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 fro February’s 108. 36 of them got at least ten views, compared to 35 in March and 25 in February. And what got the most page views? About what you’d expect:

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

73 countries or country-like things sent me readers in April. 12 of them were single-view countries. This is down from the 78 countries in march, but up from the 67 in February. There had been 30 single-view countries in Marc 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.

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.

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.

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:

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?

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:

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:

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.
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