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From time to time I view the stats and write something about them, and those site stat discussions are what you'll see copied from daily blogs to this page. More recent updates are added on the top of the page.
I've not posted much about site stats for some months, since as I said recently, they're boring. I'm not getting any big surges from anywhere else; not even from myself on the other, much busier, site I work on. Misusing power is bad... mkay? The one time I do tend to enjoy site stats is during the first few days of the month, when there aren't so many hits and referrals that the perpetually-popular pages drown out all of the more interesting and less-viewed ones. Certain things are always the same though. The pages with boobies and sexy names always get hit to death, the main page always has the most loads, and the a.shtml page in Band Names is always far more popular than I can see any reason for it to be. Here are the only seven .shtml files that were among the top 30 file loads on the site for September 1st, 2003. (The other 23 files were images, mostly the big front letters, backgrounds, nav bar images, or the images on the pages listed here.)
And as always, I'm perplexed by how many people view the A names on the Band Names page, compared to the rest. So 211 people viewed that page yesterday, while no other page in the Band Names section was viewed more than 35 times? And here's what's really odd; the title image for Band Names was loaded only 189 times. Which means a lot of people who clicked to the A page already had it cached in their browser. So why are they just now reading the A page? Personally, I think it's some sort of search engine spider issue; they all hit that page and none of the others, or something. It vexes me. Terribly.
Looking at my site stats lately has been relatively boring. There are always around 10-14k loads a day with no big spikes since I posted the V1.10 Blizzard North article on the D2 site, and had a link to the photos page with shots of my visit there. That was the biggest traffic day ever. Plus I used to do those D2 site columns (and may again, at some point) and every time I did one I'd get a big surge of 40 or 60k page loads a day for several days, depending on whether or not I had a direct link to some page on this site, or just had people clicking from my Columnists author info page. With no big referrals, from me or anyone else, the traffic is pretty steady, and far from heavy enough to 1) rank highly in terms of all Internet sites, and 2) Cost me more than $20 a month for bandwidth. About the only thing of any real interest on the stats page is the referrers. Those are mostly boring too, since of the 30 that show up like 25 are various search engines. There are two recent ones of some interest though. The first, which has over the course of the last 10 days accounted for over 500 referrals, has the catchy title, "Downloading Porn With Davo" It's a sort of daily links page on a sort of porn site, where the guy has links to several free porn sources or other odd things of a purient nature. Not an awful site or anything, and he linked to my Hot or Not page, so whatever. I've looked there a few times since first seeing the link last week, and the best thing was posted a few days ago; a series of links to sites with photos of Vegas casino showgirls and waitresses, who are in themed and vaguely-sexy outfits. Most of them look utterly ridiculous, actually. The second has sent about 30 visitors here over the course of the month, and is a site I had never seen until I followed the referral link back. He's obviously a fan of this site though, or at least the layout of this site. Check it out and come to your own conclusions.
And just to end with something else involving numbers, here are the search strings for the month thus far. One in particular I will draw your attention to, if you don't notice it skimming over them.
As I always say, this is a very small amount percentage of the actual search engine referrals. As of April 25th there have been 6673 referrals from google images, 4391 from google, and 2904 from search.yahoo.com. That's around 14,000 referrals just from the top three search sources. Why the search strings chart only knows about 780 or so search strings is a mystery that will never be resolved, since my new site hosts have a better/different stats engine. Anyway, the Amanda Bynes nude searches continue at a break-dick pace. None of them finding anything they are after. There are a bunch for various Diablo II mods, and even some for the ME mod, which makes this a rare case of people clicking here for something and actually finding what they are after. Usually the "blackchampagne.com" searches are the only ones that pull that off. The one that I found funny, and rather wrong, is the "Jessica Lynch Nude" search, which 8 evil bastards came in search of. If you've forgotten the name already, that's "Saving Private Lynch", of the largely-fictitious Iraqi hospital rescue. She was a female, but that's about all I can think would recommend her for nude photo searches, and it seems relatively absurd that anyone would look for the. I mean she's some poor semi-white trash girl in the Army. Why the hell would there be nude photos of her anywhere? Did the heavily-bandaged body, hunger-sunken cheeks, and buzz-cut head just turn some guys on so much that they had to try and seek out nude photos? Of course the fact that my site site shows up as a potential search result for such a search should probably be investigated as well.
I wasn't going to post about site stats any time soon, but looking at the search strings this morning, I found it too funny to resist. See if you can find a theme here.
Who the hell is Amanda Bynes?
Now how "nude" and/or "topless" gets into the search string has yet to be determined, but given this site, it's a pretty safe bet that I mentioned those terms elsewhere on the same page. The pathetic aspects of anyone searching for nude photos of this young, squeaky clean, innocent, pure, virginal Nickelodeon actress are too legion to even begin detailing.
Just a random FYI, here are the updated search string stats for the month. I first posted about these a few days ago, with the odd news that Amanda Bynes nude searches were breaking out. Well, nothing has changed. These are the top 9 searches for the month, with the number of times searched on listed.
I think the previous record ever for search strings (showing up in this part of the stats, which seems to record about .1% of all actual searches) is like 25 for the top one for a full month. So 85 in less than 1/3 of a month is obviously blowing that out of the water. That search hits a page from here as the #4 thing on Google right now. You are all filthy pedophiles! One other thing on site stats, Friday was the biggest traffic day ever by like 120%, in terms of page loads, and more than double the most bandwidth ever also, at nearly a gig, which is about 6x average. There were 1100 referrals from my new D2 column, all to the D2X ME Mod page, so I'm assuming most of those people clicked a few of the uniques/sets/etc page links, hence the mega bandwidth, since there are images galore there. I was thinking it ironic that on one of the weirdest blog subject days ever, I'd have my usual bi-weekly surge from the D2 site article, either from a link in the article to something or other, or from my forum signature on the column comments thread. Or both. As I recall, months ago my biggest day to date was when I got a plug from a radio station, or something like that, and that day I had, entirely coincidentally, posted about the weirdest thing to date. The infamous castration fetish blog. Funny timing I have on these things. No idea how many of the innocently mod info seeking people happened to click to the main page, and read it in horror, but I'd like to think at least a few hundred. *snickers*
Early in the life of this site I was fascinated with the stats, and poured over them daily. And that was when I was getting visitors in the dozens, and there was nothing to look at. But if I got a link from some odd site somewhere and 4 people came, I was giddy as a goose with a fresh box of beetles. And I could click back to that site and see what they said, and why they said it, etc. Plus I'd even see the single hits, which were usually weird search strings from yahoo. Like these two, I just pulled from my April 2002 stat record (the earliest month I have records from):
See the search string shows that it's a yahoo search, and the ending part is what they actually searched on. I used to see these and enjoy them, since I don't get to see much of the actual words people searched on to come here otherwise. The "problem" now is that the site has become much more popular and single hit searches (Single since what are the odds of 2 people typing in the exact same cryptic words in the same order?) don't get onto the stats at all, even just the first day of the month. Here they are for April 1st. No joke: The top one has around 1800, the bottom one has 9, and this is the top 30 out of 398. So there are 368 more with fewer than 9 clicks, and they are probably a lot more interesting than this list of almost all major search engines and misc Dii.net pages with links here. The only one on there that's unusual is the http://www.macgamer.com/news/item.php one. When I used to see them in lower numbers months ago, I'd see a lot of inexplicable ones. Just one day a link from some news item on CNN.com would show up as 7 referrals, and never go up any higher than that. And there is no way some news item there had a link here, so I always assumed it was some sort of bug or error in the site stats counter. In the case of this Mac Gamer item, I think it's the same thing. It was 12 on the 1st, and now as I'm looking at the stats for the 2nd, it's still 12, and down to #29, so it'll be gone tomorrow. Which illustrates why I never see these interesting fluky links; if this had happened any time between the 3rd and the end of the month, I would have never known about it at all, since it wouldn't have cracked the top 30. There are already 528 referring sites for April, and of those 498 will probably never make it onto the stats display at all. The odd thing with the Mac Gamer one is that I posted a couple of links to Mac Gamer from a news item on the D2 site, since it (the Mac Gamer site) was running a bunch of April Fools Jokes, a couple of which mentioned Diablo II. No surprise there, I mean there are only like 11 games this century that are playable on a Mac, so obviously D2 is going to feature prominently in every article on a Mac Gaming site. (Malaya has been bugging me about switching to a Mac, so that cheap shot was dedicated to my sweetie.) Anyway, I'm assuming that somehow in the process of clicking on/linking to that Mac site, I clicked to this site, and it screwed up the site stats. The other possibility is that someone posted a link here in one of the Mac Gamer news item comments, if they even have news item comments there. Anyway, that was about 4 paragraphs more than the topic deserved. And yes, I'm bitching that I have too much site traffic since it keeps me from seeing the oddball referrals. I do see a few of the search strings, but just a few. And I explain this every time, but the "Top Search Strings" box in the site stats only shows like 1% of the actual search strings. I don't know if this is random, or just one seldom-used search engine somewhere works with the stats or what. Anyway, here they are for April 1 and 2, since I didn't look before the 2nd and I'm writing this late at night.
These are the top 20 out of 26, and the top has 2 hits, and all the rest have one. Considering that Google and Google Images referrals are over 500 each already in two days, these 27 search strings are a miniscule percentage of the total. And usually pretty funny. Funny in the searches, and funny in trying to imagine what page here looked good enough in the search results box to warrant a hit. Where could I possibly have a page that sounds like it's information about "a christian's duty prayer card"? I don't even know what that is. (This is not a request for info, I'm just saying it. Don't mail me to explain.) For your edification, here are the full search strings for March, and yes, these are a lot less than 1% of the total search hits, etc etc.
These are the top 20 out of 326, so as always, the majority aren't shown. Think of the missed amusement. I think there are bugs with these also, since the top 2 items went to their 23 and 16 hits respectively in like 1 or 2 days around the middle of the month, and then never moved again. Why would they get so many and then never any more? Possibly one person clicked them both that many times from various different searches, and then never looked again? I also find it perpetually amusing/confusing that "blackchampagne.com" is a top search string. Every month it's one of the top 10. Why would someone search for that? I mean doesn't the "dot com" part sort of tip off that it's just to be typed in directly? Do people search for CNN.com? Another thing I find odd about site stats is in the Band Names section. Where the A Page is always one of or the most popular .shtml page on the site, aside from the main page, yet no other B-Z pages have ever shown up in the stats at all. Why? I mean sure, start with the beginning of the alphabet, but why do so few people continue on to B, or do they look at A and see what it's like, and then click to other pages by letter to see bands they like/hate discussed? So it's like everyone clicks A, and then most everyone clicks 2 or 3 other letter pages, but all different ones? I do wonder if there's something on the A page that's really sucking up a lot of search engine traffic, but I can't think of any particular artist there that would be all that hotly searched for. Maybe Christina Aguilera; I did have a couple of pics of her that were turning up a lot in image searches, at least they were until I changed the file name of both of them so they wouldn't keep eating my bandwidth. But why her and not say Britney Spears, or a Boy Band, or Radiohead, or whatever? Anyway, after the first two days of April the Band Names a.shtml page has 214 loads, making it the top .shtml page on the site (other than the main one), and no other band names page has more than 105 views, which it would need to rank in the top 30 and show up on the stats. The band names title .jpg image has over 500 views, but that doesn't mean a lot since it loads on every page in the section, but it's only going to load once per visitor per visit, since it will pull from your browser cache after the first load. All the other top pages are always the same. The Boobies and Kournikova Topless articles, and the Slang: Dirty, and Slang: Sex Acts pages. Those are the ones that get the majority of the search engine hits, I assume. Not that it's a mystery; dirty words, sex, and nude celebrity females are a guaranteed way to get traffic. Not that that was my intention with those pages or anything. *cough* Anyway, my point here was to share some of the semi-interesting stats, while also mentioning why they aren't really that interesting anymore. Once I change site hosts late this month I'll look into getting a better site stats engine that shows more than the top 20 or 30 in a category, and should be a lot more fun to poke around with.
Totally off topic, but since the site stats are usually pretty interesting just at the start of the month. Here are the top .shtml pages, the only ones that show up in the top 30 files, with their ranking positions.
Yes, everyone comes for the humor, and they stay for the sex. Sounds like my first wife. Well, not really. I find it funny that the A.shtml in Band Names gets ranked this highly, with over 300 loads, and yet not a single other page shows up. Obviously whatever I have on the A page isn't interesting enough to get people to read any more after that.
Here are the only 12 search strings so far displayed. Why just these show up when there are already over 1000 referrals from the US Google alone is a question I never have an answer to.
On the subject of site stats (as I was yesterday) the February 1st stats compiled 3 hours worth, when the January 31st stats went up. This happens about once a week, where just a few hours of the next day will go up when the previous day's does, at around 2 or 3am. It's interesting this time since it's a new month, so days and days of other stats aren't drowning out any info from these new ones. Here are the top 30 URLs for February 1st, as of 3:13am. And here are the top referrers.
I'd say that pretty well clears up the mystery of what's driving the IGN forum referrals, eh? And yes, I'm changing the name of that picture right now, being as the total bandwidth used seems likely to become an issue this month. Heh, in the process of changing it, I discovered a christina-aguilera2.jpg image in the folder. Changed the name of it also, and linked it to the Christina Aguilera entry where I used to have a link to the Twister Sister entry. I think this must have been my initial intention, since shot #2 is her at her in her most hideous clown-beast look. God, talk about a double-bagger. I also found this shot of her, and it's just amazing. I don't know whether to send it to cameltoe.org, make love to it, or set fire to my computer. Perhaps all three. It frightens me. Let us never speak of it again. For the full day's stats, there are some funny search strings. There are 7 strings listed, and obviously that chick on Joe Bachelor, or whatever, is a hot topic. I have no idea what the top string is though. No idea whatsoever. The Internet is scary.
The mystery referral of the month goes to http://boards.ign.com/message.asp, which brought in 275 people in the last two days. This one may be harder to track down than the Jenny Hyun forum thing, mainly since you have to be an IGN Insider to access their forums, and that costs money. I would bet it's just another image linking troll anyway, pointing to a picture of Anna Kournikova's boobies or something. Overall, January 2003 was by far the biggest month for traffic yet. The daily hits average was 10514. The previous most was December, which averaged 6638 per day, and that was up from the November record of 2634 per day. Much of it is from my links here from my D2 site columns, but there are a lot more search engine referrals than d2 site referrals, over all. At any rate, many of the incoming visitors are interested or disgusted enough to return after their first exposure, so I get credit for being somewhat interesting. In fact, I'm about to find out just how much credit, since the bandwidth usage for January was 4.8gig, and I get 5gig monthly. I've mailed the CS twice at my hosts, asking what happens when I go over 5gig and if they have a larger bandwidth program to sign up for, short of something massive like renting a server. They have yet to reply. The online support page has ways to add more emails, or more storage space, but nothing about bandwidth, which is a good indication of how few sites ever need to worry about that sort of thing. I'm not interested in running ad banners here, even if those were profitable for a site that doesn't do millions (literally) of page loads a day, but I'll probably set up an Amazon sell through thing, so when I talk about books or movies there will be a link to buy it from Amazon, and give me some tiny % of the sales price. Depending on how much my hosting starts to cost, I'll also set up a Pay Pal thing for donations, and hope to get a few bucks here and there. When/if I do anything with money from visitors, I'll do it with full transparency; listing all the site costs and income, and will have a donors thank you page, if donors wish to be on it. I'm not looking to make any money off of this, since I do it because I enjoy it, because I wanted to get a forum to present my writing and hopefully lead to some actual work that way, and because this is a fun hobby. There are a few blogs that actually earn their writers money, but they are hundreds of times busier than this one is, and are almost entirely right wing political blogs. And they make it since there are a lot of very rich conservative business types who are willing to subsidize their unofficial mouthpieces. Somehow I don't see those types donating here. I should therefore clarify my message and target specific topics and issues, and try to position myself as an independent advocate for something or other, ideally something that rich people like, so they'd be willing to send me some money to keep writing about how great their product is. Of course I'd need to hide my money-sucking advocacy, or else I'd just be an obvious commercial and would lose my ability to subliminally influence the fence-sitting majority. Being as the only things I frequently advocate are articles about how stupid most authority figures are, what fun pets rats and snakes are, and how dumb most movies are, I don't quite see my target benefactor demographic yet. Other sites making some money are online cartoons, and most of those get by mostly from other sources of income, such as selling books or t-shirts or the like. I can't see this site ever becoming that popular, unless it was fueled by an outside source, such as me becoming a big famous best selling author type, and people coming in to see story news or movie news, about my work. And if that day comes, I certainly won't still have time/inclination to do a long daily update, and could afford whatever the hosting would cost anyway, plus I could just write it all off on my taxes. In any event, if I do start begging for money it won't be a regular thing, since my expenses are low. I'm paying $8 a month now, and I would hope it won't go up too much when I need a bit more bandwidth. I live in some fear of a big link from slashdot or Fark, especially one to a page with a lot of images, since that could devour my entire month's bandwidth in one fell swoop. The curse of the Internet; the more popular you are, the more money it costs you to stay online. I may have to cut back on the images soon, at least the images people are likely to search for (celebrities, nude women, etc) since I'm getting a lot of referrals from various image searches. Just looking at the stats now, suddenly this image is like the 25th biggest bandwidth use on the site, with over 2132 loads, good for almost 40meg in data transfer. There are over 4100 incoming referrals from http://images.google.com/, and hundreds more from Alta Vista images, Canadian Google images, UK Google images, etc. I think the key there is to not name the pictures anything a search engine is going to latch onto. I.E. not "christina-aguilera.jpg". For some more interesting site stats info, here are the top search strings. As I always say, much to the boredom of repeat visitors, the search string portion of my stats is crappy, and only shows a very small % of the referrals. I do not know why this is, but there were over 10,000 referrals from just the US versions of Google and Yahoo in January, and thousands more from other smaller search engines. The stats list 1159 referrers (of which I see just the top 30), but there are only 112 search strings listed, of which I see just the top 20. Here they are.
It's pretty obvious why I snag so many searches for "champagne", given that it's in the title of almost every page, as well as the site URL, despite me having never actually written anything about the sparkling, alcoholic beverage. I should have named the site "Martinelli's Sparkling Cider", since that's a reasonable substitute for champagne, and something I actually drink at times. But then who said the site should be named after a beverage I actually partake of? You wouldn't click on http://www.greenandorangegatorademixedtogether.com now would you? I should hope not, and yet I drink that stuff like Shaq during a TV time out. I really should look up some actual champagne reviews and put in links to them on my review page, just to help the misguided clickers out. Either that or I could actually drink some of the stuff *shudder* and write my own reviews? It's certainly a task that my URL seems to destine me for. Even with just these few search strings to eyeball, there are some funny ones. That "a husband sucks the breast islam" is probably my favorite. And sure enough, if you search for that on Google, the articles index page comes up as the fourth returned result. I don't like to look at the Articles index page, since it just reminds me how far behind I've fallen on article'ing stuff from blogs. Where is my intern? Of course the real question is why the hell was someone searching for "a husband sucks the breast islam" in the first place? The return they got here is worthless, but what were they looking for? Rules on sucking your wife's breasts for Muslims? Are there such rules? Is it some sort of fetish search? Your guess is as good as mine. I like that three people looked for "nicole kidman thighs" and found this site. I'd imagine that there must be 4 or 5 pages around here with those words in close proximity. Though I don't see any of them listed on the first 5 pages of Google returns for that search, so whoever clicked it must have really devoted some time to the search. Perfectly-understandably, when this sort of thing is the prize. I generally list the most popular pages, but it's always the same, so sort of a boring list. It should be more interesting tomorrow, when the February stats are just one day old, and the pages that have links to them from the D2 site won't be already dominating the totals. The top page was the main page. Not far behind it though, was this one, with the hideous pictures of the fat Anna Nicole Smith, and the sexy pictures of the appallingly-skinny Hilton sisters. And that's entirely due to me linking to it from one of my D2 site columns. It was viewed nearly 8000 times in January. Third place goes to the enticingly-titled Anna Kournikova Topless article, which had 2350 views. The dirty slang page, formerly the perennial second place finisher, was just behind with 2270 loads. A new page to rank highly was next, and it's the A page in Band Names, with just over 2230 loads. No other band names pages are listed, so obviously most people start at the beginning. The disgusting Sex Acts page had 2170 views, and then the last one that gets into the top 30 total URLs is the Boobies article, with 1980. Unfortunately out of the top 30 URLs, only these 6 are actual .shtml pages. All the rest are images, mostly images found on those same pages, obviously enough. The Kournikova article is 17th, and then the boobies is 29th, and that only goes down from 2300 to 1918, so it seems clear that 31-100 or more would probably be a very slow decline in numbers, and probably interesting to see which other article pages got a lot of views, if any of the reviews did, etc. And therefore I'll close this stats discussion as I always do, by wistfully pondering the joys of a better stats engine. When/if I put up the donations box, someone can feel free to send in about $20 with a requirement that I get a better stats counter and post about it regularly. I'm best at putting aside procrastination and "good enough-ation" with a deadline/boot in my ass.
For the first time in about two months, the site stats are showing where visitors are coming from. I don't know why they stopped showing that (and 100% of traffic was "Unresolved/Unknown") and I don't know why they started again. But it's interesting to look at. So here's where visitors came from yesterday, for some amount of hours. I doubt it's the full 24. This is 2-30, since #1 is Unknown, and 16 days worth of it, so it's in the hundreds of thousands. I don't know what Network is either, but it's usually just a bit more than US Commercial, and I assume they are the same thing, though I have no real reason to do so.
Yes, Cocos (Keeling) Islands. That hotbed of websurfing. I used to get a fair amount from China, but they were suddenly blocked off a few months ago, unsurprisingly. I do find it interesting how much international traffic there is to an English-language website that's not really about anything. Hopefully the whereis/look up will continue to work, since I love to see where people are viewing this tripe from.
I've not posted about the site stats the last few days. That's nothing out of the ordinary, but in this case it is an omission since Wednesday was the highest traffic day ever, and then Thursday upped that by 8000 hits. Friday's traffic was half of Thursday's, and Saturday's came down another few thousand, but all four days were in the top 10 or so days ever. I don't really take any pride in this since almost all of the traffic influx was brought by a link from my last column on the D2 site, which was posted Wednesday evening. Hence the surge that day, and the next. Something like 5500 people have clicked this link:
And a lot of them looked around other pages on the site after they were here, judging by the traffic. There are also 600 or so clicks on the link to the Victoria's Secret pictures, which is found in my second D2 site column. So a lotta people read the past ones when I post a new one, it would appear. A more mysterious source of new traffic is a link from somewhere on the forums you'll find at this site. Those are the forums for JennyHyun.com, which probably doesn't tell you anything more than the first link did. I'd never heard of her, but she's a cute 18 y/o girl who is a web designer, but is apparently trying to become the next Mariah Carey. It pays better, so I can't blame her. I'd assume her emulation will stop somewhere short of the nervous breakdown though. I bring this up since there are around 150 referrals from that site in the last three days. Going by the URL, I assumed it was a site about TV, since the URL on the stats display is http://www.jennyhyun.tv/home/viewthread.php. However the .tv seems to have nothing to do with anything, other than preemptively taking on cyber squatters. There's no way to tell from the referral link which post mentions this site, and there are a lot of forums, with a lot of posts. I'm curious, but not anywhere near curious enough to look through dozens or hundreds of posts, trying to find who mentioned something on this site, and in what context. Since I initially thought it was a TV fansite, I was thinking my comments about the Bachelor and other related shows a few days ago might be the source. However that seems unlikely, now that I've investigated it somewhat. Probably just some wanker linked to the dirty slang page, and all my curiosity is for nothing. If anyone who came from there wants to drop me the URL of the referring post, I'd appreciate it. Anyone can look around the forums; you have to be a member, but you can join up instantly. You don't even need to get the password from a confirming email. It's a lot of teens chatting about teen stuff, from the few posts I checked out, so you might even enjoy yourself. --- A day later, the minor "hits from Jenny Hyun" mystery has been solved. And like many mysteries, the solution is pretty boring. The forums there allow image loading, and someone threw a couple of images from here into a post there. So every time someone views that thread, the images are shown. You can see the thread here, but you'll have to log in there first, and it's not really worth the trouble, since I can just tell you that the images are the two of Paris Hilton that you'll see on this page. Oddly enough, no one has pasted in the two images of Anna Nicole Smith on that page. She's a much bigger star, so I can't imagine why not? A fresh-baked CCC goes to Lanth for hunting up the correct forum post.
This was meant to be a few paragraphs just following up on the stats thing from yesterday, and I was going to write a long thing about women and their eye-candy of choice (or non-choice) here. But since it's already 8am and I need to go run some errands this morning, and this got a lot longer than anticipated, I'll just go ahead and save the other for tomorrow. Assuming I'm still in the mood to write about it then. So here's a follow up to the stats chat of yesterday. Hits for the 2nd were almost double the 1st, primarily since tons of people on the D2 site read my new article, clicked to the Flux author info page, and clicked the link to here from that page. There were also a bunch of people reading my previous d2 columns, to the tune of 187 referrals to the Victoria's Secret link from column #2. Which is actually sort of annoying, since it's got 7 images on it, plus the news images header, so now almost 1/3 of my total display of top 30 files are all from that one page. Then just behind it in total hits is the Kournikova article, which has 6 images on it. So my total page load knowledge from the top 30 files is... four pages. Main page, Kournikova article, victoria's secret page due to the D2 column link, and at #29 is the Dirty Slang page, which rules from search engine referrals. The other ongoing annoyance is that I don't see the search strings from Google or Yahoo or other major search engines. There are nearly 1000 referrals from search engines in just the two days of stats so far this month, and I see a total of 7 listed on the search strings display. Months ago I would see individual ones show up on the top referrers list, since things that gave me 1 referral would display for a while. No longer does a single referral source show up even the first day of the month, which is a good sign, but inconvenient. The few search strings I do see are usually pretty funny though. Here they are, all have one search each, thus far.
I don't even want to know what the first one was searching for. I would like to know what #4 was looking for though. I mean what the hell? I assume that #2 read my getting fired tale months ago, and wanted to look it up again? It's one of the articles now, just go to the articles main page and look in the ToC if you want to dig into all the overly-wordy non-fun. I'll just spoil all the suspense now and say that I got re-hired once the Union filed a complaint, though I did miss a week of work and got zero pay for it. I didn't list last month's search strings yesterday, so here they are.
Champagne reviews and mini skirt were running neck and neck all month, until champagne reviews got a late burst and pulled ahead. Or if you count the other "mini skirt" with the garbage characters around it, they were still nearly even. Obviously people wanting reviews for New Year's Eve bubbly shopping, and being misdirected here by the reviews page, and the site title. I have a sip of champagne about every third year, so it's not like I could write about it even if I wanted to. My stepbrother gave me a bottle of it this year for Xmas, as part of his "gifts I could pick up at the liquor store on the way to the Xmas Eve dinner" present scheme. I will never drink it, at least not unless I have some guests over and they want to crack it open. And as often as I permit guests, it's more likely to be used to brain a burglar than be consumed in revelry. I don't really mind drinking, and do it on occasion at social events, but it never occurs to me to do it otherwise, and I've chosen to not develop a taste for alcohol since it's expensive and leads to other bad habits. Not to mention acting like a total fucking idiot. While I realize that's the whole point for a lot of people, I'm not a lot of people. While some of the things I have no idea what they are about (Where have I ever mentioned mini skirt, or Rush Limbaugh, other than briefly and in passing?) I do remember what most of those other searches are for, or at least what they tripped on that's on this site. I'm not sure about "biblical allusions in comics". I've never written about that in any way, so I suspect that in some daily update I just happened to mention "biblical" and "comics" in subsequent paragraphs. The Mike Maginnis hoax was a news item I talked about one day, when he died. He was some old crusty guy who started the whole modern Bigfoot phenomena by tromping around in some big wooden carved feet. His initial effort has now taken on a life of its own, as you probably realized. Cutest couple in crete-monee high school was a news item mention about a lesbian couple who were voted "cutest couple" for their yearbook. Outing them both to their parents in the process, apparently. This listing of search strings is so woefully inadequate and misleading that I hesitate to even pay any attention to it. I just do since some are better than none. As the first two days of this month demonstrate, there are 800+ referrals, and I see 7 strings listed. Last month I had almost 6000 referrals from just the main US Google, and thousands more from Yahoo, international Googles, and hundreds of other search engines. And from that I see about 100 on the search strings. As I invariably conclude every time I drag forth the rotting carcass of site stats to discuss... I really have to get a better stats engine sometime.
Site stats! I post tidbits about the site stats every now and then, but haven't done so lately. I find it very interesting to see how the numbers go, how many people are visiting, what they're looking at, etc. The stats I see aren't all that informative, and especially after a week or more of each month, they show little info since the same things are hit so often that it builds up. At the end of December a site would have had to send me 54 (or more) referral hits for it to show up on my stats, what with so many search engines clogging up the top 30 referrer listing. Therefore, the first few days of each month are interesting, since I see exactly what's being viewed, or at least the top 30 files. There were around 5000 files loaded January first, and something like 600 unique visitors. Over a dozen people loaded more than 100 files each yesterday. For December one guy loaded over 2000 files, which was by far the most. The next most frequent surfer was around 1400. I can't say exactly how many pages that is, since each visitor loads at least 4 files (the page itself, top image, blue background, grey background), and often there's one of the script letters as well, or other thumbnail type images. But most return visitors have the backgrounds cached, and possibly the letters too, so they might only load one file, while a brand new visitor would load 6 for the same page. Anyway, here are the most popular pages for the day. Most of the most popular files are images, either the background files, or else top page images that are on more than one page. The invective.jpg gets a ton of loads, since it's on like 60 pages. Same with band-names.jpg, reviews.jpg, etc. But going by which .shtml pages are the busiest, it's always the main page with the most hits. Second place thus far is the Kournikova Topless article, which had 65 views yesterday. Next was the Boobies article, at 41 views. Then Playboy Mag Sucks, at 36. Dirty Slang got 35, Sex Acts got 34, and Celebrity Skin got 33. Stop me if you notice a trend here. Unfortunately that's as far as I know, since that's all the top 30 show. Anything with fewer than 33 loads in the day is not visible. The Kournikova article has about 6 images on it, as does the Boobies article, so those together hog almost half the top 30 files. I do know that the invective.jpg was loaded almost 300 times, and since there's about 200 in the Kournikova, Boobies, Playboy Mag, and Celebrity Skin articles above, close to 2/3 of the total article loads were 4 of them on sex. There are something like 60 total articles, mostly on non-sex topics. You people are all dirty whores. I would love if I had a cool database script thingie working to organize every page. I'd like the articles to be sortable by type, popularity, and rating, both to satisfy my curiosity and to be more fun/easier to navigate for the readers. But as much time as I like to spend with scripts and higher technology (zero) that's not real likely to suddenly appear.
The referrals for one day aren't real interesting. It's all search engines or links from a few of the D2 site pages.
Fascinating, isn't it? Or not. Other search engines include Google Canada, New Zealand, Germany, Belgium, France, Australia, and Custom. There are also Google Images from the US and UK, Alta Vista images, and two more AOL searches that look just like the first one, but come from a different IP#, and therefore are stored differently, just to clog up my top 30 display, I suspect. I don't know how to figure the actual uniques. The main display says 592 visitors, but then you look at the referrals and there are 243 of them, of which only the top 30 show. By #27 they are just 1 each, so figure that's 216 singles, but if you add up the top 27, it's well over 800, which would make well over 1000 total referrals. How can the referrals be nearly twice as high as the uniques? Are people clicking multiple links to this page, just to mess with the counter? That's why I don't trust the uniques or sites or other listed results. There's one metric called "visits" that's totally worthless. It stands at 93 for yesterday, and then you look on the top 30 visitors for the day and more than half of them have a 0 for visits. And then there's the top browser count. It lists 15, and if you add those up they are well into the thousands, so I guess every file counts. MSIE 6.0 is always the top browser. And the second browser as well, with the Windows NT 5.1 first and Windows 98 second. And then you get MSIE 5.5, 5.0, 5.01, 6.0 for Win 9x, 6.0 for NET CLR 1 (whatever that is), and yet another 6.0 for win9x verison. Then there's one lone Netscape, and it's 4.7, and 103 files. Then three more MSIE 6.0 versions, another 5.5, another 6.0, and one last 5.01. Browser stats aren't exactly fascinating, unless you are tracking MS' total domination in the browser market. I hear about Opera and Lynx and others, but I've yet to actually see any evidence of such things. All I ever get are 13 or 14 varieties of MSIE, 1 NS, and usually a googlebot, which is their spider. One thing I miss is the where people are coming from display, but the "who is" or whatever it would be called has been broken for the past two months, so I just see this:
Bah. I can always run trace routes to the top visitors's IP#'s to see where they are located, which is something for my curiosity from time to time, but that's only 30 out of thousands of visitors, even if I cared enough to check all 30 of them, which I don't.
Overall traffic is way down the last few days, both here and on the D2 site. People are on vacation so not surfing from work, people at home are visiting friends or relatives, watching TV, opening presents, shopping, etc. Whatever, they're not online as much and not doing recreational surfing. I've surfed a lot less myself, so I can hardly blame anyone else. Though part of my less busy surfing is due to so many of the sites I regularly look at not updating for a few days or a week or two, with Xmas as their excuse. I have been updating, so you bastards have no excuse to not be here. Not you guys reading this, those other bastards who are all full of eggnog. Despite the lessening in overall traffic, one page has shot up the stats. I just noticed today that it's got well over 1100 hits this month, and has something like 65% of the total page loads anywhere in the whole /writing folder. Which page? It's obvious in retrospect. http://blackchampagne.com/writing/xmas-poems.shtml Must be getting a ton of search engine hits, since I don't see any sudden referrals galore from anywhere other than search engines. Pity I don't see the search strings for more than about 1% of the search engine referrals, but people must be searching for "Christmas" and "poem", and getting that. Given that one is a sort of horror poem and the other is all about Diablo II, they're probably pretty disappointed with their search string results. And it's all my fault.
The month is young and site stats are somewhat amusing. I didn't post anything about the end of November since there wasn't anything interesting to post. Lots of traffic, relatively speaking, but no huge surges from any odd sources. Traffic is very high the last three days, for no apparent reason. No huge referral source, just search engines, but I have over 700 referrals just from US Google in 3 days and 600 from US Yahoo, with several hundred more from various other/international search engines. That's a lot more than usual, but I don't know what page they are hitting; no single page is really standing out way in front of where I'd expect. In mid-June the site hits unexpectedly spiked for two days, and I couldn't figure out why or how, since there weren't any referrals at all; just a ton more hits on the main page. As I found out thanks to a reader email, a radio station in Georgia had mentioned the site URL. At the time the average daily hits were like 1000 or slightly less, and they went up to 3200 the day of the radio station mention, which was a huge spike back then, and cause for my intrigue. Now there are more than 3000 average, and there have been over 5000 the last two days, which are both in the top 5 days ever, I think, but the comparative difference to the old radio station day is minor. Traffic would need to pop to around 13,000 in a day for a similar increase at this point. The record ever was October 31st, since I posted the Halloween story on the D2 site, and had links on that page to my past stories, all of them pointing to the archived versions on this site. There were something like 550 referral hits from the D2 site that day, and total traffic was just over 7000 hits. Obviously my plugging of myself from the D2 site is fueling much of the steady rise the last couple of months, but I get tons from search engines also. Thus far this month there are 48 referrals from my columnist bio page, which is more than from any other website, but far less than the search engines. I'd like to see exactly which pages are being viewed the most, but my stats only show the top 30 files. Files, not pages. This means that most of the top ones are images. The top 9 are all images this month, since the same image appears on lots of different pages. The title image for Band Names is on 30 pages, the Articles one is on 50+ pages, Reviews is on 30+, etc. In terms of actual page views, the main page always has the most, though the Dirty Slang page is often a very close second. I think almost entirely from search engine referrals. Since I put up those articles there is a new contender, the Anna Kournikova one. I assume that "Anna Kournikova Topless" is pretty potent search engine bait. That page has 1 more view than the Dirty Slang page thus far this month. Complicating the top 30 file listing is the fact that there are 7 images on the Anna Kournikova page, so that one page takes up 8 of the 30 slots I see, all with the same number. The Boobies article isn't far behind, and then the Sex Acts slang page is next. The last article I see in the top 30 is the Castration article. No surprise they're all sex stuff, is it? You are all a bunch of filthy perverts. I also get to see search strings, but only some. With well over 1000 search engine referrals thus far this month, I see a total of 16 strings listed on the stats, all but 3 of them with just 1 hit each. As I say every time I talk stats, I don't know why this is. The stats program provided by my site host sucks, what can I tell you. Anyway, the top one has 3 searches, the next two have 2 hits, and the rest all have 1.
As always, at least half of them have no conceivable connection to anything actually on this site. People doing searches must be disappointed with me quite a lot. The weirdest one is always "mini skirt". That's almost always the #1 result on this screwy string listing; last month it was by far the most searched. But if you search on Google for that, you don't get any results pointing here, and I don't have any pages that talk about mini skirts in any detail. Mysterious. Here they are for November, while I'm thinking about it. The number is how many used that string.
These are the top 20 out of 76, according to the stats, so 56 more single time searches we don't get to see. Alas. As I always say, I'll get a better stat program someday. If it showed the google and yahoo searches, it would be interesting, since there would be things with hundreds of searches, and I could get an actual idea of what people were trying to find.
The last two days (Thursday and Friday) have been the heaviest ever traffic days. Overall traffic has been going up steadily since the site launched in mid-February, and October was by far the busiest month. Just for comparison, I think there were 2 days ever before August that had over 2000 loads in a single day, and just a few during August, and sporadic numbers in September. October averaged 1950 or so per day. The record was Halloween, with just over 7000 hits. What's a "hit?" I'm not entirely sure, but as far as I can tell it's any file on the site that you don't have cached already. So if you load this page and were here yesterday, you'll load the page only. Not the light or dark background, or the title image. So you'd get one load. But if a brand new visitor, or just someone who had cleared their cache since their last visit hit the same page, they'd get four loads. Light background, dark background, page, and title image. When I look at the stats by country, there are always a bunch of odd countries with 4 loads each, but never anything with fewer than that (and since I only see the top 30 countries, I only see any with 4 for a day or two at the start of each month now). It's already too late this month with just one day of stats (as of 11pm, when I'm writing this). Number 30 is Brazil, with 5 pages. There are 39 countries from yesterday, so the bottom 9 all probably have 4 loads each. And they're not all countries, just different domain extensions. The top 5 now are Network, US commercial, Unresolved/Unknown, Canada, US Education. I do not know what "Network" is, but it's always just ahead of US Commerical, and those two are far far more than whatever the third place country is. I also get US Military and US Government and sometimes Arpanet, but all the rest are countries. The top countries for October (which was the first month ever in which the stats worked every single day) were Canada, NZ, UK, Oz, Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, in that order. There were 75 countries total, of which I only see the top 30 on my stats. Anyway, my initial point is that it's impossible to know the actual number of people who visit, since the "uniques", "Sites", "files" and "visits" stats are all very suspect and fluctuate wildly, not all all consistent with the total hits and KB transfer. Uniques and Sites will say 200 and 230, and then I'll look and I had 500 referrals that day, from search engines and other sites. So I don't know how many people, but I do know if it's more or less pretty accurately. Note that whatever figure I use, this site is still quite tiny. Busy sites get 30 or 40 or 50k uniques a day; I get 500 (estimated) on a busy day. The D2 site gets more traffic in an hour than I get in a week. Which is a good thing, in terms of hosting costs, since you'll notice I'm a bit short on ad banner revenue around here. October was the biggest month yet, by far, and I used just over 1/5th of my 5gig allowed transfer, so I'm not real worried about having to go up from the $8 a month I'm paying now. Anyway, that endless and boring introduction dispensed with, the one day stats from Nov 1 (I see one day since it's the first of the month) have some funny stuff. The reason for the big surge in traffic Thursday and Friday is because of this page, on the D2 site. I wrote it up Halloween afternoon and included old Halloween updates, a new screenshot this year, some old screenies and artwork, and my new short story. Which was far from written at the time, but I was going to do it. And I did, late at night. Anyway, I had links to 4 of my old short stories on the page, and they went to a rough version on the D2 site, or else early versions on the TDL hosted site. Since I've gone over those stories and made a lot of changes and (I think) improvements since then, namely when I posted them on this site early this year, I changed the links to point here; to the updated versions of the stories. I didn't think they'd get many hits, but the links had to point somewhere. There were 545 people who clicked them Halloween, in about 9 hours (I updated it around 3pm) and then another 370 did so Nov 1. The usual daily traffic in Oct was 2000, and there were 7000 hits Nov 1, so if you go by the 4 hits per first visit, that would only be 2200 from the initial clicks, leaving me 3000 short of the total. So obviously a lot of the new visitors looked at other pages. I got a grand total of zero emails from the new people, at least emails to me at this site. I hardly ever mail the webmaster of sites I look at, so I'm not surprised by this, but anyway. The funny thing comes in that all of the links from the D2 site go to the main story pages here, which for all those old D2 stories are a title sort of page, with links to the actual 2 or 3 pages of the story, and then a notes page. The follow through on the actual story reading is amusing. These are for Nov 1, not Oct 31, since none of the story pages have enough loads to show in the top 30 pages after 31 days of October. 187 hits: /writing/dark-lady.shtml 97 hits: /writing/paladins-lesson.shtml 58 hits: /writing/magistrate-suit.shtml 43 hits: /writing/haunted-castle.shtml The point here, is that less than 1/3 of the people who clicked on a story link clicked to the first page of it, and no one clicked to any of the second pages of a story, at least not enough to register in the hits, since they had to have over 24 to show up. It would appear that a title page before the actual story starts is a pretty bad idea, if you want people to actually, um.... read the story. This sort of perplexes me. I mean the links from the D2 page are very clearly links to Halloween stories; the people who clicked them were not mislead or confused. So why would they click to the story, look at the short title page, and then bail out before reading anything? Possibly just the fact that the links went off site (from the D2 site) to a page with a different design (this one) was confusing or a surprise, and that put them off. I don't suspect I'll ever know. I will probably dispense with title pages though, if they're that much of a mood-killer. Or at least link directly to the start of a story, and then have a link back to the title page, if people want more info. No one seems to want that, judging by the stats. So what else did people look at? Well perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular article is the one that says, "Anna Kournikova Topless". It was loaded 29 times. The shortcoming with my stats only showing the top 30 more popular files becomes immediately-apparent when you see that also loaded 29 times were /images/annak-2.jpg, /images/annak-3.jpg, /images/annak-4.jpg, and /images/annak-5.jpg. All of which are thumbnails on the Anna K article page. The Hot or Not page really does this, since that used to always be in the top 30, and it has like 15 thumbnails that all load also. So half of the top files would be from one page. Then you've always got the light background and dark background, title page header image, news archives page header, and that's 2/3 of the top 30 files gone and me knowing 1 more thing about my site traffic than I could have learned reading tea leaves.
With October ended, I do have some funny search string stuff. As I always explain, I don't know what these are. This site gets hundreds of referrals a day from search engines. However I don't see what they are searching for, apparently since most of them go in as single searches for a code phrase, and these are usually unique. You could search for "writing Lovecraft and Stephen King reviews sex" and guess what the first return is on Google? (I honestly just typed that into Google for the hell of it, hoping my site would show up somewhere on the listings. That it's #1 is pretty funny.) Another person could search for "writing Stephen King Lovecraft reviews and sex" and get the exact same page, but it wouldn't be the same search/referral since the order of the words is different. That being said, it's not the whole story. I have a "search strings" table on my stats, but it's only registered on from one odd search engine, or something like that. Most early months I'd show 500 referrals from various international googles, yahoo, etc, and there would be like 9 strings listed in the table. For Nov 1 there is 1 search string listed, and it's for "mini skirt", while the referrals shows over 150 hits from just US Google, and dozens more from various other sources. So I do not know why only like 1% of the actual searches that result in a page from this site being clicked to show up in the stats. But it's unfortunate, since they are funny. What's also funny is that I write about this topic from time to time, and usually name the search string. Which then results in more hits, since I have the actual string people are searching for listed, and that obviously shows up as a search result when they search on it. No doubt pissing them off when they think they've got an 100% accurate match and come to see it's just me talking about the search, and not the result. The big one that went off in October is Howard Stern It's Just Wrong. As I wrote about a few weeks ago when the strings first started showed up, this is some sort of game they're doing on the Howard Stern Show, in which they pay a son to strip in front of his mother, or a sister in front of her brother; that sort of semi-incestuous stripping thing. Why everyone and their pachyderm are searching for it I can't tell you, but it's dominating my admittedly inadequate search string results. Top for October:
As you can see, that search got the top 2, and 7 of the top 18 results, and probably has more permutations with 2 hits that aren't shown. Weird aspects:
Anyway, there's no point to any of this, but I enjoy the oddities of search results, and share them in the hope that you will too. And if you don't, you still added to them by coming here to read this. No, there's no escape. |
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
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stats are a source of regular amusement to me. I'm not running this site
to get a huge amount of traffic, but I do enjoy having someone reading the words
I go to the trouble to type out, and it's interesting to see where the readers
come from, what pages they view the most, and so on. Checking out what
search strings brought people here is always good for some amusement, as is
seeing what sites referred them this way.
