Second Anniversary Math

Hello and welcome to the Excel Math blog. We started writing two years ago, this week. Click here to see the first posting. Our goals for the blog are to:

• increase exposure of our Excel Math curriculum, created long before Microsoft Excel came along
• demonstrate how the math concepts we (or our kids) learn in elementary school can be interesting AND useful in daily life

Today I'm looking at some of the numbers generated in pursuit of these two goals.

THE BLOG
I've written virtually every working day - creating 488 posts. Using division, that's 488/2 = 244 per year. I could have reached 500 if I hadn't taken some vacation along the way. So using multiplication, it's 50 weeks x 5 posts/week

Blogger (the software I use) is provided by Google. Most of the blog's graphics and audio are stored on the Google' s Picasa site. The Picasa meter says I've uploaded 2227 images that occupy 145 mb. As a percentage, that's 14.2% of my total free space.

Some media files are duplicates (due to editing and changes). My estimate is about 2000 images are linked from the actual blog posts. Using division and rounding, we learn 2000/488 = 4.1 images per posting.

EXPOSURE
If my first goal is to gain exposure, how am I doing?

Compared to the megasites, not too well. Here are the top ten, hits-wise:

1. Google (search, mail, etc.) 
2. Facebook (social networking) 
3. Yahoo (community & mail)
4. YouTube (videos)
5. Wikipedia (encyclopedia) 
6. MSN (news)
7. Amazon (commerce)
8. eBay (auction & commercial)
9. Twitter (social network)
10. Bing (search)

Considering this Excelmath blog subjest is elementary school MATH, not a new dress or video of a Frisbee-catching dog, it's doing just fine. My site monitoring meters say we've had 49,000-51,000 unique visitors. Using division, 50,000/24 = 2083 or about 2,100 a month.

We've had visitors from 170 countries.

The largest number of unique, first-time visitors was 251 on calendar date March 3, 2011. (Evaluating paper towels, in case you are interested - click here).

Large numbers are part of a concept called number sense. Getting many hits on a blog is not that hard - you just write about fast cars, pretty women, your pets, getting rich quick, and the secret lives of Hollywood celebrities. But those subjects don't have much to do with elementary math.

DEMONSTRATION
The readers of the blog have to be the ones to judge the utility of the site. But I can say from my point of view, that it's been extremely interesting, plenty of hard work, and lots of fun as well. Here's one of my favorites.

If you want to read some of the past postings, you have two choices -  you can search using Google for Excelmathmike (all one word) or you can use the drop-down box in the left margin and select the posts chronologically.

CONCLUSION
I'm on vacation this week, but I didn't want to miss this anniversary posting. Time for me to go relax in the sunshine with my cat - who doesn't care about appearing in our blog to gain me more readers! But here he is anyway.