Almighty Stats
Apr0
In the wake of being linked to by the BBC Internet Blog, probably the most cataclysmic linking event I’ve ever been subjected to, I decided to take a look at my stats and see how it affected the traffic to my little corner of the web.
What you need to understand before you read this is that I actually don’t care how many people visit my blog – until today I made no use of any monitoring suite outside of what the server logged whilst it went about its daily business (I have since installed Google Analytics in light of the numbers I’m seeing, just because I’m curious about their validity). It therefore came as quite a shock to discover that over the past 12 months I’ve averaged around 188 visits a day. Not page views, not server hits, but distinct visits from distinct users. I serve 12.3MB of content per day, not that much when compared to even a small but relatively popular site, but a hell of a lot more than I was expecting.
This month's stats
Anyway, the influx of visitors from the BBC brought my daily total for yesterday to 354 distinct visits, the most popular page indeed being my rambling about the new iPlayer. I also served up 51.6MB of content to the world in general.
All these numbers are of course from my own stats provided so adequately by Apache and reported on by Webalizer. I’ve done a little digging about and discovered that my biggest site users in terms of pure hits are search engine spiders, but remember that they only count as one visitor. It does appear that each visitor is indeed a single unique person having a look at my blog.
Other useless factoids come from the search stats – “flux capacitor time machine icon leopard” is one of the most popular search queries for ending up here, as are a few variations on “bugsy malone staging”. Someone arrived at my blog after searching for “jackson sofa”, which I have no explanation for.
I’ll post a followup in a couple of days to see if Google Analytics corroborates these stats, and if not I’ll take a closer look at why these numbers are wrong.
Counting Down
Dec0
I’ve just added a countdown (or several) to my blog, visible to the left along with the rest of the useless stuff. Pay close attention to the Y2K38 Bug, which is far more likely to cause planes to fall out of the sky than the damp squib of the Y2K Bug.
Twitter – Making What I’m Doing More Obvious
Dec0
I’ve finally finished making my Twitter account not only update my Facebook status, but also tie into this website so you can see everything I’m up to. Look, over there in the right hand column.
Happy Halloween
Oct0
The site header has changed colour and that can mean one of only two things – either it’s a new season or it’s an occasion. As it happens, it’s the latter. Happy Halloween everybody!