Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Everyone's a Critic ...

Okay, not everyone. And being critical isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Besides, it means at the very least that I got noticed by someone.

Looking at my statistics for the xwhy page for the past couple of days, I noticed a couple of unusual entries. First, there was MathFail.com, which I believe I punctuated correctly. There were only a few visitors, but they averaged 14 pages per visit.

I'll put aside for a moment my feelings for the use of the word "Fail" as a name, exclamation or expletive, even though that is as much Internet culture as calling a web log a "blog". This site is a blog with math jokes and other related links. Although I didn't make it onto the list of Favorite Math Blogs (and I can't argue with the choices because I read several of those myself), but I did make it onto the Top 10 list of geeky math comics / webcomics, with the following comment:

5. (x, why?) - A funny webcomic, and has over 350 comics published to date. The mot recent ones are kind of meh.

I don't mind the comment, actually. That's feedback. I like feedback.
And I'll be the first to admit that as much as I like the current series of strips, even I didn't envision it going on for as long as it has. It will be taking a break before it runs its course so I can rework the conclusion.

The bigger spike came from Slashdot.org, which sent a couple dozen hits. Unfortunately, most didn't hang around long and none have come back so far today.

It took a while to track this one down for two reasons: first, because I linked to slashdot article about Mersenne primes, and second, because there is a poster there named Chris Burke, who isn't me.

In the end, it turned out that the MathFail.com post was crossposted where more people clicked on it. Mystery explained.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

All publicity is good publicity! :-) I haven't linked the "golden mean" series from my facebook page, because most of my facebook friends are Mafia Wars players, so I really don't know how many might be math geeks. Actually, I suppose I should share them anyway.