ragingly ambivalent. or something. whatever.
Posts tagged as:
I just cracked open the Google Analytics stats for my blog, and was curious to see how much data was available. I had it display all data (going back as far as November 16, 2005, which is apparently when I first started using Analytics). Google has tracked over 1 million page views on my blog. [...]
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interesting. according to YouTube’s Insight stats display, my recent 3 videos are quite the hit with the older gentleman crowd…
I just disabled two separate blog stats packages, each for a different reason. This move was partially inspired by the upcoming “F*** Stats – Make Art!” session on the docket at Northern Voice.
First, I disabled the FeedBurner FeedSmith integration plugin. This is a handy way to automatically redirect requests for RSS feeds to the FeedBurner [...]
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Apparently Sitemeter, one of the services I use to track stats about visitors and activity here, recently started inserting cookies for an advertising company. These cookies are essentially spyware, used to track visitors across the internet by matching up that cookie on each site that is visited.
I've disabled Sitemeter, and won't be going back. I've been very happy with them for the last few years, but sneaking spyware onto visitors is not cool. StatCounter has pledged to not do that, so I'll be using them, alongside Google Analytics. (it could be argued that Google could be tracking visitors in a similar pattern of spyware cookies – not sure how I feel about that, but at least they're relatively up front about it, being an online ad company. Sitemeter just silently changed the rules…)
If you want to clean up your browser after Sitemeter, delete any cookies you might have from "specificclick.com" (I had 4 cookies from that domain, but I'm not sure if they were a result of Sitemeter tracking code from my blog, or from elsewhere…)
References to the spyware cookie include:
I'm sorry for any inconvenience. Hopefully that's the end of it…
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I’ve been playing with Google Analytics since I saw Tim Bray mention it last week. It looks like Google bought the Urchin webserver stats cruncher, rolled into their Adsense service, and are offering it for free. Although it seems rather tilted towards optimizing Adsense revenue, it’s also quite useful for non-Adsense usage.
I’ve been letting it chew for a week to see what kind of data it came up with, and am really impressed with the reports it provides. My only real beefs are that the data is delayed (-1/2 star) – by sometimes a day or more – and that it borks in Safari (-1/2 star). And, the interface seems really complicated (-1 star) – I keep forgetting where the various reports live. Are they visible under “Executive” mode? “Webmaster”? “Marketer”? And, some of the terminology used to describe the reports is a bit non-intuitive. Maybe not if you’re an Adsense geek, but for a regular web-head, I keep thinking “uh, what does this report tell me – they do provide nice paragraphs under each report to give the gist of it, though.
The report delay is really noticeable because I’m also using Sitemeter, which provides up-to-the-second reporting. That’s how I saw the traffic spike sent from TUAW this morning. I would have completely missed that (until it was over) if I was relying on the Analytics reports.
The reports are displayed in dynamic form – either “ajax” (blech) or Flash, depending on the report, making drilling down into the data a bit less unpleasant. I personally love the “Map Overlay” view, showing where the last 50/100/500 viewers were from. I wish there was a way to teleport to the other end of a network connection. There are several blog readers in locations I’d love to visit 
The other really cool report matches entry pages with exit pages, so you can see sort of a flow through the data on the blog. Very cool, seeing how people are taking advantage of the alternative navigation links (related entries, calendars, tabs, searches).
It doesn’t have a way to track RSS traffic. If it did, I’d gleefully bump the review up to 5 stars, and ignore the no-Safari display. I can live with a few hours of delay on the reports, too.
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As of the previous post, this blog contains 778 published entries containing a whopping 160,266 words – around 205 words per post. That blows me away. I mean, I remember struggling to write 5.000 word essays. And I write this blog just to document stuff I’m doing, basically for kicks.
That’s not all – the 895 non-spam comments on this blog contain a stunning 52,668 words – about 59 words per comment.
I’ve added the wordcount stats to the “Archives” page to keep track of the running counts. I’m using the handy-dandy and not-so-cryptically-named Wordcount plugin.
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Sometime over the weekend, the odometer on this weblog rolled over to 6 digits. I have no idea who it was, but the 100,000th actual human visitor came by sometime in the last 72 hours. I hadn’t been paying enough attention to the stats, but that’s pretty cool. One heckuva milestone. I should have been paying attention, and had some kind of prize. Perhaps an “I'm an edtech geek” bumper sticker or something…
And, looking at the traffic trends, it’s not going to take long to roll over to 200K.
I’m still absolutely amazed that anyone else finds this online braindump/rant-bin useful/interesting.
Here’s to another 100K…
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