côte d’Ivoire	1
Czech Republic	1
Egypt	1
Iraq	1
Israel	1
Mongolia	1
Sri Lanka	1
Taiwan	1 (*)
United Arab Emirates	1
Venezuela	1
Vietnam	1 (*)

Bangladesh, Taiwan, and Venezuela were single-reader countries in May. No other place is on a single-reader streak like that. I seem to be back to being ignored by Scandinavian countries.

The start of July saw my having made 68 posts here this year, for a collective 67,452 words. This is an average of 992 words per post. This was 9,581 words in June. I’m averaging, so far this year, 992 words per post. At the start of June my average was 981 words per post. My average was 953 words per post at the start of May. I, too, would be interested when this implies my average post will exceed all finite numbers of words. I’m not figuring that mess out.

Through the start of July there’ve been a total of 304 likes, an average of 4.5 likes per posting this year. That’s the same number of average likes per posting as the last two months had seen. There were a total of 105 comments recorded, an average of 1.5 comments per posting, once again the same as at the start of June and of May. This means the Insight panel tells me there were 14 comments on the month, while the statistics panel claims there were 11. There was a similar discrepancy in May, when one panel claimed I had 17 comments and another claimed 12. I think this has to reflect pingbacks, one post referencing another.

As of the start of July I’ve posted 1,270 items to this blog. They’ve attracted a total 79,855 page views — I just passed 80,000 hours ago — from 40,879 acknowledged unique visitors. There are probably more unique visitors, but WordPress did not gather those statistics for us the first years of this blog.

If you’d like to be a regular reader of my writings, please add my blog to your RSS reader. Your reading won’t show up in any data I’m able to track. If you would like to follow my writing in a way that I know happens, use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button at the upper right corner of this page.

Rabbit, rabbit. pic.twitter.com/EmablrYSbx

— Joseph Nebus (@nebusj) July 1, 2019

And on Twitter I’m @Nebusj, and there I post links to every new essay as it gets published. Also I try at the start of each month to post pairs of rabbit pictures. It’s not much of a thing, but it is a thing. I think that well explains what to expect from me as a writer.

How May 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

It’s two days past when I wanted to do my self-inspection, but that’s all right. Better to have a thing done than not. I had another month of decline on the mathematics blog, inexplicable except for my going and vanishing for a week at a time without notice or much interesting content.

I published ten things in May, my quietest month in years. And the number of things I post seems to be the most important thing I can control to encourage readers. Well, I could change the time of day that I post. For several years now I’ve posted everything at 18:00 Universal Time. That’s about 2 pm Eastern Daylight Time, in my home time zone. It’s possible another hour might serve my interests in being read better.

There were 981 page views in May, down from 1,020 in April (twelve posts) and 1,391 in March (fourteen posts). It’s the first time I didn’t break a thousand since December 2017 (another eleven-post month). The number of unique visitors rose slightly, though: 721 unique visitors in May, compared to 668 in April and 954 in March. (December 2017 had 599 unique visitors.) There is probably a great deal of fluctuation in all this.

Bar chart showing about four and a half years of readership figures which are fairly constant, with a few peaks in the spring and summer of last year. — What’s fun about looking over this many months at once is trying to spot where I was running A To Z sequences. You can actually see people responding to sudden, two- and three-month stretches of regularly-published high-quality articles. It’s almost a lesson or something.

The number of likes continued to be erratic. 43 things were liked here in May, up from April’s 40, down from March’s 97. For what it’s worth the twelve-month running average leading up to May was 72 likes per month. This was an unliked month. The number of comments had one of its sporadic upticks, with 12 comments. There’d been 14 in April and a near-record-low four in March. Again for what it’s worth the twelve-month running average is 25 comments per month. That range does include some of the A To Z months, which invite comments in a way I don’t seem to be able to do normally.

163 different posts got at least one view in May. The ones that got the most were a couple perennials and one that I figured to be liked, for how many words I put into it:

The record grooves and the trapezoids people always ask about. I figured a nice meaty question like the continuity of a familiar function would get readers. What’s always a bit of a surprise is which Reading the Comics post gets the most readers in a month. Generically I’d expect something posted early in the month. For it to be one that posted the 19th? A bunch of people really like Frank and Ernest. That’s the only explanation.

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in the darkest pink and most of the Americas in a soft pink. Western Europe, Russia, India, China, and a fair bit of southeast Asia an Australia and New Zealand are also that uniform pink. Africa and the Middle East are grey, lacking readers. — You wouldn’t believe how long I spent trying to clean off the bit of monitor dust that was sitting there in the South Pacific before I worked out that it was Fiji. Well, you probably would; it was just a couple seconds and I worked it out by moving the window with the map on it.

There were 61 countries or country-like organizations to send me readers in May. There had been 54 countries for April and 59 for March. This past month 16 of them were single-reader countries. In April there were also 16 single-reader countries; in March, 17. Here’s the full roster:

Country	Readers
United States	665
India	34
Canada	33
United Kingdom	31
Australia	19
Hong Kong SAR China	14
Germany	13
Mexico	10
France	8
South Korea	8
Nepal	7
New Zealand	7
Poland	7
Singapore	7
South Africa	7
Sweden	7
Chile	6
Denmark	6
Italy	6
Pakistan	5
Spain	5
Colombia	4
Panama	4
Slovenia	4
Algeria	3
Belize	3
Brazil	3
Egypt	3
Malaysia	3
Netherlands	3
Argentina	2
Bosnia & Herzegovina	2
China	2
Finland	2
Greece	2
Guam	2
Hungary	2
Ireland	2
Israel	2
Jamaica	2
Morocco	2
Norway	2
Peru	2
Thailand	2
Turkey	2
Austria	1
Bangladesh	1
Croatia	1
European Union	1 (*)
Fiji	1
Guatemala	1
Indonesia	1
Japan	1
Kuwait	1
Nigeria	1
Philippines	1
Puerto Rico	1
Russia	1
Taiwan	1
Uruguay	1
Vietnam	1

The European Union was the only single-reader country-like structure in May to have also been a single-reader place in April. None of the other countries have a streak going. Whoever my lone reader was in Jordan left after five months. The block of readers from Sweden has also dissipated but not disappeared altogether.

This year through the start of June I published 59 posts. This had a total of 57,871 words. This was 11,194 words published in May alone, for an average 1,119 words per post that month. My year-to-date average is 981 words per post. I’d been averaging 953 words per post at the start of May.

Through the start of June there’ve been 264 total likes of posts around here, an average of 4.5 likes per posting. That’s the same average likes per posting as the start of May saw. There’ve been a total of 91 comments, an average of 1.5 comments per posting. I notice, too, that this implies 17 comments in May, while the statistics panel I get claimed there were 12 comments in May. I think the discrepancy reflects pingbacks, one of my own posts referencing another. To verify this would need minutes of looking over the comments received here, though. So it’s sad to think of how this will never be done.

As of the start of June I’d posted 1,261 things here. They had a total of 78,957 page views from a 40,294 recorded unique visitors.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, there’s many ways to do it. One is to add my essays to your RSS reader, whatever that may be. If you do that, I will receive no statistics or logs or anything about your readership. It’ll be your secret. For a less-secret way, you can use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button, at the upper right corner of this page.

Rabbit, rabbit. pic.twitter.com/WugGqox2PA

— Joseph Nebus (@nebusj) June 1, 2019

And if you follow me on Twitter as @Nebusj months will start with quality content like the above, of a couple pictures of a rabbit I saw from a parking lot. Thought you might like that.

How April 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

Well, I deserved that. After a fair start April pretty well flopped for me: the last two weeks of the month I ended up not writing any of the things I should have. If it weren’t for reblogs and heads-up posts I wouldn’t have even reached ten posts for the month. I’m not sure when I’ve posted that little. It looks like sometime early 2014.

So April was my least-red month in a long while. Since December 2017, looks like. But of the things within my control, post count and schedule are the things that most affect readership. And boy was April a writer-blocked month for me. Here’s how bad it was.

The strikingly uniform monthly readership of my blog for the past four and a half years; there's a drop in April. 1,020 views, 667 visitors, 1.53 views per visitor, and 12 posts published. — Oh, so, how I got results going back this far. WordPress has this page that offers site owners a review of their readership figures. The URL for it looks like https://wordpress.com/stats/month/nebusresearch.wordpress.com with the name of whatever your particular WordPress blog is on the end there. If you add to the URL ?startDate=2016-12-01 — or some other starting date, in the format YYYY-MM-DD — then you get just what you’d imagine. What I haven’t figured is how to set the range. You’d think adding an endDate property would do it, and no, it does’t. But there’s little left- and right-arrows to the either side of the ‘Stats for (Given Month and Year)’ and clicking the right-arrow there will expand the range. It really doesn’t want to show more than about four and a half years in one screen, though.

So I still broke a thousand page views; I haven’t fallen below that since the depressing month of December 2017. I admit part of why I pushed that what-grade-you-need post on Monday was that I was a little short of a thousand views and hoped to get above that. March 2019 had 1,391 views, and February 1,275. In April there were 668 unique visitors, my lowest since July 2018 (also with 668) or February 2018 (611) depending on how you count “lowest”. There’d been 954 unique visitors in March and 835 in February.

The number of likes went back to its plummet in April: only 40 things liked at all around here. In March there’d been 97 likes; in February 44. And here’s where fiddling with the startDate property really hurts, because there has been this incredible secular decline in likes. I mean, in all 2015 I never dropped below 179 likes in one month, and never below 107 in 2016. In 2017 the minimum was 70. In 2018 the minimum was 37. I don’t know what’s making me less likable.

Comments were up in April, although they’d almost have to be. There were 14 in April; March saw only four. February had ten. I might do another A To Z just to get people talking to me.

Well, here’s the roster of popular essays this past month:

How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side? which people always want to know.
Reading the Comics, March 30, 2019: Comics Kingdom is Screwed Up Edition which shows just how popular it is when I get all cranky about a thing.
Is 1/x a Continuous Function? which, oh good grief, I haven’t followed up on yet? I’m being irresponsible here.
How Two Trapezoids Make This Simpler which is an interesting change, as usually it’s the count of how many different kinds of trapezoid I can name that’s in the top-five count.
What Dates Are Most Likely For Easter? which gives an idea how much people are slightly curious about this.

That’s not a bad spread of posts.

Mercator-style projection map of the world. The United States is shown in the deepest red. The rest of North and South America, mostly, is in pink; as are western Europe, the Baltics, South Asia, Russia, and Australia. — Your Victoria II challenge of the month: create *this* Empire with client states. Easy mode: you may start as the United Kingdom, any Indian nation, Russia, or Brazil instead. Hard mode: accomplish this by 1900.

54 countries sent me readers at all this past month. 16 of them were single-reader countries. That’s down from the 59 countries of March and 17 single-reader countries. Also from February’s 73 countries and 20 single-reader countries. But here’s the country roster:

Country	Readers
United States	688
Canada	44
United Kingdom	39
Sweden	26
India	22
Australia	19
Pakistan	12
Brazil	11
France	10
Italy	9
Malaysia	9
Singapore	8
Norway	7
Slovenia	7
Belgium	6
Germany	6
Hong Kong SAR China	6
Russia	6
Spain	6
Austria	5
Philippines	5
Saudi Arabia	5
South Africa	5
United Arab Emirates	5
Finland	4
Greece	4
South Korea	4
Denmark	3
Japan	3
Nepal	3
Vietnam	3
Chile	2
Hungary	2
Israel	2
Jamaica	2
Switzerland	2
Thailand	2
Turkey	2
Bolivia	1
Costa Rica	1
Djibouti	1
European Union	1
Ghana	1
Guam	1
Ireland	1
Jordan	1 (****)
Macedonia	1
Mexico	1
Netherlands	1
Peru	1 (**)
Serbia	1
U.S. Virgin Islands	1
Ukraine	1
Venezuela	1

Peru’s been a single-reader country for three months now. Jordan’s been one for five months. That’s the only ongoing streak. I don’t know what’s got so many Swedish readers in lately. I fear there might have been a misunderstanding somewhere.

This year, through the start of May I’ve posted 49 pieces. This has gotten a total of 46,677 words, according to whatever definition of ‘word’ WordPress uses. This is 9,943 words in April, which for me counts as laconic. The average post length this year has dropped to 953 words, down from the 993 at the start of April. There were twelve posts in April, technically, for an average of 829 words per post. There’ve been 221 total likes for the year, putting me at an average of 4.5 likes per post. At the start of April there had been an average of 4.9 likes per post. This year there’ve been a total of 74 comments, for an average of 1.5 comments per posting.

Or so says WordPress. But my post about March 2019 said I’d reached 52 comments by the end of March, and I’d had 14 comments in April. Something isn’t adding up here. I get these yearly totals from the Insights panel, and I wonder if that’s counting pingbacks — one WordPress post linking to another — as comments. Those aren’t counted in the monthly-comments-total mentioned above.

May starts with my having made 1,251 posts in total. These have attracted overall 77,976 page views from an acknowledged 39,572 unique visitors.

I’m always glad to have you as visitor. If you’d like to add my little efforts here to your WordPress Reader, please use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button at the upper right corner of this page. I confess despairing a bit at recent followers. Not you, of course, kind reader. But a lot of recent followers seem to be those curious blogs that just reblog articles about search-engine-optimization and that’s … all … a baffling exercise to me. Anyway, if you want to follow me without showing up in my or anyone’s analytics, good on you. Here is the RSS feed for my essays. And to get back to the surveillance, I’m @Nebusj on Twitter. And to encourage you to follow: I’m trying to start each month with a pair of rabbit pictures. Not to brag, but this month’s?

Rabbit, rabbit. pic.twitter.com/JEp5kc8a4s

— Joseph Nebus (@nebusj) May 1, 2019

You’re welcome.

How March 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

So, I did something dangerous in March. I try not paying attention to the day-to-day statistics. But there’s a little graphic that shows the last several hours of views. And it’s easy to see while doing administrative stuff. And I happened to see a surge in readers. I couldn’t find an obvious cause for it. There’s some data available about where readers are coming from, but not much. I never did figure out why several hundred people wanted to read my mathematics blog all at once. But it did make me go back and check and re-check what my readership was like. And that’s dangerous stuff, especially since I had a quite variable month. Like, the day before a 113-views day there were 19 views. And that wasn’t the least-read day of the month. Watching the readership statistics, day-by-day, is a terrible habit. It’s even worse for a blog like this with relatively low, irregular readership volume.

So that’s what I did to drive myself mad this past month. And how well did that work?

A box chart showing, for the last several months, fairly uniform numbers of views and visitors. For march, 1,391 views from 954 visitors, 1.46 views per visitor, and 14 posts published. — Yes but I’ve learned how to fiddle with the date range that these figures show so *next* month I should have an amazing box plot to show you.

For all those slow days I had an uptick in pages viewed: 1,391 in March, up from February’s 1,275 and January’s 1,375. But is that significant? Not really; there were 45 views per day on average in March, 46 in February, and 44 in January. So this is all keeping to the level I’ve been at since about October 2018. There were 14 posts published in March, up from February’s 11 and January’s 12.

The number of unique visitors was up, noticeably: 954 in March. So I’m still holding at only one thousand-visitor month so far. (March 2018 saw 999 visitors, though. It almost makes me think there’s some event or other in the middle of March which attracts people to pop mathematics blogs.) Well, February 2019 had 835 unique visitors, and January 856, and I’d been around 850 per month going back through November 2018. There’s a level there.

Reader engagement is a more erratic thing. One measure was positive, as I see things: there were 97 likes given to my writing in March. That’s the greatest number in twelve months. February only saw 44 likes; January, 63. But that’s a surprisingly variable measure. But the other side of things? Comments? There were four in all March. Comments are always erratic, yes. February had 10 comments, and January 22, and there’ve been as many as 60 in the past year. But four comments? If I haven’t missed anything I haven’t had a month that sparse since November 2012, which, just … wow.

I can explain some of this. I’ve been doing a lot of Reading the Comics posts, which are fun to write but have almost nothing to respond to. I’ve gotten some comments on Twitter. This has to be the first month I’ve seen more comments on Twitter than on WordPress. And I haven’t been in the midst of an A-To-Z or similar themed event that’s really open to comments. Still, mm. I should do more things that are open to comments, but how would I learn what those are?

For all that people read without commenting, they did still read things. The most popular posts in March were:

So, two perennials, and a bunch of comics. I’m curious why the 2016 Pi Day comics was so much more popular than the 2019. There were more strips for the 2016 version, but the 2015 Pi Day comics were even more robust than that. Also now that I’m reminded I’d had a Barely Mathematics Edition I realize I should have named Sunday’s Reading the Comics, with all those Bear With Me strips, the Bearly Mathematics Edition. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to get to use that one sometime.

59 countries sent me readers in March. That’s down from 73 in February and equal to the 59 in January. There were 17 single-reader countries, down from February’s 20 and from January’s 19. Here’s where readers were:

It's just the one view from China for the month, which isn't much per capita, I admit. But it's still, like, fourteen times more readers than I usually see from China. The real curious thing is that it shows 51 views from Sweden, while six from Norway and from Denmark, and four from Finland. I'd have expected those countries to be a bit closer together. — A Mecator-style map of the world, showing the United States in dark red; Canada, Mexico, Australia, and western and central Europe, plus Russia, in light red, and a surprising number of readers from Pakistan through China. Also several in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil.

Country	Readers
United States	902
United Kingdom	65
Sweden	51
Canada	45
Philippines	45
India	40
France	21
Germany	17
Brazil	15
Singapore	14
South Africa	11
Nepal	10
Pakistan	10
Spain	10
Australia	9
Slovenia	9
Netherlands	8
Turkey	8
Mexico	7
Denmark	6
Italy	6
Norway	6
Ireland	5
Thailand	5
Austria	4
Finland	4
Malaysia	4
South Korea	4
American Samoa	3
Belgium	3
Hungary	3
Sri Lanka	3
Switzerland	3
Croatia	2
Ecuador	2
Hong Kong SAR China	2
Israel	2
Latvia	2
Poland	2
Portugal	2
United Arab Emirates	2
Vietnam	2
Bahrain	1
Bangladesh	1
China	1
Colombia	1
Czech Republic	1 (*)
Ethiopia	1
Indonesia	1
Jamaica	1
Japan	1 (***)
Jordan	1 (***)
Lithuania	1 (**)
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Peru	1 (*)
Puerto Rico	1 (*)
Russia	1
Saudi Arabia	1
Slovakia	1

Czech, Peru, and Puerto Rico have sent a single page view two months running now. Lithuania’s been a single view a month for three months. Japan and Jordan have four-month streaks going.

In 37 posts through the start of April I’ve put up 36,734 in 2019. This is 15,984 words in March. My average post length this year has been 993 words, up from the 902 at the end of February and even the 966 at the end of January. Hm. Well, that’s what fourteen posts at 1,142 words per post will do. I’ve reached 52 comments on the whole year, an average of 1.4 comments per posting. That’s down from the start of March’s 1.5 comments per post. There’ve been 182 total likes this year to date, for an average of 4.9 likes per post. That’s an increase, at least. At the start of March there had been an average 4.3 likes per post.

The month started with my having made 1,239 posts in total. They’ve attracted in total 76,956 page views from an acknowledged 38,905 unique visitors.

If you’d like to not miss any posts, you can add my work to your RSS reader, using this link. Or you can use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button in the upper right corner of the page. And I am on Twitter as @nebusj, so it should be easy enough to spot me somewhere. Thank you for being around.

How February 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

February offered an interesting casual experiment for my mathematics blog. I didn’t actually leave it completely fallow. But I also didn’t do very much with it. I’d had an idea for a nice little project for it, but kept finding other things consuming the time.

So the short month ended up having a mere 11 posts. That’s on the low end of what I usually post around here. I’ve done as few as this several times in the roughly two years that WordPress makes it easy to find statistics for. But it hasn’t been common.

What did this do to my readership?

February 2019: 11 posts. 1,275 views. 835 visitors. 1.53 views per visitor. — 1.53 views per visitor is the lowest that ratio’s been since May 2018 (1.52).

So I had a mere 1,275 views over the month, down from January’s 1,375 and December’s 1,409. What fascinates me is that this is an average of 46 views per day. In January there were an average 44 views per day; in December, 45. There were 835 unique visitors in February, down a touch from January’s 856 and December’s 875. That’s an average of 30 per day in February, 28 per day in January, and 28 per day in December. This suggests my blog may have reached the point that I don’t actually need to have stuff on it anymore. This would be quite the load off my schedule. It certainly suggests I’m improving my views-per-things-posted ratio.

My ‘likes’ continue to fall from the October 2018 local peak. There were 44 in February, my lowest total since July. Down from 63 in January and 82 in December. That’s rather more than can be accounted for by the shortness of February. Even per-post it’s still a drop, but not from much of a height. Comments plummeted even farther; there were ten in February, and one of those was about how there aren’t a lot of comments around here. There’d been 22 in January and 17 in December, numbers that seem more robust now. February was my lowest-comment month going back to May 2017, when there were eight comments.

The most popular posts this past month include a couple old reliables, and then one that I expect to be a steadily read one. The top five were:

How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side? with that snappy picture of the Buggles’ The Age Of Plastic album.
In Which I Am Disturbed By A Triangle Theorem That Isn’t Morley’s Somehow which was that fine bit about bisecting the area of a triangle.
How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw which is holding at “six” after nearly seven years.
Solving The Price Is Right’s “Any Number” Game and why it sure seems to take about the same time to play every time it comes up.
How Two Trapezoids Make This Simpler, part of my exhausting review of how to find the area of a trapezoid.

There were 73 countries sending me readers in February. That’s well up from January’s 59, and even higher than December’s 68. Twenty of these were single-reader countries. That’s up from January’s 19 and December’s 17. I seem to have Europe pretty well-covered, apart from the Balkan, the Baltics, Bulgaria, and Belarus. I’m glad I have readers in Belgium at least. And how many?

A Mercator-style map of the world. The United States is the darkest pink on it; most of the Americas and Eurasia are a fairly uniform pink. Only a few African countries have any pink to them. — And ooh, hey! A reader from China. That like never happens.

Country	Readers
United States	729
United Kingdom	67
Canada	50
Russia	42
Philippines	41
Denmark	39
India	38
Australia	28
Indonesia	13
Italy	13
Netherlands	13
Singapore	13
South Africa	12
Hong Kong SAR China	11
American Samoa	10
Germany	8
France	7
Poland	7
Austria	6
Belgium	6
Switzerland	6
China	5
Nepal	5
New Zealand	5
Pakistan	5
Sweden	5
Turkey	5
European Union	4
Slovenia	4
Spain	4
Thailand	4
Algeria	3
Iraq	3
Macedonia	3
Romania	3
Slovakia	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Brazil	2
Colombia	2
Finland	2
Greece	2
Guatemala	2
Ireland	2
Lebanon	2
Mexico	2
Nigeria	2
Norway	2
Panama	2
Saudi Arabia	2
Serbia	2
Taiwan	2
Uganda	2
Ukraine	2
Argentina	1 (**)
Cambodia	1
Cyprus	1
Czech Republic	1
Egypt	1
Hungary	1
Israel	1
Japan	1 (**)
Jordan	1 (**)
Kenya	1
Lithuania	1 (*)
Malaysia	1
Martinique	1
Mauritius	1
Papua New Guinea	1
Peru	1
Portugal	1
Puerto Rico	1
South Korea	1
Vietnam	1

Lithuania has been a single-reader country two months running now. Argentina, Japan, and Jordan have been single-reader countries three months now. Colombia ends its single-reader streak at six months as someone else came in to see what all the fuss was about. This spoils their chance to beat the European Union’s seven-month single reader streak, from December 2015 through June 2016. Sorry. Colombia still has the single-country streak record, though.

If I learn anything from the Insights panel, it’s that I write very long articles. They’re growing less so! According to Insights this year, to date, I’ve posted 20,750 words over 23 posts. This is an average 902 words per post. At the end of January I averaged 966 words per post. I posted a total of 9,162 words over February, or a mere 833 words each of those. I’m imposing less of a crushing workload on myself! Anyway, there were a total of 35 comments so far this year, an average of 1.5 comments per post, down from 1.9 at the start of February. There were 100 total likes, for an average of 4.3 likes per post, down from 4.8. Hm.

I start March with having made 1,225 total posts. They’ve attracted 75,565 views, from an acknowledged 37,951 unique visitors. So far.

I’d be glad to have you as a regular reader. You can have this blog added to your WordPress reader by using the “Follow nebusresearch” button in the upper right of the page. All these posts are also available by RSS, if you’d like to be read without being tracked. On Twitter I’m @Nebusj. And on Sundays and often another day of the week I go Reading the Comics for their mathematics topics. Thanks for reading this. I’m glad you’re there, trusting that you are there. And that it is you. You looked like you from a distance, anyway.

How January 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog

It seems like about fifteen minutes ago I was looking over how 2018 treated my mathematics blog. But who am I to argue with the calendar? I have a hard enough time convincing the calendar that 1998 was at most eight years ago. My arguments are useless. Look, I clearly remember watching Star Trek Nemesis, opening weekend, alone except for the friend I talked into seeing this with, and there is no possible way that this was one minute more than six years ago. Well, here’s what I can say about my readership and how much blame I can take for it, within the scope of the first month of 2019.

January 2019: 1,375 views, 856 visitors, 1.61 views per visitor, and 12 posts published. — I’m sure someday I’ll reach the heights of 2,000 page views in a month again, if I can find a way to write the how-many-grooves-are-on-a-record’s-side article again.

I posted twelve things in January, and two of them were looks at what was popular previously. Considering that, though, people were interested. I suspect it’s spillover of the A-To-Z posts. There were 1,375 pages viewed, down a little from December’s 1,409 and November’s 1,611. Considering how much less effort January was, this seems like a great tradeoff. There were 856 unique visitors, compared to December’s 875 and November’s 847. In November I had 23 posts and December 17, so I’m at least being very efficient, per post, at drawing readers. I hadn’t had a 12-post month since July, when there were 1,058 page views and 668 unique visitors. Probably people were hanging around hoping to see more A-To-Z grade stuff.

The number of items liked dropped to 63. There had been 82 in December and 85 in November. Again, per post, that’s a pretty good rate of growth. There were 22 comments, up from December’s 17, down from November’s 36, and still pretty close to nothing when you consider I try to answer every comment, so half of all that writing is just me.

There was an outright surprise among the most popular posts of the month. Do you see which one doesn’t seem to belong here? And can you spot in which one I originally wrote ‘2018’ in the subject line, and corrected it, but it’s too much trouble to correct a WordPress URL for me to bother with?

Well, I’m delighted to see interest in the Five-Color Map theorem. It’s not so famous as the (correct) Four-Color Map theorem. But it’s one with a proof a normal mortal can follow.

The Insights panel tells me there were an average of 1.9 comments per post, through the end of January. 4.8 average likes per post, too. There were a meager 11,588 words posted in January, but that still averages to 966 words per post. That’s down from the 2018 average. It’s still my second-highest word count, though. It’s all right. I’ve thought of some things I could post that would be amusing and quite short to write, and that require I do calculations that might be fun in my spare time. This supposes that I have spare time.

How about the running of the countries?

Mercator-style projection of the world. The United States is the most darkly red-colored country, with Canada, the United Kingdom, and India faintly darker. There are almost no African countries with any pink in them; nor are most of the countries along the Silk Road, somehow. — Really the most startling part to me are the eighteen page views each from Macedonia and American Samoa. This seems like more per-capita readers than I might expect.

Country	Readers
United States	835
Canada	84
United Kingdom	61
India	60
Philippines	54
Denmark	26
Italy	21
American Samoa	18
Macedonia	18
Slovenia	18
Germany	17
Australia	13
Poland	11
Netherlands	10
Ireland	9
Singapore	9
South Africa	7
Brazil	6
Croatia	6
Sweden	6
United Arab Emirates	6
France	5
Malaysia	5
New Zealand	5
Czech Republic	4
Indonesia	4
Israel	4
Mexico	4
Turkey	4
European Union	3
Pakistan	3
Romania	3
Russia	3
Spain	3
Taiwan	3
Bangladesh	2
Nepal	2
Norway	2
Argentina	1 (*)
Austria	1
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1
Chile	1
Colombia	1 (*****)
Ecuador	1
Finland	1
Georgia	1
Greece	1
Hong Kong SAR China	1
Iraq	1 (*)
Jamaica	1
Japan	1 (*)
Jordan	1 (*)
Kazakhstan	1
Lithuania	1
Morocco	1
Saudi Arabia	1 (**)
Switzerland	1
Thailand	1
Ukraine	1

There were 59 countries listed as sending me any readers in January. That’s way down from December’s 68 and November’s 70. 19 of them were single-reader countries, up from December’s 17 and November’s 13. Argentina, Iraq, Japan, and Jordan were single-reader countries last month too. Saudi Arabia’s been a single-reader country for three months now. Colombia’s on a six-month streak now. I could swear Colombia has done this before, too, although good luck my finding the time when. Searching for ‘Colombia’ in my archives is not as helpful as you might imagine. Oh, I can find a time in late 2015 through early 2016 when I had a single European Union reader each month, six months in a row. Maybe that’s what I was thinking of.

I began the month having ever had 74,290 page views, from an acknowledged 37,119 unique readers. I’m glad you’re one of them, at least right now. You can put my posts in your RSS reader and enjoy them at your convenience. If you do that, you won’t show up in any of my statistics. I’ll never know you read any of this unless you comment. And that’s fine by me. I’m happy with people keeping their privacy. If you’re using WordPress regularly you can also add me to your WordPress Reader. That’s from the button at the upper-right corner of the page. On Twitter I’m @Nebusj. and at least once a week I go around Reading the Comics for the mathematics stuff. Thanks for being here.

How All Of 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog

It’s looking as though WordPress has really and permanently discontinued its year-in-review posts. That’s a shame. They had this animation that presented your year as a set of fireworks, one for each post, paced the same way your posts for the year were. The size of the fireworks explosion corresponded to how much it was liked or drew comments or something. Great stuff. Haven’t seen it in a couple of years. The web washes away everything whimsical.

I can do it manually, at least, looking at the summaries for yearly readership and all that. It’s just a bit different from the monthly reviews. And then I can see what lessons I draw from that, and go on to ignore them all. My impression of 2018 had been that I’d had a mildly better-read year than I had in 2017, but that my comments and likes had cratered. That is, people might find something they wanted to read, but saw no reason to stick around and chat with me, which I understand. But here’s what the data says.

2018 statistics: 16,597 page views. 9,769 visitors. 1.70 views per visitor. 182 posts published. — Also I swear they’ve changed the color scheme on this statistics page. This is probably setting up to a complete redesign of the statistics page to make it into something that gives almost the same information but takes way more JavaScript to do. I’m being old again. Pay no mind.

And, for the sake of convenience, let me put things since 2012 — my first full year — in a coherent table.

Year	Posts Published	Page Views	Unique Visitors	Likes	Comments
2012	6,094	180	275*	97	190
2013	106	5,729	2,905	262	161
2014	129	7,020	3,382	1,045	308
2015	188	11,241	5,159	3,273	822
2016	213	12,851	7,168	2,163	474
2017	164	12,214	7,602	1,094	301
2018	182	16,597	9,769	1,016	386

The 2012 visitors count doesn’t; they only started keeping track of those numbers (where they’d admit to us) partway through the year.

2015 you can see was a busy year. That’s the first year I did an A-To-Z sequence, and that got a fantastic response. In 2016 I tried two over the year and while neither was as well-received, it did turn out nicely. 2017 and 2018 had a single A-To-Z sequence each. I’m surprised how nearly I track to a post every other day over seven years straight. And I’m surprised that my page-view count grew by about one-third from 2017 to 2018. And that unique visitors grew by about the same amount, and has been except for 2016-to-2017. I’m certainly not doing much to be better about promoting myself, so something else is at work. The evaporating number of likes and comments I can’t explain. It’s looking like 2015 and 2016 were exceptional years, but what was the exception?

I can say what’s popular: posts that tell you how to do something. And, of course, my participation in the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival. I hope to do that again this year. The ten most popular things from 2018 were:

Fascinating, to me, is that only one piece (the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival) was posted in 2018. But overall it suggests I should start more pieces with the tag “How to … ”.

122 of the world’s countries sent me any readers at all in 2018. Here they are, and how many came from each, as WordPress organizes them and thinks dubious things like the “European Union” or the “United Kingdom” are countries:

Country	Readers
United States	10,545
Philippines	803
United Kingdom	737
Canada	641
India	635
Australia	285
Singapore	246
Denmark	199
Turkey	148
Germany	122
South Africa	114
Sweden	106
Brazil	105
Slovenia	105
France	85
Italy	83
Netherlands	72
Spain	71
Hong Kong SAR China	70
Puerto Rico	67
European Union	66
Switzerland	63
Poland	62
Austria	53
Indonesia	53
New Zealand	50
Mexico	45
Ireland	44
Pakistan	43
Belgium	41
Norway	39
Malaysia	37
Greece	36
South Korea	35
Russia	29
Algeria	28
Romania	27
Israel	25
Argentina	24
Kenya	22
Japan	21
Czech Republic	20
Finland	20
United Arab Emirates	20
Thailand	19
Egypt	18
Vietnam	16
Ghana	15
Peru	15
Portugal	14
Bangladesh	13
Nigeria	13
Croatia	12
Lithuania	12
Ukraine	12
Taiwan	11
Bulgaria	10
Bhutan	9
Brunei	9
Chile	9
Serbia	9
Hungary	8
Nepal	8
Saudi Arabia	8
Slovakia	8
Belize	7
China	7
Kazakhstan	7
Venezuela	7
Afghanistan	6
Morocco	6
Qatar	6
Sri Lanka	6
American Samoa	5
Colombia	5
Iraq	5
Kuwait	5
Lebanon	5
Macau SAR China	5
Mongolia	5
Albania	4
Estonia	4
Georgia	4
Jamaica	4
Jordan	4
Uruguay	4
Barbados	3
Costa Rica	3
Guernsey	3
Iceland	3
Latvia	3
Mauritius	3
Palestinian Territories	3
Panama	3
Cambodia	2
Cyprus	2
Ecuador	2
Laos	2
Libya	2
Luxembourg	2
Namibia	2
St. Kitts & Nevis	2
Tanzania	2
Trinidad & Tobago	2
Armenia	1
Bahamas	1
Bahrain	1
Botswana	1
El Salvador	1
Ethiopia	1
Fiji	1
Gibraltar	1
Guam	1
Kyrgyzstan	1
Macedonia	1
Malta	1
Mozambique	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Oman	1
Senegal	1
Sint Maarten	1
Tunisia	1

I’m quite surprised to have so many readers from the Philippines and wonder if some peculiar event happened, like a teacher told the school to look at my piece about the number of grooves on a record. I figured to appeal more to countries where English is a primary language, and know I have a strong United States cultural bias. (Quick, name a non-American comic strip that’s ever got into a Reading The Comics post. Time’s up! You were trying to think of Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends.) But the gap in readers per capita between, say, the United States and Canada seems more than I should have expected.

In all, in 2018, I posted 182 things. They came out to 186,612 words overall, for an average of 1,025 words per post. On average posts attracted 5.3 likes, and 2.8 comments. Seems as though I could do more. I don’t really know what.

How December 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog

With the end of December it’s the time to see what was popular around here, and just how popular it was. I keep figuring I’ll learn something useful from these explorations. Now and then I come to conclusions and one of these months I’ll even act on them.

December was an exhausting month. The last couple weeks of any A To Z sequence always are. These sequences are great fun, of course, or I wouldn’t keep doing them. But fatigue sets in, especially as I discover I’m not getting as far ahead of deadline as I imagined I would be and I get to the difficult letters of the alphabet’s end. And the Fall 2018 A To Z made up for being less frequent than past glossaries — two, rather than three, essays a week — with being crazily longer. So I was exhausted by that. And then the mathematically-themed comics for my Reading the Comics posts completely dried up. Add to that real-life obligations that I would not skip — being with family, and going to pinball events — and I ended up posting 17 things in December. Which is more than usual, yes. A typical month is 12 to 14 posts. But it’s down from the 23 of October and November, and I’m as convinced as I can be without evidence that the number of posts determines how many page views I get.

So October 2018, aided in part by my hosting the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival, had 2,010 page views from 1,063 unique visitors. November I got in 1,611 page views from 847 visitors. December, well, that saw 1,409 page views from 875 visitors.

December 2018: 1,409 views; 875 visitors; 1.61 views per visitor; 17 posts published. — I’d have liked to have taken this screenshot at just past midnight, Universal Time, on the 1st of January, but I was busy with something or other. Who can really say what, or why, though?

There were 82 things liked in December. It’s a slight drop from November’s 85, and October’s 94. I suppose it’s a rise in likes per page view, at least. The number of comments utterly collapsed, which probably reflects the end of the A To Z project. In October and November I had appeals for suggested topics; December didn’t have time for them. So what was 60 comments in October and 36 in November dropped to 17 for December. It’s not my least talkative period of the last year, but it’s up there. I need, seriously, to work on opening my posts to more comments. I’d ask people for suggestions how to do that, but who would answer?

The most popular essays around here in December were two perennials, two A To Z pieces, and some comics:

How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side? So my improved Buggles picture is paying off there.
My 2018 Mathematics A To Z: Unit Fractions (a topic suggested by Iva Sallay)
My 2018 Mathematics A To Z: Volume (a topic suggested by Roy Kassinger)
How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw (a topic suggested by this time I was teaching a class and couldn’t think how to prove what the area of a trapezoid was)
Reading the Comics, December 4, 2018: Christmas Specials Edition (a topic suggested by a kid making jokes about the story problem on the test, I’m going to guess rather than go back and check)

What countries sent me page views, and in what quantity? These, and these:

Country	Readers
United States	819
Canada	77
United Kingdom	68
India	46
Turkey	39
Philippines	31
Singapore	31
Australia	27
Denmark	23
Indonesia	15
Slovenia	14
South Africa	13
Italy	11
New Zealand	11
Sweden	10
Greece	9
Netherlands	9
South Korea	9
Bangladesh	8
Ireland	8
Lithuania	8
Germany	7
Brazil	6
Hong Kong SAR China	6
Poland	6
American Samoa	5
European Union	5
Mexico	5
Russia	5
Switzerland	5
Finland	4
France	4
Norway	4
Belgium	3
Czech Republic	3
Ghana	3
Hungary	3
Israel	3
Kenya	3
Pakistan	3
Serbia	3
Austria	2
Chile	2
Egypt	2
Libya	2
Romania	2
Spain	2
Taiwan	2
Ukraine	2
Vietnam	2
Albania	1
Algeria	1
Argentina	1
Botswana	1
China	1
Colombia	1 (****)
Iceland	1
Iraq	1
Japan	1
Jordan	1
Kuwait	1
Latvia	1
Palestinian Territories	1 (*)
Portugal	1
Puerto Rico	1
Saudi Arabia	1 (*)
Sint Maarten	1
Slovakia	1

That was 68 different countries sending readers, down from November’s 70 and October’s 74. There were 17 single-reader countries, up from November’s 13 and down from October’s 23. The Palestinian Territories and Saudi Arabia were single-reader countries in November too. Colombia’s been a single-reader country five months now. I don’t see how China can be a single-reader country, even given that English isn’t a primary language there. More than one person has to stumble across here just by accident. There’s something going on there.

According to Insights, I start the month and year with 72,915 total page views, from an admitted 36,260 unique visitors.

I published something like 18,587 words here in December, which is a drop from the 26,644 of November. I write “something like” because I don’t know how WordPress tallies stuff like words in captions, and I don’t think it counts words in comments. And the idea of a “word” in a count like this is difficult to make precise and indisputable. So don’t be fooled by the digits into thinking there’s any precision there. Also it’s still 1,093 words per post, which is a bit down from the 1,158 in an average November essay but still.

For the year-to-date, by the end of December, I was writing an average of 1,025 words per post. That is, posts for the whole of the year, rather than just in December. That’s down from the end-of-November average of 1,108 words per post. I averaged 5.2 likes per post, down from the end-of-November average of 5.3. And 2.8 comments per post, up from the end-of-November average of 2.7. That’s certainly not a significant change.

I’m glad to have you as a reader, even if it’s just for this sort of self-preening post. You can put my posts in your RSS reader and enjoy them at your convenience. If you’re using WordPress regularly you can also add me to your WordPress Reader. That’s from the button at the upper-right corner of the page. On Twitter I’m @Nebusj. And just about every Sunday plus, usually, some other day of the week I’ll be Reading the Comics for the mathematics stuff. Thanks for being here.

How November 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog

I knew that November 2018 was going to be a less busy month around here than October would. I didn’t have the benefit of hosting the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival for it. I’m hoping to host the carnival again, though. Not until after the new year. Not until after I’ve finished the Fall 2018 A To Z and have had some time to recuperate. It’s a weird thing but writing two 1500-to-2000-word essays each week hasn’t lightened my workload the way I figured. If you’re interested in the current Blog Carnival, by the way, here it is. Anyway, as reversions to the norm go, November was not bad. Here’s what it looked like.

November 2018. Views: 1,611. Visitors: 846. Views per visitor 1.90. Total posts: 23. — WordPress readership figures around here for July 2016 through November 2018. I was able to capture this picture just before anyone visited me in December, which I’m going to say is because I had really good reflexes and not because nobody wanted to deal with me the first Saturday of the month.

So there were 1,611 pages viewed here in November. Down from the 2,010 of October, but noticeably higher than September’s 1,505. That’s still a third-highest month (March 2018 was busier still). But it’s weirdly gratifying. There were 847 unique visitors logged in November. That’s down from October’s 1,063, and even September’s 874. I make this out as my fifth-most-visitors month on record. All those months have been this year.

85 things got liked in November. That’s down from October’s 94, up from September’s 65, and overall part of a weird pattern. My likes are definitely declining over time. But there’s little local peaks. If there’s any pattern it’s kind of a sawtooth, with the height of the teeth dropping. I have no explanation for this phenomenon. There were 36 comments in November, well down from October’s 60, but equal to September’s. It’s above the running average of the last two months (28.5 comments per month) but it’s still well below, like, the average commentary you can expect on the Comics Curmudgeon. Granted, we serve different purposes.

Of the most popular essays this month the top two were perennials. Some A to Z stuff filled out the rest. I’m including the top six posts here there was a tie for fourth place, and sixth place was barely behind that. If this reason seems ad hoc, you understand it correctly. Read a lot around here were:

Mutt, hauling a Victrola in: 'Have I ever shown you these valuable records I have?' Jeff: 'No!' Mutt: 'These records are very valuable! They are the first records ever made!' Jeff: 'They sound scratchy!' Mutt: 'Yes, they have some scratches, but they are worth five dollars each!' [ Later that Day ... Jeff is sandpapering a record. ] Jeff: 'I'll surprise Mutt.' (To Mutt). Jeff: 'Now they don't have scratches any more! I sanded them until they were smooth!' — Bud Fisher’s **Mutt and Jeff** rerun for the 1st of December, 2018. Clearly an attempt to get itself added to my page about how many grooves are on a record’s side. I have no information about when this strip first ran. My gut says the art dates to the 1940s. The word balloons are all recent, computer-assisted reletterings. (Look at the lower end of each letter ‘S’.) The relettering is certainly easier to read than the original cramped and shakily reproduced lettering. (Look at the record player’s ‘Come, Josephine’ text, or the sound effect of Jeff scratching the record clean in the fourth panel to see how bad it could be.) But the relettering is probably why the dialogue has that slightly over-edited, not-quite-human flow we’re used to from **Funky Winkerbean**.

And where were all these readers coming from? Here’s the roster of countries and their readership totals:

Country	Readers
United States	1,038
United Kingdom	72
Philippines	66
Canada	63
India	46
Denmark	37
Singapore	32
Australia	26
Sweden	15
Slovenia	14
Italy	12
Netherlands	12
Spain	11
Hong Kong SAR China	9
Germany	8
Brazil	7
Croatia	7
United Arab Emirates	7
Romania	6
Thailand	6
France	5
Puerto Rico	5
South Africa	5
Venezuela	5
European Union	4
Indonesia	4
Mexico	4
Norway	4
Pakistan	4
Poland	4
Austria	3
Israel	3
Nepal	3
Russia	3
Switzerland	3
Turkey	3
Algeria	2
Argentina	2
Bangladesh	2
Belgium	2
Bulgaria	2
China	2
Finland	2
Georgia	2
Ghana	2
Greece	2
Japan	2
Jordan	2
Malaysia	2
New Zealand	2
Nigeria	2
Panama	2
Peru	2
Portugal	2
South Korea	2
Sri Lanka	2
Taiwan	2
Belize	1
Bhutan	1
Colombia	1 (***)
Costa Rica	1
Czech Republic	1 (**)
El Salvador	1
Guernsey	1
Kenya	1
Lebanon	1
Namibia	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Qatar	1
Saudi Arabia	1

70 countries sent me readers in November 2018. That’s down from October’s 74 but up from September’s 58. 13 of them were single-reader countries, down from October’s 23 and September’s 14. Czech Republic has been a single-reader country for three months. Colombia for four months now.

According to the Insights panel, I start the month at 71,506 total page views for the 1,185 posts I’ve done altogether. It also records 35,384 unique visitors, but I again have to defensively insist WordPress didn’t count unique visitors for the first couple months I was around here. I swear.

I published 23 posts in October. A to Z months tend to be busy ones. These posts held something like 26,644 words in total. For the 165 things I had posted this year, through to the start of December, I averaged 1,108 words per post. That’s up from the start of November’s 996 words per post, but still. I’m averaging 5.3 likes per post, and 2.7 comments per post. At the start of last month I was averaging 5.5 likes and 2.8 comments per post. This is probably not any important kind of variation. There’ve been 450 total comments and 870 total likes this year, as of the start of December.

Are you interested in reading me more regularly? You can put my posts in your RSS reader and enjoy them at your convenience. You can also add me to your WordPress Reader, using the button at the upper-right corner of the page. Also possibly a pop-up menu from the lower-right corner. On Twitter I’m @Nebusj. Through the end of the year I’ll keep working on the Fall 2018 A To Z. And every Sunday plus, usually, some other day of the week I’ll be Reading the Comics for the mathematics stuff. Thanks for considering any of this.

How October 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog

I expected there to be a fair number of readers here in October. The A to Z project, particularly, implied that. A To Z months are exhausting, but they give me a lot of posts. And I’m as sure as I can be without actually checking that the number of posts is the biggest determining factor in how many readers I attract. There were 23 posts in October, compared to September’s 15 and my summertime usual of 12 to 14.

Then there’s the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival. This posted in September — by six hours — but it was destined to bring new and, I hope, happy readers in. And that happened also. Here’s what the WordPress statistics showed me for the month:

October 2018: 2,010 views from 1,063 visitors. 1.89 views per visitor. 23 posts published. — I’m so looking forward to seeing how big my faceplant back to normal is for November. No, really, nobody put references to me on some high-volume blog that tells people of cool stuff they might be reading. I couldn’t bear it.

So this was my highest-readership month since the blog started seven years ago. 2,010 page views, from 1,063 unique visitors. That’s also the greatest number of unique visitors I’ve had in one month, and the first time I’ve broken a thousand visitors. September had 1,505 page views from 874 unique visitors; August, 1,421 page views from 913 unique visitors.

There was a bit of an upswing in the number of likes: 94 of them issued in October, compared to September’s 65 and August’s 57. This is on the higher side for this year, but it is down a good bit from the comparable month two or three years ago. In June 2015, for my first A to Z, I drew over 500 likes; I don’t know where likers have gone.

There were 60 comments on the blog in October, partly people who liked or wanted to talk about A To Z topics, partly people suggesting others. It’s the greatest number of comments I’ve had in one month in two years now. September had 36 commenters; August, 27. Have to go back to March 2016 to find a month when more people said anything around here. That, too, was an A-to-Z month, and one of the handful of months when I posted something every single day.

There were a lot of popular posts this month, naturally. This might be the first time in years that none of the top five were Reading the Comics posts. The A to Z and the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival squeezed out very nearly everything:

Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival #121
How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
My 2018 Mathematics A To Z: Jokes
My 2018 Mathematics A To Z: Hyperbolic Half-Plane
I’m Looking For Some More Topics For My 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z (although this particular set is closed and, indeed, all written; here’s the search for topics that’s more current.)

52 countries sent me any readers in August. 58 did so in September. There were 16 single-reader countries in August and 14 in September. For busy October?

Country	Readers
United States	1,172
Philippines	99
United Kingdom	94
Denmark	82
Canada	65
India	59
Singapore	53
Australia	50
Poland	27
Slovenia	24
Brazil	20
South Africa	16
Turkey	15
European Union	13
Greece	13
Germany	12
France	11
Mexico	11
Puerto Rico	11
Spain	10
Ireland	8
Malaysia	8
Italy	7
New Zealand	7
Russia	6
Switzerland	6
Argentina	5
Netherlands	5
Nigeria	5
Norway	5
China	4
Hong Kong SAR China	4
Indonesia	4
Pakistan	4
Belgium	3
Belize	3
Chile	3
Kenya	3
South Korea	3
Algeria	2
Austria	2
Barbados	2
Croatia	2
Ghana	2
Japan	2
Morocco	2
Qatar	2
Romania	2
Slovakia	2
Sweden	2
Ukraine	2
Albania	1
Bahrain	1
Bangladesh	1
Bulgaria	1
Cambodia	1
Colombia	1 (**)
Cyprus	1
Czech Republic	1 (*)
Georgia	1
Jamaica	1
Jordan	1
Kazakhstan	1
Macau SAR China	1
Macedonia	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Oman	1
Peru	1
Portugal	1
Serbia	1
Sri Lanka	1
Taiwan	1
Uruguay	1
Vietnam	1

74 countries sending me any readers at all. 23 countries sent me a single reader for the month. Czech republic has sent me a single reader two months in a row now; Columbia, three months in a row.

Insights tells me that I started November with a total of 69,895 page views, from a logged 34,538 unique visitors. As ever, please recall the first couple years WordPress didn’t tell us anything about the unique visitor count, so for all I know there “should” be more.

In October I published 28,733 words, which is nearly double September’s total. Whew. I’d posted 142 things this year by the start of November, and gathered a total of 391 comments and 787 likes for the year to date. This averaged to 3.1 comments per post on average, up from 2.6 at the start of October. And 5.5 likes per posting, down from 5.8 at the start of October. The 142 posts through the start of November averaged 996 words each. That’s up from 946 words per post at the start of October. I’m going to crush myself beneath a pile of words that I meant to be less deep.

If you’d like to add this blog to your WordPress Reader, there should be a button to do so at the upper right corner of this page. It should also be an option in this pop-up menu from the lower right corner. Or you can add this blog to your RSS reader, and read it in any format you like and without me or WordPress being able to track you. If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, I am @Nebusj. Still thinking seriously about getting a Mathstodon account. And if you’re interested in my two biggest projects here, all of my Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z should appear at this link. My biggest ongoing project is Reading the Comics, and its many posts are here. Thank you for reading.

How September 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog, Finally

I like to do my monthly recap of my readership, like, at the start of the month. It’s just that between the Carnival, the A-to-Z, Reading the Comics, and my being busy on Friday I didn’t have the time before now. I’d say that it doesn’t matter because these statistics-review posts are mostly for my own entertainment. But I do feel there’s something untidy in my being a week late.

It was a well-read month! My second-most-read month, if I’m not missing something. WordPress reports 1,505 page views, up from August’s 1,421 and July’s 1,058. (The highest I have on record is March’s 1,779 page views.) Third-highest number of unique visitors, as well: 874 of them. August had 913 unique visitors. July a mere 668, but that was a more normal month. (March had 999 unique visitors and yes, it still burns me up that I didn’t have just the one more.)

Yes, I’m excited by what I see for October’s views already. I should have made this chart sooner in the month. Now I’m going to be all disappointed when it doesn’t stay this riotously popular on, like, the 28th of October.

The number of ‘likes’ around here rose, to 65. Had been 57 in August and 37 in July. That’s still tiny, though, compared to what was normal around here even a year ago (98 in September 2017, and that was down from all of 2016). The number of comments was up, to 36 from August’s 27 and July’s 28. But the number of comments around here is so erratic that I’ve mostly given up on figuring any kind of pattern.

The top most popular articles for September were one perennial, one that I’d have expected to be a perennial (and was the number-two post last month), comics, and the carnival:

I have the suspicion that the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival #121 post will be most popular next month too. And that only my publishing it the last day of September kept it from being on top for that month too.

52 countries sent me any readers at all in August. 16 of them were single-reader countries. The same numbers accurately described countries and single-reader countries for July. And for September? … Here’s the roster.

Country	Readers
United States	885
Philippines	149
United Kingdom	64
India	63
Canada	51
Australia	34
Turkey	23
Singapore	22
Germany	21
Denmark	16
Slovenia	16
European Union	12
France	8
South Africa	8
Switzerland	8
Brazil	7
Netherlands	7
Pakistan	7
Brunei	6
Kazakhstan	6
Ghana	5
Puerto Rico	5
Russia	5
Spain	5
Egypt	4
Ireland	4
Malaysia	4
Sweden	4
Taiwan	4
Thailand	4
Austria	3
Finland	3
Morocco	3
Norway	3
Poland	3
South Korea	3
Belize	2
Greece	2
Iceland	2
Indonesia	2
Jamaica	2
Kenya	2
Mexico	2
Vietnam	2
Algeria	1
Argentina	1 (*)
Belgium	1
Chile	1 (*)
Colombia	1 (*)
Croatia	1
Czech Republic	1
Guam	1
Israel	1
Kuwait	1
New Zealand	1
Saudi Arabia	1
Slovakia	1
United Arab Emirates	1

So that’s 58 countries total, with only 14 of them single-readers. Argentina, Chile, and Colombia were single-reader countries in August; nobody else was. No countries are on a longer than two-month streak. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than a hundred readers from the Philippines. Also 12 readers listed as from the European Union, distinct from the countries participating in it, seems unusually many.

According to the Insights panel I’d had 119 posts this year, right before October began. And had gathered 67,885 page views. This would be from a total of 33,475 acknowledged unique visitors. (My blog started before WordPress told us anything about unique visitors.) As of the start of October, there had been 313 total comments. This makes an average of 2.6 comments per post on average. At the start of August there had been 2.6 comments per post on average. But remember that was fifteen fewer posts. At the end of September I’d gotten 696 total likes, for an average of 5.8 likes per post. That’s down from 6.0 at the end of August. By the end of September I’d had a total of 112,648 words posted around here. 15,014 of them were posted in September. Since there were fifteen posts altogether that’s an average of 1000.1 words per post in September. For the year, through the end of September, that’s 946.6 words per post this year. At the end of August that had been 930 words per post. So as ever, my attempts to write more quick, simple, short things that don’t wear me out has failed. And I have the rest of an A to Z to write, too! I’m so doomed.

If you’d like to watch my continuing logorrheic doom, please follow along. You can add me to your WordPress Reader by using the button at the upper right corner of the page. If you’d rather read without my having the ability to track, you can follow me by RSS here. If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, try adding me as @Nebusj. Thanks for being here, in whatever form you are.

How August 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog

And with the start of the month it’s my chance to do my usual self-examination. In this I look over what was popular, and how popular, and draw no usable conclusions from this. The month didn’t end as I had hoped, owing to family matters. But then nothing ever does quite go as one hopes. We just have to carry on anyway. But looking over WordPress’s review of readership around here:

August 2018 statistics: 1,421 views. 913 visitors. 1.56 views per visitor. 14 posts published. — I’m a little surprised to have had fourteen posts. I was pulled away from my writing the last week of the month so thought I would just have a gap.

Huh. August was a busy month, with 1,421 recorded page views. The last several months had been 1,058 and 1,077. This is the third-highest number of page views since April of 2016 at least. And that’s from 913 unique visitors, which is the second-highest number of unique visitors I’ve got on record. (March 2018 continues to taunt me with 999 unique visitors.) People found something they liked.

They liked 57 things, which compares to July’s 37 by being larger. It’s still an anemic total, though. June had 94 likes, and even that is way down from a year ago. August 2017 had 147 likes. And there was a time there’d be 345 likes in a month. That time was April 2016. Comments drifted slightly downward, to 27 from July’s 28 or June’s 30. I count that as holding still, anyway. As ever, I need to do better writing things that encourage responses.

The roster of most popular articles suggests that I’m catching on as a reference for the record-groove counting problem. Just under 200 page views were of that alone. The next-most-popular piece had only 67 views. Don’t think I’m not considering studying power-law scaling of my posts. If you have no idea what I’m on about, don’t worry. I may get to it. But here’s the most popular posts for the past month:

I’m still taking nominations for the A-To-Z, by the way, and shall be for a while yet. Also, discussions of fun mathematics which don’t fit the A-To-Z format may yet belong in the Mathematics Blog Carnival, to appear here at the end of September. Please let me know of anything that’s educational or playful or just fun that you’d like to see shared with more people. Can be your own writing; can be something you think more people should know.

What countries of the world, plus the European Union, sent me readers in August? And how many? Here’s the official roster as WordPress make it out.

Country	Readers
United States	802
Philippines	232
Canada	52
Turkey	44
India	40
United Kingdom	31
Australia	30
European Union	26
France	18
Germany	12
Bhutan	8
Italy	7
Singapore	7
Belgium	6
Czech Republic	6
Netherlands	6
Peru	6
Puerto Rico	6
Spain	6
Israel	5
Pakistan	5
Sweden	5
Brazil	4
Finland	4
Mexico	4
New Zealand	4
Nigeria	4
Norway	4
Algeria	3
Indonesia	3
South Africa	3
South Korea	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Denmark	2
Malaysia	2
Vietnam	2
Argentina	1
Austria	1 (*)
Chile	1
Colombia	1
Egypt	1
Estonia	1
Ethiopia	1
Hong Kong SAR China	1
Ireland	1 (*)
Latvia	1
Luxembourg	1
Panama	1
Portugal	1
Romania	1 (*)
Slovenia	1
Sri Lanka	1

They list 52 countries sending me any readers. This is the same as in July. There were 16 single-reader countries, again the same as in July. I know, I’m worried I made a mistake with the data too. Ah, but here. Austria, Ireland, and Romania are on two-month streaks as single-reader countries. Nobody’s been on the roster more than two months in a row. Serbia just missed the half-year milestone.

The Insights panel would have me believe I started September on 66,380 page views, from 32,601 recorded unique visitors. I’ll go along with that gag. For the year to date, I’ve posted — well, I forgot to take a snapshot of the data before Sunday’s Reading the Comics post published. If we pretend the 2nd of September was part of August, though, then: I’ve had 105 posts so far this year; 14 in August and 15 in the Greater August that included this past Sunday. I’ve accumulated 269 total comments, for an average of 2.6 comments per post. This is the same average I had at the start of August. I gathered a total of 633 likes, for an average of 6.0 likes per post this year. Start of August I’d had 6.4 likes per post. Counting Sunday’s post I had 97,634 total words published so far this year, 14,551 of them in August. In July I had 14,032 words in only twelve posts. My words-per-post average is up to 930. Start of August it had drifted down to 885.3.

If you’d like to read my posts you’ve got options. They all involve reading, though. Maybe having them read to you. But all my posts are available by RSS feed. If you like the WordPress reader, there’s a button at the upper-right corner of the page. And if you’d like to see messages announced on Twitter, I’m @Nebusj there. And yes, I am sniffing around Mathstodon.xyz, the mathematics-themed instance of the Twitter-like social site Mastodon. Just browsing its public feed can be fun. There’s a mix of people sharing neat stuff they ran across, little puzzles that’ve been bothering them, and legitimate current research. I do not have an account there and might not make one at all. But I’m thinking about whether I ought. Will tell you if and when I do.

How July 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog

July 2018 was another month in which stuff got in the way of my plans. I know it seems like I’m always apologizing for that. But I tell you truly: stuff keeps getting in the way of my plans. I could keep up the most essential stuff, the Reading the Comics posts. But bigger projects — I may as well stop being coy; I’m hoping to do another A to Z this year — kept getting lost under daily stuff. This includes pet health problems. I’ll leave it at that because they were sad ones.

But let’s see what these strained circumstances did for my readership, such as it was.

July 2018, views: 1,058. Visitors: 668. Views per visitor: 1.58. Posts published: 12. — My WordPress.com statistics report for July 2018 and the months leading up to that.

OK. Spent another month at above a thousand page views, which is a nice threshold. There were 1,058 pages looked at around here in July, down from June’s 1,077 and May’s 1,274. This is three months in a row I’ve had twelve posts, most of them Reading the Comics stuff. This goes to support the hypothesis that the thing most in my control that affects my readership is the number of things I write. There were 668 unique visitors, down a little from June’s 681 and a fair bit from May’s 837. The number of likes plummeted once again, to a mere 37. It had been 94 in June and 73 in May. But that’s still a drop.

And it hurts a bit. I think I’m doing much better Reading the Comics posts than I used to. I credit the discovery that GoComics.com links aren’t as secure as I had thought. If I’m going to include the image of every comic strip I talk about, I want to have a more substantive discussion. Reprinting strips that I don’t have the copyright to is fair use, of course, in that I’m using them for educational purpose. But making sure that I have a deeper discussion based on the strip makes me feel more secure in my use.

At least the comments held steady, with 28 of them over the month. That’s down from June’s 30, but that’s not a real difference. May saw only 17 comments. And it’s pretty good to have that many comments. Pet issues and other obligations had me spend a week and a half just checking that nothing had exploded. (It didn’t. I’ve never had something explode around here.)

And what was popular around here? One perennial, some comic strip stuff, and a post I am delighted got some attention:

There were a large number of views of the record-grooves post. But they weren’t particularly concentrated any one day or week. I think it might have reached that point where it’s Google-ranked highly enough to turn up as an answer to people’s query. I’m always embarrassed when my self-examination posts are among the most popular stuff I write. But if I view them as concentrating the stuff my readers think is particularly important, well, that’s all right then. Maybe I should do more regular recaps of what’s been popular lately. Could fill that late-in-the-week content hole.

But the important thing is I’m delighted people are reading about my prosthaphaeretic rule for finding square roots. I’m sure that it’s an old trick. And it’s not at all practical, not anymore. But I did notice it sitting there, waiting for me to uncover. That was fun.

Now to the list of countries sending me readers: will it include the United States up top?

Country	Readers
United States	669
United Kingdom	110
India	49
Philippines	42
Australia	25
Canada	23
Slovenia	10
South Africa	10
Germany	9
France	7
Hong Kong SAR China	6
Kenya	6
Brazil	5
Mexico	5
Netherlands	5
New Zealand	5
Spain	5
Macau SAR China	4
Malaysia	4
Pakistan	4
Puerto Rico	4
Argentina	3
Belgium	3
Italy	3
Japan	3
Singapore	3
Chile	2
Guernsey	2
Indonesia	2
Mauritius	2
Norway	2
Poland	2
Portugal	2
Sweden	2
Tanzania	2
Turkey	2
Austria	1
Bangladesh	1
Brunei	1 (**)
Bulgaria	1
Denmark	1
Hungary	1
Ireland	1
Israel	1
Laos	1
Peru	1
Romania	1
Serbia	1 (****)
Slovakia	1 (*)
South Korea	1 (**)
Venezuela	1
Vietnam	1

There were 52 countries sending me readers in July, down from 55 in June and 58 in May. There were 16 single-reader countries, down from 19 in June and 22 in May. Slovakia’s been on that list two months in a row. Brunei and South Korea three months now. Serbia’s on its fifth month in a row on the single-reader list. I hope they like me a little bit enough. It’s a rare month to have no countries with an & in their name, like Trinidad & Tobago. Hm.

If the Insights panel is correct, I started August viewed 64,958 times by 31,688 logged unique visitors. I’d finished with 90 posts on the year, gathering a total of 232 comments and 572 likes. That’s an average of 2.6 comments and 6.4 likes per post. I reached 83,083 total words published, an average of 923.1 words per post. At the end of June I was averaging 885.3 words per post. I don’t know how I got so much more longwinded so fast. But it does credit me with 14,032 words published in July, and that over only twelve posts. No wonder I’m tired.

Thanks as ever for reading my posts. You can add this page to your RSS reader by using this address. If you’d rather add it to your WordPress reader, you can use the button at the upper-right corner of the page. And if you’d rather see me on Twitter, please do add me @Nebusj. Thank you.

How June 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog

I’ve broken the habit of watching my WordPress readership statistics day-to-day. This is good. It’s too easy to read random fluctuations as significant changes. And to go from that to supposing that everyone’s decided they hate me now. I do still check monthly. And I try to think what I can learn from that data. Not too hard, and not enough to change what I do. But to where I might think I learned something.

I had another 12-post month. As seems to keep happening I started out with an ambitious program of the weekly Reading the Comics posts, finishing up a couple of open-ended essay threads, and then a few drop-ins as I ran across something interesting. And then my days got all busy and stuff demanded my attention and all I had time for was the comics posts after all. It turned out mostly all right, though. Here’s just how all right:

June 2018, Views: 1,077. Visitors: 681. Views per visitor: 1.58. There should also be a listing that there were 12 posts. — Meanwhile in the world’s dullest domino chain.

So for the sixth month running I beat a thousand page views. Came in at 1,077. It’s my thinnest margin since back in February when there were a mere 1,062 page views. Still, I had a more than this large comfortable round number of page views. The number of unique visitors dropped also, to 681. That’s my lowest number of visitors since February again. But that just seems to reflect there being less traffic overall in June; the number of views per visitor was 1.58, basically the same as May’s 1.52 and April’s 1.53. No archive-divers here, seems.

There were 94 things liked in June; that’s up from April’s and May’s 73, and down from March’s 142. There were 30 comments posted in June, up from May’s 17 and April’s 13, but down from March’s 53. All respectable enough; none exactly suggesting I know how to write stuff people love to share or comment on. Which is on me, of course; no reader’s got the job of responding to stuff they don’t care to.

The popular posts were nearly what I would have guessed: the Buggles and some comics stuff. But there were surprises even in the top five:

So I’m surprised that last month’s readership review post would be among the most popular. I guess it shows the value of having any picture at all, however marginally interesting, in a post. Still seems dangerously self-absorbed. The non-Euclidean geometry one also surprises me, since it was only up for two days and still got as many readers as anything else posted in June. The lesson here, I suppose, is that people love seeing me not know stuff that’s obvious to people familiar with a topic. This is promising for future essays, though, since there are so many obvious things I don’t know.

Then there’s the list of countries that sent me readers to include, since that’s apparently a thing people like:

Country	Readers
United States	698
India	62
United Kingdom	45
Canada	44
Germany	19
Philippines	19
Singapore	15
Australia	14
Italy	14
Sweden	14
Poland	11
South Africa	9
Austria	8
France	7
Indonesia	7
Puerto Rico	7
Belgium	4
Brazil	4
Denmark	4
Hong Kong SAR China	4
Mexico	4
Netherlands	4
Norway	4
Spain	4
Czech Republic	3
Egypt	3
Kenya	3
Switzerland	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Argentina	2
Ireland	2
Japan	2
Lithuania	2
Malaysia	2
Nepal	2
Vietnam	2
Brunei	1 (*)
Cambodia	1
Croatia	1
Ecuador	1
Estonia	1
Fiji	1
Georgia	1
Ghana	1
Greece	1
Iraq	1
Malta	1
New Zealand	1
Nigeria	1
Serbia	1 (***)
Slovakia	1
Slovenia	1
South Korea	1 (*)
Thailand	1
Turkey	1

There were 55 countries sending me any readers, down from 58 for three months in a row. There were 19 single-reader countries, down from 22 in May, up from 14 in April. Brunei and South Korea were single-reader countries two months in a row. Serbia’s had a single reader for me four months in a row now.

The Insights panel tells me July started with this blog having had 63,897 total page views, from an admitted 31,020 unique visitors. It logs for the year 2018 a total of 78 posts that attracted, to that point, 196 comments. And that there had been 535 total likes given to something over the year so far. This comes to an average of 2.5 comments per post, and 6.8 likes per posting. By the end of May I had gotten only 2.4 comments and 6.7 likes per post, so, at least I’ve got something figured out.

By the end of June I had posted 69,051 words as WordPress logs things; that’s 13,374 words over June, a bit more than I posted over May despite June being the shorter month. I’m up to an average of 885.3 words per post; at the end of May I was at a mere 843.6 words per post. The trend is obvious; by the end of the year I’ll just never stop writing things. You’ll just see a continuous feed of me putting more heaps of words onto this pile. You’ll be shocked how many times and how many different ways I can type ‘that’ wrong and correct it. Or how often an ‘of course’ creeps into my writing and I have to edit that out.

As ever, I encourage you to read this post and more like it. You can add this page to your WordPress reader by using the button at the upper-right corner of this page. This link is the RSS feed, which gets all my posts as they’re posted, and which you can add to your RSS reader without my ever knowing about. I’m @Nebusj on Twitter. If you see me on Tumblr you’ve found a hoax, since I’m not on Tumblr and every time I look at it I feel helpless and confused.

How May 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog

And now the easiest post I write all month: my review of what my readership looked like the past 31 days. I have to admit once more I’m not satisfied with my writership. I didn’t get some projects going that I wanted; but that’s all right. I’ve got five big ideas in mind for the coming several months. Thinking up what to do is always the hard part, other than actually doing it. So that’s my part. Now on to your, the readers’, part. Here I pause while savoring my last moments of not knowing the response was bad.

Oh, how about that. It wasn’t bad. It was even good. Readership was back up in May, rising to 1,274 page views all told. This ties with January for the second-greatest number of readers so far this year. It’s a fair bit up from April’s 1,117. Down from March’s 1,779, but what wouldn’t be? The number of unique visitors rose too, to 837. That’s below March’s tantalizing 999, but up from April’s 731. I did post 12 pieces in May, compared to 11 in April, and 16 in March. I suspect that the number of posts published is the only thing in my control that can influence readership numbers.

A bar chart of readership figures, mostly circling around 1,000 readers per month with a spike two months ago. — Of course the real information is in the Views Per Visitor statistic, but I don’t know what it means.

I can say what people were looking for. The most popular post of the month was, once again, about the number of grooves on a record’s side. I think it’s been getting more popular lately. This shows the power of uploading a better picture of that Buggles album cover, I suppose. The five top posts of the month:

So it’s worth spending some time improving the graphics for my crushingly detailed examination of the area of trapezoids. Writing blogs always say use quality graphics for your articles and it turns out they’re so right.

I struggle still with reader engagement, and I understand that. A lot of what I write is in improv terms hard to advance. I need to be better at writing open things that encourage response. There were a mere 17 comments in May, improved from April’s 13 but still not much at all, especially compared to March’s 53. Which still isn’t great but is something. There were 73 things liked in May, the same number as in April. And way down from March’s 142.

What countries sent me readers? Mostly the United States, as always. But here’s the full roster:

Country	Readers
United States	915
Canada	60
India	59
United Kingdom	36
Australia	21
Germany	12
Puerto Rico	11
Denmark	10
Philippines	10
Singapore	10
Malaysia	9
Slovenia	9
Indonesia	8
New Zealand	7
South Africa	7
Israel	6
Spain	6
Brazil	5
Hong Kong SAR China	5
Italy	5
Switzerland	5
Sweden	4
Vietnam	4
Greece	3
Ireland	3
Norway	3
Russia	3
Albania	2
Belgium	2
Ghana	2
Japan	2
Pakistan	2
Slovakia	2
Thailand	2
Turkey	2
Algeria	1
Austria	1
Brunei	1
Costa Rica	1
Egypt	1
European Union	1
Finland	1 (*)
France	1
Jamaica	1
Kuwait	1
Mauritius	1
Morocco	1
Netherlands	1
Poland	1
Qatar	1
Saudi Arabia	1
Serbia	1 (**)
South Korea	1
Sri Lanka	1
Saint Kitts & Nevis	1 (*)
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Ukraine	1

That’s 58 countries which sent me readers over the month. That’s three months in a row the total’s been 58 countries so I assume WordPress is just making these numbers up and figures 58 looks about right. Not suspiciously few, not suspiciously many. We’ll see.

There were 22 single-reader countries. That’s different at least; in April there were 14, and in March 15. Finland and Saint Kitts & Nevis were single-reader countries in April also. Serbia’s been single-reader for three months running now.

The Insights panel tells me that for 2018 so far I’ve had 66 posts, and have accumulated a total of 443 likes and 161 comments. There’s 55,677 total words. This means I published 10,836 total words over the month, which is more than I did in April. I thought I was tired. My year’s average right now is 843.6 words per post; at the end of April that was 830.4. My posts for May alone averaged 903 words. The April posts averaged 772. I knew I was getting more verbose. There’s 2.4 comments and 6.7 likes on average for the post. At the end of April this was 3.5 comments and 6.9 likes per post.

The month officially starts with 62,824 pages viewed from a tracked 30,339 unique visitors. I’ve officially got 759 WordPress visitors, who’re following through their Readers page. I’d be glad if you joined them: you can use the button at the upper-right corner of this page to follow via WordPress. You can also see me as @Nebusj on Twitter. And if you’d prefer you can follow the RSS feed for my posts. If you do that I get absolutely no information about what you read or how interesting you find it, and that’s fine by me.

We ended up putting 38 goldfish back in the pond. The reader with long-term memory may remember we brought 52 in. The fish had a hard winter, one afflicted by water quality issues and feeding issues. We’re trying to recover emotionally, and to work out a plan for better fish care next winter.

How April 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog

People were far less interested in the number of grooves on a record’s side this past month. That’s what I take away from the readership figures around here for April, as WordPress reports. There were, it appears, some 1,117 pages viewed in April, from 731 unique visitors. That’s well down from March’s 1,779 views and 999 visitors. But March was clearly an outlier; February saw 1,062 page views from 611 visitors. This is four months in a row with at least a thousand page views, so everything seems consistent.

The number of likes fell to 73, down from 142. This seems like a lot of drop, but considering there were 102 likes in February and 112 in January … yeah, that’s a bit lower. Hm. Comments were down, too, with a mere 13 posted in April. There were 53 in March, 30 in February, those are much more engaged numbers. It’s my doing, I know; I had a month of mostly writing about comics and that’s fun, but it’s not much to discuss. What’s to say, “That wasn’t really a student making fun of the story problem!”? Nah. Also I’m abashed to realize I had only eleven posts in April; March had a healthier count of 16.

Statistics chart showing a big spike in March and a return to the roughly twelve-month normal for April 2018. — Definitely more normal than the March 2018 figures.

So what were people reading? One perennial and then a bunch of mostly new stuff:

How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side? And while that number hasn’t changed any, I did finally get a better picture of that Buggles album to use as picture.
Reading the Comics, April 25, 2018: Coronet Blue Edition which … really? It had like two days to attract readers. Are references to obscure one-season 60s dramas really that compelling? … I’m a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan from way back, of course I know they are.
Reading the Comics, April 11, 2018: Obscure Mathematical Terms Edition and okay, that makes more sense being on the top-five list.
Someone Else’s Homework: A Solution and my friend’s had a couple more homework problems to bounce off me and I’ve liked them all. I’m just sensitive I might spoil some poor instructor’s plans if I talk about too many of them.
Reading the Comics, April 14, 2018: Friday the 13th Edition? and that makes sense being up on the roster too.

The Insights panel tells me I’ve gotten to 44,841 total words published this year so far, with 135 total comments and 370 total likes. So, 8,494 words over the month. I’m currently averaging 830.4 words per post, 3.5 comments per post, and 6.9 likes per post. Words and likes are slightly up from March; comments are down a bit.

As I make it out 58 countries sent me readers this past month. That’s the same as March, and up from February’s 54. They’re these:

Country	Readers
United States	687
United Kingdom	84
Canada	59
India	38
Australia	21
Singapore	18
Philippines	17
Brazil	16
South Africa	16
Ireland	11
Spain	11
Turkey	11
Puerto Rico	8
Denmark	7
France	7
Afghanistan	6
Italy	6
Netherlands	5
Peru	5
Slovenia	5
Sweden	5
Germany	4
Israel	4
New Zealand	4
Poland	4
Ukraine	4
Mongolia	3
Russia	3
South Korea	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Algeria	2
Argentina	2
Belgium	2
Bulgaria	2
Egypt	2
Hong Kong SAR China	2
Indonesia	2
Japan	2
Lebanon	2
Lithuania	2
Malaysia	2
Norway	2
Romania	2
Switzerland	2
Armenia	1
Czech Republic	1
Finland	1
Gibraltar	1
Iraq	1
Kenya	1
Luxembourg	1
Nigeria	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Senegal	1
Serbia	1 (*)
St. Kitts & Nevis	1
Tunisia	1
Vietnam	1

That’s 14 single-reader countries, down one from March and down two from February. Serbia was a single-reader country in March; nowhere else was. May starts with 61,549 pages viewed from 29,502 admitted unique visitors.

I’d appreciate it if you did follow NebusResearch regularly. I haven’t restored the e-mail postings, although if I go another month or two without anything suspicious turning up in the comments I might try it. But you can follow on your WordPress Reader, by using the button at the upper right corner of the page. Here’s the RSS feed, if you’d rather read the way you like without WordPress being able to trace you. And if you don’t mind Twitter you can follow me as @Nebusj there. Watch as I give the tally of how many goldfish we’re getting back out to the backyard pond!

How March 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog

Well, one thing I know to post this week is my review of what my readership was like in March. Let me go see what WordPress will tell me about that.

Huh.

Not at all sure what happened there but it looks like I might’ve just had my best month ever. WordPress tells me there were 1,779 page views in March, way up from February’s 1,062 and January’s 1,274. Also it tells me this came from what I’m sure is a record 999 unique visitors and now that’s going to drive me crazy for like ever. There were 611 unique visitors in February and 670 in January. I am not positive but think my previous records were in March 2016 (1,557 views) and April 2016 (757 visitors). That’s on 16 essays posted, up from the 13 in February and 14 in January.

A bar chart showing the 1,779 page views and 999 visitors from March 2018, and lower numbers for other months going back to November 2015. — Is this self-indulgent? No; I’ve learned that people are much more interested in posts when there’s any picture, however unimportant, attached. This is self-**serving**, an important difference.

Had 53 comments made around here in March, my best since the glory days of early 2016. February saw 30 and January 39 comments and oh I did my best to keep caught up, but it’s hard. There were 143 things liked over the month; that’s up from February’s 102 and January’s 112. Greatest number since August 2017 and my last round of A To Z work.

I don’t know precisely what drew so many readers in, as in, why many people were looking for this. But I know what they were looking for. The most popular, by far, essay this month drew 279 page views. I have to guess some forum found the answer to years of argument and posted a link to settle the issue. The top five:

Insights for the year tell me that (as of the 3rd of April, anyway) I’ve had 44 total posts, with 120 total comments and 301 total likes. There’s 36,347 words posted so far in the year, and an average of 826 words per post. I’m averaging 2.7 comments per post, and averaging 6.8 likes per post. This is dangerous stuff to consider: at the start of March I averaged 2.8 comments per post, but a mere 6.7 likes. In fairness, there’s some comments I need to respond to and just haven’t had the chance; Easter and a pinball event ate up a lot of time.

So what countries are sending me readers, suspecting or otherwise? This bunch:

Country	Readers
United States	1,278
Canada	72
United Kingdom	52
India	42
Philippines	37
Singapore	28
Austria	24
Switzerland	21
Brazil	20
Hong Kong SAR China	20
Sweden	20
South Africa	18
Australia	16
Denmark	14
Romania	11
Italy	7
Norway	7
Germany	5
South Korea	5
Algeria	4
Belgium	4
Ireland	4
Spain	4
Thailand	4
Argentina	3
Czech Republic	3
Malaysia	3
New Zealand	3
Poland	3
Puerto Rico	3
Saudi Arabia	3
Egypt	2
Estonia	2
European Union	2
Finland	2
Kenya	2
Kuwait	2
Netherlands	2
Pakistan	2
Portugal	2
Qatar	2
Russia	2
Turkey	2
United Arab Emirates	2
Belize	1
Croatia	1
Ecuador	1
France	1
Greece	1
Israel	1 (*)
Japan	1
Kyrgyzstan	1
Laos	1
Latvia	1
Lebanon	1
Mexico	1
Serbia	1
Ukraine	1
Venezuela	1

That’s 58 countries, up from February’s 54. There’s 15 single-reader countries, down one from February. Israel’s keeps me from having a clean break in the single-reader country streak; there was just the one reader from there in February too. April starts with a logged 60,445 visits, from an admitted 28,781 unique visitors.

If you’d like to follow NebusResearch regularly, please do. There’s a button at the upper-right of the page to add this to your WordPress Reader page. You can also follow me as @Nebusj on Twitter, where I routinely post announcements of new essays here and on my humor blog. (The humor blog normally posts between 7 and 9 pm Eastern Time; the mathematics blog, typically, between 1 and 3 pm Eastern Time.) If you’d rather use your RSS reader here’s the feed for that.

If you’d like posts e-mailed to you as they’re made … I’m sorry, I can’t take signups for that just now. I noticed a weird and large number of signups from people, from addresses that were a bunch of random words followed by four digits and all from outlook.com. I don’t know what angle they’re working but that’s got to be some spammer nonsense going on. So that’s turned off for a while at least. If you’re one of the nearly four people who’ve taken out e-mail subscriptions hold on to those accounts! They’re sure to be worth something someday. It’s not necessary to bag them in mylar just yet, but feel free to do that if you think it’ll be fun.

How February 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog

It was a less riotously popular month here in February than it was in January. I’d like to blame the shortness of February, but that isn’t it. I know. I’ve got statistics.

The big one that I worry excessively over: total page views. 1,062 of them in February, down from January’s 1,274 but up from December 2017’s 899. And hey, anything above a thousand feels gratifying enough. The count of unique visitors dropped to 611. It had been at 670 in January, but then it was at 599 in December. I’m working on stuff that might affect this. We’ll see. I’d wondered if the readership drop might entirely represent February being such a short month. But WordPress’s insights page lets me know the average number of pages viewed per day. 41 in January (part of a three-way tie for third-highest, alongside September 2017 and November 2015). 38 in February. Still, not bad for a month that went by without a major overarching theme to pull people back in.

It was still a pretty likable month: 102 things clicked on over the course of the month. Down from January’s 112, but still, well ahead of December’s 71. It’s still in the range of liked-essays that I haven’t seen since the last A To Z project. There were 30 comments, once more down from January’s total (39) but up from December’s (24). It seems obvious that all these three data points should track together, although I’ve never tested that and maybe I could have some fun rambling about curve-fitting with it.

Oh, for the one data point wholly within my control: I posted 13 things in February. 14 in January. 11 in December, which was an awful month. (We haven’t found our next rabbit yet. I’ve been gently calling this one rescue every couple days to mention how the person fostering a Flemish Giant we find appealing hasn’t called us back to set a time when we might meet. I have a suspicion the person fostering has decided to quietly adopt the rabbit. And that’s fine, but not being told that gets in the emotional way of looking elsewhere.)

So what all was popular? … Pretty much what I would have guessed without knowing anything about the month:

I’m kind of seriously thinking to take some time off this month and just improve the graphics of the Record Grooves and the Trapezoids articles. And I’m always tickled when what amounts to a self-reblog, like the buy-a-theorem post, comes out more popular than the original post it references. I’m also thinking about setting some day aside to just reblog something from my archives.

What countries sent me readers? This bunch, says WordPress.

Country	Readers
United States	703
Canada	47
United Kingdom	44
India	42
Philippines	42
Australia	14
Sweden	14
Singapore	12
France	9
Germany	9
Mexico	8
Pakistan	8
Brazil	6
Puerto Rico	6
Slovenia	6
Netherlands	5
Turkey	5
Algeria	4
Hungary	4
Italy	4
Spain	4
Bulgaria	3
Finland	3
Greece	3
Indonesia	3
Nepal	3
New Zealand	3
Portugal	3
South Africa	3
Switzerland	3
Belgium	2
Hong Kong SAR China	2
Japan	2
Mongolia	2
Romania	2
South Korea	2
Taiwan	2
Uruguay	2
Bahamas	1
Bangladesh	1
Barbados	1
Costa Rica	1
Cyprus	1
Denmark	1
Egypt	1
European Union	1
Ireland	1 (*)
Israel	1
Kenya	1
Lebanon	1
Mozambique	1
Poland	1
Russia	1 (**)
United Arab Emirates	1

That’s 54 countries altogether, if we don’t ask serious questions about the European Union and, for that matter, Hong Kong or Puerto Rico. There’d been 50 countries give or take in January, and 53 in December. There were 16 single-reader countries in February, up from the 14 in January and 15 in December. Ireland was a single-reader country in January too. Russia’s been a single-reader country two months running. And otherwise there’s been a turnover in single-readership countries.

The Insights panel says March started with 58,654 page views here, from an admitted 27,772 unique viewers and aw, isn’t that sweet number? The insights panel is also threatening to ruin me as a person by giving me some new interesting year-to-date statistics. According to these, as of the 5th of March (I didn’t have the chance to check on the 1st, and I don’t know how to find a year-to-specified date) I’ve published 25,359 total words, at an average 845 words per post. 30 posts to date for the year. 207 total likes, 77 total comments. And an average of 2.6 comments and 6.9 likes per post. I just know I’m going to obsess on these, what with how they’re numbers that have decimal points. But this is way more interesting than tracking the most popular day and hour.

If you’d like to be among my readers, congratulations: you’re doing it now. You can follow in your WordPress reader by using the ‘Follow nebusresearch in Reader’ button near the center-right of this page. Or you can get the less-adequately-copy-edited versions delivered in e-mail, using the “follow blog via e-mail” button just underneath that. I’m @Nebusj on Twitter, and I’m closing in on my 10,000th tweet! So this is your chance to be there as it happens. Probably not this month. I’m not that chatty. But sometime.

How January 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog

First of all, I would like to say this about this tweet:

Someone is building a directory of all the Calvin and Hobbes comics that have anything to do with math here: https://t.co/qfHMxTbMkj #mtbos #iteachmath pic.twitter.com/V79cxTHjQa

— David Wees (@davidwees) February 5, 2018

And that is: I don’t feel threatened at all so nyah.

(And if you want to help them out, please, do send any Calvin and Hobbes strips with mathematical themes over their way.)

Back to my usual self-preening. January 2018 was a successful month around here, in terms of people reading stuff I write. According to WordPress, there were some 1,274 pages viewed from 670 unique visitors. That’s the largest number of pages viewed since March and April 2016, when I had a particularly successful A To Z going. It’s the greatest number of unique visitors since September 2017 when I had a less successful but still pretty good A To Z going. The page views were well above December 2017’s 899, and November’s 1,052. The unique visitors were well above December’s 599 and November’s 604.

I don’t have any real explanation for this. I suspect it’s spillover from my humor blog, which had its most popular month since the comic strip Apartment 3-G died a sad, slow, baffling death. Long story. I think my humor blog was popular because people don’t know what happened to the guy who writes Gasoline Alley. I don’t know either, but I tell people if I do find out anything I’ll tell them, and that’s almost as good as knowing something.

Still, this popularity was accompanied by readers actually liking stuff. There were 112 pages liked in January, beating out the 71 in December and 70 in November by literally dozens of clicks. It’s the highest count since August of 2017 and summer’s A To Z sequence. There were more comments, too, 39 of them. December saw 24 and November 28 and, you see this coming, that’s the largest number of comments since summer 2017’s A To Z sequence.

The popular articles for January were two of the ones I expected, one of the Reading the Comics posts, and then two surprises. What were they? These.

Yes, it’s clickbait-y to talk about weird tricks for limits that mathematicians use. In my defense: mathematicians really do rely on these tricks all the time. So if it’s getting people stuff that’s useful then my conscience is as clear as it is for asking “How many grooves are on a record’s side?” and (implicitly) “How many kinds of trapezoid are there?”

If I’m counting right there were 50 countries from which I drew readers, if “European Union” counts as a country and if “Trinidad and Tobago” don’t count as two. Plus there’s Hong Kong and when you get down to it, “country” is a hard concept to pin down exactly. There were 14 single-reader countries. Here’s the roster of them all:

Country	Readers
United States	879
India	89
Philippines	59
United Kingdom	37
Canada	28
Singapore	15
Hong Kong SAR China	11
Netherlands	11
Sweden	11
Belgium	9
Algeria	8
Austria	8
Australia	7
France	7
Italy	7
Switzerland	7
South Africa	6
Brazil	5
Slovenia	5
Argentina	4
Germany	4
Japan	4
Pakistan	4
Indonesia	3
Spain	3
Denmark	2
Egypt	2
European Union	2
Greece	2
Iraq	2
New Zealand	2
Portugal	2
South Korea	2
Thailand	2
Ukraine	2
Bulgaria	1
Czech Republic	1
Ireland	1
Malaysia	1
Mexico	1 (**)
Namibia	1
Norway	1
Russia	1 (*)
Saudi Arabia	1
Sri Lanka	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Turkey	1
Uruguay	1 (*)
Vietnam	1

There were 53 countries sending me readers in December and 56 in November so I guess I’m concentrating? There were 15 single-reader countries in December and 22 in November. Russia and Uruguay were single-reader countries in December; Mexico’s been a single-reader country for three months now.

WordPress’s Insights panel says I started the month with 57,592 page views recorded, from 27,161 recorded unique visitors. It also shares with me the interesting statistics that, as I write this and before I post it, I’ve written 16 total posts this year, which have drawn an average two comments and seven likes per post. There’ve been 900 words per post, on average. Overall this year I’ve gotten 39 comments, 110 likes, and have published 14,398 words. I don’t know whether that counts image captions. But this also leads me to learn what previous year statistics were like; I’ve been averaging over 900 words per post since 2015. In 2015 I averaged about 750 words per post, and got three times as many likes and about twice as many comments per post. I’m sure that doesn’t teach me anything. At the least I won’t learn from it.

If all this has convinced you to read my posts, please, keep reading them. You can add them to a WordPress reader by way of the “Follow nebusresearch” sticker on the center-right of the page. Or you can get it delivered by e-mail using the “Follow Blog Via E-Mail” button underneath it. If you’ve got your own RSS reader, you can follow from this feed. There’s probably more ways to follow this, too. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, try @Nebusj, because that’s me and I like having company there.

What 2017 Looked Like To My Mathematics Blog

I do like doing a year-end recap of my readership. And WordPress seems not to be doing its annual little fireworks spectacular animated gif. This is a shame since this year, for the first time, I had two mathematics posts the same day and that would’ve been nice to see animated. (I had messed up the scheduled posting of one of the Summer 2017 A To Z, and had something else already planned to run that day, and it was either bump something too late or go ahead with two things on the same day.)

So what did readership look like for the whole year?

I published 164 posts in 2017, well down from 2016’s 213. 2016 had two A to Z sequences whereas 2017 had just the one. This was a median year for me. In 2015 I’d published 188 posts, and in 2014 a mere 129. In 2013 there were 106. (In 2012 there were 180, but that count is boosted by an experiment in also posting some space-history stuff that just didn’t fit the main content here.)

WordPress.com Traffic record for my blog in 2017. 12,214 views, 76,02 visitors, 1,094 likes, and 301 comments. — I started blogging here in late 2011. Sometime in late 2012 is when WordPress started tracking unique visitors so far as the let us know. 2018 is looking a bit flat but, you know, it’s got some promise of something or other, I like to think.

12,214 pages viewed over the 2017, which is down from 2016’s 12,851. Not very much, though, especially for how much less stuff I published. It’s a bit higher than 2015’s 11,241. I’m not sure what to make of basically flat numbers of page views over three years. Mostly I suspect, deep down, that not being able to easily read the Jumble puzzles, and occasionally include them in Reading the Comics posts, has hurt my readership and my engagement. If you know a good source for them, please, let me know.

The number of unique visitor has risen steadily, though. 2017 had the greatest number of distinct people stopping by, with 7,602 logged. In 2016 they were 7,168 in number, and in 2015 only 5,159. 2014 saw 3,382; 2013, 2,905 unique visitors. That’s a pretty dramatic growth in unique visitors per published post, a statistic that WordPress doesn’t keep and that’s of significance only because I can keep dividing things until I find some sort of trend line. Still, 2013 through 2015 it’s an almost constant 27 unique visitors per post, and then in 2016 that rose to 33 and then to 46.

The number of likes plummeted to 1,094. 2016 had seen 2,163, and 2015 — the first year I did an A to Z — some 3,273 things were liked. Comments similarly plummeted; there were 301 in 2017. 2016 saw 474, and 2015 some 822. I am not sure what I did right that first A to Z that I haven’t quite recaptured, or built upon.

For all that the 2015 through 2017 were the most-read years of my little blog here, the most popular pieces were from before that. The top five most-read posts were … well, three are ones I would have guessed. The other two surprised me:

This at least implies what to do: more polygons and game show riddles. The most popular piece from 2017 was What Would You Like In The Summer 2017 Mathematics A To Z?, my appealing for enough topics to write about for two months straight. (Blogging is never easier than when someone else gives you topics to write about.)

I got visitors from 113 nations of the world, says WordPress, and here they are:

Country	Readers
United States	6973
United Kingdom	784
India	547
Canada	450
Philippines	442
Singapore	243
Australia	194
Austria	187
Germany	172
Turkey	135
Hong Kong SAR China	126
France	108
Spain	108
Brazil	107
Slovenia	104
Italy	93
Puerto Rico	78
Sweden	72
South Africa	63
Netherlands	47
Denmark	43
New Zealand	40
Switzerland	40
Thailand	37
Ireland	36
Argentina	33
Mexico	31
Israel	30
Romania	30
Russia	30
Belgium	29
Indonesia	29
Malaysia	28
Norway	26
South Korea	26
Poland	25
Japan	24
Bangladesh	21
Taiwan	20
Greece	18
Oman	17
US Virgin Islands	17
European Union	15
Finland	15
Portugal	15
Croatia	14
Pakistan	14
Ukraine	14
China	12
Colombia	12
Saudi Arabia	12
Slovakia	12
United Arab Emirates	12
Chile	11
Czech Republic	10
Nigeria	10
Uruguay	10
Bulgaria	9
Hungary	9
Vietnam	9
Kuwait	8
Egypt	7
Estonia	7
Belarus	6
Lebanon	6
Iceland	5
Jamaica	5
Nepal	5
Paraguay	5
Peru	5
Serbia	5
Venezuela	5
Cambodia	4
Costa Rica	4
Iraq	4
Saint Kitts & Nevis	4
Albania	3
Algeria	3
Armenia	3
Bosnia & Herzegovina	3
Cyprus	3
Kenya	3
Lithuania	3
Macedonia	3
Azerbaijan	2
Bahrain	2
Barbados	2
Ecuador	2
Georgia	2
Ghana	2
Jordan	2
Kazakhstan	2
Latvia	2
Luxembourg	2
Morocco	2
Northern Mariana Islands	2
Qatar	2
Sri Lanka	2
Trinidad & Tobago	2
Angola	1
Bahamas	1
Bermuda	1
Bhutan	1
Cape Verde	1
Ethiopia	1
Guam	1
Madagascar	1
Maldives	1
Malta	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Tunisia	1
Uganda	1
Zimbabwe	1

I understand being more read in countries where English is the primary language. Still seems like I had fewer readers from China than should’ve expected. I remember ages ago someone else (Elke Stangl?) mentioning a curious absence of readers from China and I’m curious whether others have observed this and, if so, what might be going on.

On the insights page WordPress tells me I had a total of 441 comments and 1,043 likes, which does not match what the traffic page was telling me. I wonder if the discrepancy in comments is about whether to count links from one posting to another, which are regarded as comments on the linked page. No idea how to explain the discrepancy in likes, though.

Insights says I got an average of three comments per post in 2017, and an average of six likes per post. At 153,483 words, in total, published that’s 936 words per post, on average. I’m curious what the statistics for earlier years were. I feel like I’m getting more longwinded, at least. (Also with 201,692 words on my humor blog this gives me a bit more than a third of a million words published last year. Not a bad heap of words.)

I am considering getting a proper, individual domain for my blog here. I confess I’ve never quite understood how being off on my own name would encourage more visitors than having a subdomain nestled under the wordpress.com label, but it seems to work for folks like Iva Sallay’s findthefactors.com. (Sallay also has two great hooks, between the puzzles and the lists of factors of whole numbers.) Maybe I just need to poke around it some more until the whole matter becomes irrelevant, and then I can act, wrongly.

How December 2017 Treated My Mathematics Journal

Before I even look at the statistics I can say: December 2017 treated my mathematics journal better than it treated me. A third of the way in, our pet rabbit died, suddenly and unexpectedly. And this was days short of a year from our previous pet rabbit’s death. So that’s the cryptic plan-scrambling stuff I had been talking about, and why my writing productivity dropped. We don’t know when we’ll take in a new rabbit (or rabbits). Possibly this month, although not until late in January at soonest.

And … well, thank you for the condolences that I honestly do not mean to troll for. I can’t say we’re used to the idea that we lost our rabbit so soon. It’s becoming a familiar thought is all.

Our pet rabbit on the beach, nibbling a flower and peering into the camera with one big, round eye. — Don’t let the endearing cast of his eye fool you. Given the chance, he’d steal your heart.

But to the blog contents. How did they, quantifiably, go?

I fell back below a thousand page views. Just under 900, too: 899 page views over the month, from 599 unique visitors, as if both numbers were trying to tease Price Is Right Item-Up-For-Bids offerings. That’s down from the 1,052 page views in November, but only technically down from the 604 unique visitors then. October had 1,069 page views from a basically-equal 614 unique visitors. And it turns out that while I thought I stopped writing stuff, especially after our rabbit’s death, I had 11 posts in the month. That’s low but in the normal range for a month that has no A-to-Z sequence going. Curious.

There were 71 pages liked around here in December. That’s technically up from November’s 70, but not really. It’s less technically up from October’s 64. Still makes me wonder what might have happened if I’d scraped together a 12th post for the month. And the other big measure of reader involvement? 24 comments posted in December, down from November’s 28 but above October’s 12. I may need to start offering bounties for interesting comments. Or, less ridiculously, start some open threads for people who want to recommend good blogs or books or Twitter threads they’ve found.

2018 starts with a total 56,318 page views from 26,491 tracked unique visitors. The numbers don’t look bad, although I keep running across those WordPress blogs that’s, like, someone who started posting an inspirational message once a week two months ago and has just broken a million page views and gets 242 likes on every post and wonder if it’s just me. It’s not.

How about the roster of nations? For that I figure there were 53 countries sending me readers in December, technically down from November’s 56 and technically up from October’s 51. There were 15 single-reader countries, down from November’s 22 but slightly above October’s 13. And who were they? These places:

Country	Readers
United States	553
Canada	47
United Kingdom	41
India	35
Ireland	19
Philippines	16
Austria	13
Germany	12
Turkey	12
Australia	11
Sweden	9
Singapore	8
France	7
Italy	7
Slovenia	7
New Zealand	6
Spain	6
Indonesia	5
Norway	5
South Korea	5
Brazil	4
Hong Kong SAR China	4
Malaysia	4
Poland	4
Belgium	3
Denmark	3
Finland	3
Japan	3
Netherlands	3
Portugal	3
Taiwan	3
Thailand	3
Argentina	2
Colombia	2
Ecuador	2
Serbia	2
Slovakia	2
United Arab Emirates	2
Albania	1
Bangladesh	1
Croatia	1
Egypt	1
Israel	1
Jamaica	1
Lebanon	1 (*)
Mexico	1 (*)
Peru	1 (*)
Romania	1 (*)
Russia	1
South Africa	1
Switzerland	1
Uruguay	1
Venezuela	1

Lebanon, Mexico, Peru, and Romania were also single-reader countries on November, and there’s no nation that’s on a three-month single-reader streak.

So what was the roster of popular posts for the month? My perennials, plus Reading the Comics, and some of that Wronski π stuff just squeaks in, tied for fifth place. What people wanted to read here was:

Have I got plans for January 2018? Yes, I have. Besides keeping on Reading the Comics, I hope to get through Wronski’s formula for π. I know there’s readers eager to find out what the punch line is. I know at least one has already worked it out and been surprised. And I’m hoping to work out a question about pinball tournaments that my love set me on. I’ve done a little thinking about the issue, and don’t believe the results, so I’m hoping to think some more and then make my computer do a bunch of simulations. Could be fun.

And I’ll be spending it hoping that you, the reader, are around. If you’re here now there’s a good chance you’re reading this. If you’d like to follow on your WordPress reader, there’s a ‘Follow on WordPress’ button in the upper right corner of the page. If you’d rather get it by e-mail, before I’ve made corrections to things that are only obviously wrong two minutes after publication, there’s the ‘Follow by e-mail’ button near that. And if you’d like to follow me on Twitter, try @Nebusj. I’m currently running only like four weeks behind on responding to follow-up tweets or direct messages, which is practically living a year in the future compared to my e-mail. Thanks for being here.

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