These you have loved …

I am as bad as the rest of you. I almost daily visit someone's website or blog, read their words of wisdom, download papers, talks, or overhead slides, and learn a huge amount this way. Yet I almost never post a comment or drop an e-mail to say "thanks". Which doesn't at all reflect how genuinely appreciative I am, or acknowledge what a difference all this has made to my logical life.

So I can hardly feel aggrieved when, in its turn, this blog gets about 10,000 visitors a month (or almost 30,000, counting repeat visits), some of the papers and handouts posted here have been downloaded thousands of times, and yet I get about one email every three months. So it is good to know that the number of visits steadily drifts upwards, and stuff indeed gets read.

But it is  surprising too to discover from last year's summary stats what gets picked up. For example, leaving aside stuff related to my logic book and the much-downloaded Gödel Without Tears series (yes, I'll be finishing the updates on that over the coming weeks), who would have guessed that over 3000 people would have downloaded the handout on Galois connections I dashed off for some grad students. It was very nice to see too that 750 people downloaded my two page handout on Kleene's very pretty proof of the first incompleteness theorem, and a similar number a longer piece on Kreisel's squeezing argument a later version of which has now been published in Analysis. As to other webpages, the LaTeX for Logicians section gets visited quite a bit in a steady way, as one might have expected (though I've not been doing much to maintain them recently — I wonder if there is anyone out there who would sooner or later like to pick up the baton and run with it?). And I was amused to see that the page I dashed off in the first flush of excitement as a proud owner of an iPad got visited over 8000 times in just five months (though I guess I should update that page: I'd now stress some limitations as well as the things it does well …).

Anyway, as I said, it is nice to know I'm not just talking to myself here! So very best wishes for 2011 to all of you out there.