no more band-aids
After consulting the available stats and readership metrics, I compiled the following likely-comprehensive list:
Aggregated stats for D2L usage during the Winter 2014 semester (Jan-Apr 2014). Counts number of visits, not pageviews.
The first week of January was the ramp-up to the official semester start. Reading week is visible as the slump in February. Kind of trails off as finals approach…
Using Marco Arment‘s handy dandy RSS feed-subscribers apache access log processing script, here’s the current breakdown of accesses by known RSS reader applications to my blog since 8am today:
The big spike on the far left? Google Reader. Still counting for almost 77% of RSS-related accesses to my blog. Except no humans can see what it’s still indexing using GReader…
Marco found the same thing on his much-more-widely-read blog.
Google Reader appears to be a zombie process, obediently and tirelessly indexing RSS feeds, oblivious to the fact that nobody will be able to view the product of its work…
Update: Here’s a version with GReader removed:
Newsblur (at almost 15% of RSS traffic to my blog), followed by Digg1, Yahoo! Pipes2, etc… The RSS landscape has changed rather dramatically in the last couple of weeks. The long tail of long tail readers…
I just installed the GoAccess apache log processing application on the Hippie Hosting Co-op server, giving users a way to watch the stats for their sites in realtime, without having to rely on privacy-invading analytics bugging software. This software works on the command line, so just SSH into your account and type:
goaccess -f statistics/logs/access_log
That tells goaccess to load with the logfile at the specified location. You can feed it other logfiles, but the default one for a Hippie Hosting account should be at statistics/logs/access_log.
It will prompt you for the type of log file. Select NCSA Combined (arrow-down, hit enter to select, then F10 to continue. yeah. intuitive software…)
It’ll give you something like this, updating live:
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. Over 600,000 unique visitors. The scale of that just blows my mind.
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 service. I had decided to use FeedBurner as a way to reduce the load on my Dreamhost shared server – the feed would be cached by FeedBurner and served from there, removing a tonne of requests off-site. It did the trick, but at the cost of handing control of my blog’s feed over to a third party (who has since been absorbed by Google). One direct negative side effect of the FeedBurner plugin is that it seemed to interfere with tag- and category-based feeds. That shouldn’t be a problem anymore. I’ll miss some of the stats, but I really don’t need that much data. Now, how do I get the 1494 people sucking the feed off of FeedBurner to come back to the real source? FeedBurner offers to put up an ugly “BLOG MOVED. PLEASE UPDATE SUBSCRIPTIONS” notice to nudge people into resubscribing to the proper URL. But they provide pretty seamless redirection to get people TO FeedBurner. A bit of a roach motel syndrome going on there. You can check in, but you can never leave. (OK. ‘never’ is a little overblown, but it’s not realistic to expect everyone to update their subscriptions – I can’t remember the last time I did that…)
The second plugin to get switched off today is the very cool, extremely addictive, but ultimately creepy Blog Voyeur plugin. It didn’t track any additional info, but presented a list of people who have commented on the blog, and the last page they’ve visited, thanks to the “remember me” cookie. It’s not too invasive, but I felt like I should put on a trenchcoat while viewing the Voyeur report page. It didn’t help that feeling much by inserting “YOU ARE BEING WATCHED” on the comment submission form – I agree that notification is necessary, but maybe with less-creepy wording?
I’m not giving up on stats altogether, but am limiting them to just Google Analytics and WordPress.com Stats. They’re both generic and anonymous stats packages, without the level of creepiness of Blog Voyeur, and the loss of control involved with FeedBurner.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.