I haven't posted about site stats in forever, largely because they've been quite stable for the past year or so, since I'm no longer pimping myself in my D2 columns. Those would always bring a huge influx of visitors and make for some interesting hit totals, and back in those days I was still paying attention to readership. I pay attention to it still, and I hope people read and enjoy this, since no one wants to just talk to themselves online, but I'm not doing anything to actively pump up site stats anymore. I never send links to myself to any other sites, or work them into the D2 site, or whatever.
That being said, I do still enjoy seeing the site stats from time to time, and looking at the odd searches people did to find this site, and so on. So when the site stats stopped working during the last week of September, and were recording figures like 4 total visitors a day during October, I wondered what was going on. And when I finally got around to checking it just now, I got some good news. Out went the old and quite crappy site stats engine, and in came a new one called Urchin. I've been playing with it for a few minutes, clicking through the different displays, and it's quite nifty, though still flawed.
It lists every page hit and ever referrer and such, down through hundreds and thousands of entries. For example, thus far for October there are 1074 entrance pages listed, with the number of hits each has gotten. Unfortunately, while the referrer listings are just as extensive (251 so far in October) the info about them is not detailed. I see how many came from each referrer, and that most of them are search engines, but I can not see the actual search strings that people typed into those search engines. And that's the stat I've always found the most amusing.
Even though the old search engine, ever-crappy webalizer, only listed a few of the search strings, they were always good for a laugh. Here are the top 20 it showed from the first three weeks of September:
1 black champagne
2 preston spears
3 rock band names
4 blackchampagne
5 cartman aristocrats
6 cartman's dirtiest joke ever
7 london preston spears
8 middle earth mod
9 alphabetical list of rock bands
10 diablo 2 middle earth mod
11 diablo middle earth mod
12 drop mod
13 alphabetical band names
14 chocolate liquor bottles
15 http://www.blackchampagne.com/2005/09/prodigy-or-hack.html
16 mega m
17 middle earth mods
18 tae kwan-do photographs
19 www.blackchampagne.com
20 all five members full names in the band called wilburys
So yeah, the new engine is much more useful and informative, but it's just not as much fun.
That being said, I have to admit that I love the page loads and the filters. The engine lets me exclude or mandate various words in the results, and that's awesome. For example, I just sorted the top page loads so that only files with "reviews" in the URL would show up. It turns out that there have been 173 such pages loaded thus far this month, and you'll never guess what #1 is:
/reviews/f-chilis.shtml 63
/reviews/b-stories-rabbits.shtml 57
/reviews/m-charlie-chocolate.shtml 52
/reviews/b-earthsea.shtml 49
/reviews/m-blade3.shtml 46
/reviews/b-historian.shtml 45
/reviews/m-spring-summer.shtml 43
/reviews/b-savage-pastimes.shtml 40
/reviews/b-depraved.shtml 39
/reviews/index.shtml 36
/reviews/f-claim-jumper.shtml 19
/reviews/m-elektra.shtml 19
/reviews/b-dead-angels.shtml 18
/reviews/m-transporter1.shtml 18
/reviews/b-portrait-killer.shtml 17
/reviews/b-fantasy-novelists.shtml 16
/reviews/b-angels-demons.shtml 14
/reviews/b-tehanu.shtml 14
/reviews/m-batman-begins.shtml 14
/reviews/b-seventh-scroll.shtml 11
/reviews/m-chop-socky.shtml 10
Yes, 67 people have loaded the review of Chili's Restaurant, and if you look further down, you'll see the Claim Jumper review also in the top 10. No, I have no idea why. No one has ever sent me an email about anything I said about a restaurant, as far as I know, and those pages aren't even really reviews; they're just sort of collected comments with no real rhyme or reason to them.
When it comes to the popularity of review pages (and other pages), I suspect the hits have much more to do with search engine rankings any anything else. After all, if 2,000,000 people search for Harry Potter reviews and mine are listed on the 87th page of Google returns, no one is ever going to click to them. But if 100 people search for reviews of
Stories Rabbits Tell and my review is on the first page of results, I'll end up with a lot of referrals. 57 so far this month, apparently.
By the way, I was too lazy to paste in all of the http and a href= stuff to turn these text results into links, so if you want to hop to those pages, just paste in the /reviews/whatever.shtml after the http://www.blackchampagne.com in your browser, and hit enter. Lastly, if you're curious about some other site stat stuff, ask in the comments. I can answer there and/or keep it in mind for the next time I talk about this stuff.
