How July 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog: Romania liked me

I have not given up on my mathematics blog, though I admit to its commanding less attention than I have sometimes given it. I have had less attention to give everything. In a month of writing that comes pretty close to simple maintenance mode, I expect pretty average readership figures. I did not have them.

WordPress says that I received 3,071 page views in July, which is the biggest total I’ve had since October 2019, and I believe my second most-read month ever. This is because for some reason I got about a thousand page views from Romania, mostly in the second week of the month. I don’t know why. I usually get about a thousand page views from the United States — in July there were 860 — so this is odd. There were also 339 page views from India, which is up from the usual of one to two hundred, but not so much more as to be clearly wrong. So, much as I like having a big month, I can’t believe in it.

And yeah, I could work out the per-posting average views and unique visitors and all. But given how much of this is someone in Romania hitting refresh on my pages I don’t know that it’s worth composing into sentences.

Because sure, 3,071 is way above the twelve-month running mean of 2,064.8 views per month, and the running median of 2,080 per month. When I look at the count of unique visitors, though? That’s a less exalted 1,193 for July. THat’s close to what June offered me, and below the running mean of 1,418.1 and running median of 1,409 visitors. The things that measure interactions were even more dire: only 17 likes were given around here in July. That’s the lowest figure in at least two and a half years, and below the running mean of 32.3 and running median of 30.5. And finally there were no comments in July, the third time that’s ever happened. My running mean is 7.3 and median 6.5 right now. (Well, there was one submitted comment, on my announcement that I won’t be doing an A-to-Z this year. But it was just a one-word “Nice”. I imagine that’s a spammer doing that thing rather than an attempt to hurt my feelings.)

I would like to report what the relative popularity of July’s posts were. For some reason WordPress won’t tell me. I can get the similar data for my humor blog, so I don’t know what the issue is. Well, here’s what I published this last month:

• How June 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog
• Reading the Comics, July 12, 2022: Numerals Edition
• Reading the Comics, July 16, 2022: Brevity is the Soul of Wit Edition
• About my 2022 Mathematics A-to-Z

For the year to date, WordPress figures I’ve published 45,855 words, not counting this post. That’s coming in at an average 955 words per posting, which is dwindling a little. I blame Comic Strip Master Command for not giving me stuff I can go on about all night.

As of the start of August, WordPress says, I’ve gotten 166,185 page views, from a recorded 99,618 unique visitors.

If you’d like to be a regular reader of my blog, thank you. You can add this to your WordPress reader by clicking the ‘Follow Nebusresearch’ button on the right hand column of this page. If you’d like to get it by e-mail, you can use the ‘Follow Nebusrsearch By E-mail’ button below that. If you have an RSS reader, you can get my essays at https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed instead. And thank you for considering reading what I come around to writing.

How May 2015 Treated My Mathematics Blog

For May 2015 I tried a new WordPress theme — P2 Classic — and I find I rather like it. Unfortunately it seems to be rubbish on mobile devices and I’m not WordPress Theme-equipped-enough to figure out how to fix that. I’m sorry, mobile readers. I’m honestly curious whether the theme change affected my readership, which was down appreciably over May.

According to WordPress, the number of pages viewed here dropped to 936 in May, down just over ten percent from April’s 1047 and also below March’s 1022. Perhaps the less-mobile-friendly theme was shooing people away. Maybe not, though: in March and April I’d posted 14 articles each, while in May there were a mere twelve. The number of views per post increased steadily, from 73 in March to just under 75 in April to 78 in May. I’m curious if this signifies anything. I may get some better idea next month. June should have at least 13 posts from the Mathematics A To Z gimmick, plus this statistics post, and there’ll surely be at least two Reading The Comics posts, or at least sixteen posts. And who knows what else I’ll feel like throwing in? It’ll be an interesting experiment at least.

Anyway, the number of unique visitors rose to 415 in May, up from April’s 389 but still below March’s 468. The number of views per visitor dropped to 2.26, far below April’s 2.68, but closer in line with March’s 2.18. And 2.26 is close to the normal count for this sort of thing.

The number of likes on posts dropped to 259. In April it was 296 likes and in March 265. That may just reflect the lower number of posts, though. Divide the number of likes by the number of posts and March saw an average of 18.9, April 21.14, and May 21.58. That’s all at least consistent, although there’s not much reason to suppose that only things from the current month were liked.

The number of comments recovered also. May saw 83 comments, up from April’s 64, but not quite back to March’s 93. That comes to, for May, 6.9 comments for each post, but that’s got to be counting links to other posts, including pingbacks and maybe the occasional reblogging. I’ve been getting chattier with folks around here, but not seven comments per post chatty.

June starts at 24,820 views, and 485 people following specifically through WordPress.

I’ve got a healthy number of popular posts the past month; all of these got at least 37 page views each. I cut off at 37 because that’s where the Trapezoids one came in and we already know that’s popular. More popular than that were:

• Reading the Comics, April 20, 2015: History of Mathematics Edition
• Reading the Comics, May 9, 2015: Trapezoid Edition
• Reading The Comics, May 22, 2015: Might Be Giving Up Mickey Mouse Edition
• Reading the Comics, May 4, 2015: Hatless Aliens Edition
• Reading the Comics, May 14, 2015: At The Cash Register Edition
• Calculating Pi Less Terribly
• Playful Mathematics: Sweet Add-A-Line

I have the suspicion that comics fans are catching on, quietly, to all this stuff.

Now the countries report. The nations sending me at least twenty page views were the United States (476), the United Kingdom (85), Canada (65), Italy (53), and Austria (20).

Sending just a single reader were Belgium, Bulgaria, Colombia, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Romania, and Vietnam. Romania is on a three-month single-reader streak; Vietnam, two. India sent me a mere two readers, down from six last month. The European Union sent me three.

And among the interesting search terms this past month were:

• origin is the gateway to your entire gaming universe.
• how to do a cube box (the cube is easy enough, it’s getting the boxing gloves on that’s hard)
• popeye “computer king” (Remember that comic?)
• google can you show me in 1 trapezoid how many cat how many can you make of 2 (?, although I like the way Google is named at the start of the query, like someone on Next Generation summoning the computer)
• plato “divided line” “arthur cayley” (I believe that mathematics comes in on the lower side of the upper half of Plato’s divided line)
• where did negative numbers originate from

Someday I must work out that “origin is the gateway” thing.