Monthly Archives: January 2009

Stats, stats and more stats (and lies!)

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I’m a bit of a web-stat-aholic.  Despite the fact that this is a personal blog with hardly any relevance to the outside world, I still feel the need to see how many people read it.  But then that’s true of all the websites I throw up.  In some ways I find the stats just interesting, even if the numbers are really small, it amuses me how people find the sites, what search strings they use, and how certain pages get more hits.

I use three stats systems on this site, Google Analytics, the WordPress.com stats plugin, and the CyStats plugin.  Clearly the whole area of ‘what constitutes a visitor’ is murky at best, and when a page is made up of lots of resources that each generate a request to the web server, it gets a little harder to work out how many hits you’ve had, but I’m amused by the difference in information the three systems provide, and the apparent totally useless WordPress.com stats plugin.

When I moved the blog to WordPress I thought the WordPress.com stats plugin would be a good option, and indeed it looked like it was reasonably accurate when the visitor count was 1 or 2 people a day.  However, as the site gets found by google and random hits start to increase, the stats look more and more crazy, in particular the ‘top posts and pages’ section.

Here’s the current info from that plugin for pages visited today and yesterday,

stats1So yesterday, apparently the only two pages read on the site were the Watchmen post and the Wii Fit page.  And today, people are only reading the Watchmen post and nothing else.  I kinda find that hard to believe, and in fact, the other two stats systems agree that it’s complete bollocks.  I’ve no idea what-so-ever what the WordPress.com stats plugin is doing but it’s certainly not recording which pages are being viewed.

Total visitors or page views being different I can live with because how they’re measured is pretty vague, but you would think a stats plugin would know which pages were being read, that is kind of the whole point.  In contrast, this is what CyStats thinks has been read today,

Windows 7 Beta - file sharing                           8   14%
Main page                                               8   14%
of protein and fat and blood sugar                      4   7%
So, what went wrong (or WordPress, Cron and Squid)      3   5%
Lord of the Rings Online - a review - part one          3   5%
Windows 7 Beta in Sun's xVM VirtualBox                  3   5%
Where oh where has my Gallium gone?                     3   5%
/category/politics                                      2   3%
/tag/dvd                                                2   3%
A month with WordPress                                  2   3%
Old photo's                                             2   3%
First real go at non-drybrush skin                      2   3%
Whiskey & Red Bull                                      2   3%
Windows 7 beta + Lord of the Rings Online               2   3%
David Gemmell Legend Award news                         2   3%
About                                                	2   3%
Eating without thinking                                 2   3%
/2006/08                                                2   3%
Archives                                                2   3%

which as you can see is rather more varied (and slightly more believable).  However, the list of visited pages on Google Analytics for today is different again, not just the numbers, but the actual pages, listing some not viewed above and missing out some that were viewed.

Ultimately, I have the logs from my web hosting account (when they work), and that means I can see, for real, which pages are being accessed and how often, but reading those logs can be a pain and using tools to interpret them just introduce more interpretation that leads to yet another set of figures.

I guess where I’m going with this post is that trusting the stats for your site is impossible, but some tools are clearly more broken than others, and the WordPress.com stats plugin is entirely useless, since it’s clearly unable to work out which page your visitors are reading.  Don’t trust it.

An Everquest sized hole (or, Goodbye to the Orc Pawns)

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… on my hard disk.

I deleted EverQuest today, from my hard disk.  I’d say ‘uninstalled’ but I haven’t installed EQ since the very first time, it was decent enough that you could just copy it anywhere and it would run (just about), so after the first time I installed it and through all my machine upgrades  I just copied it around as needed.

Today I deleted it.  Before that I logged my two main characters on one last time, and ran them to their home cities.  I even ran my dwarf along the route he used to run all the time when I first started playing, from Kelethin to Kaladim, when he was making banded armour.

I killed an orc pawn as I went by (as I always used to), and I was pleased to see my faction was still okay.

faction
Orc pawns, one of the first things I ever killed in EverQuest, and also the last.

Good times.

I shall spend the rest of my life checking my tail for the sign of the Crushbone orcs, but I fear they’re out classed and out numbered.

Downtime, sorry.

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Gradwell (my web host) is having some major issues with its infrastructure.  The net result is periods of slowness, no response or broken page loads.  I’m sorry.  It’s not just affecting this site, but the other sites I host, and some of those are hosted for other people.  I apologise to all those people.  I am considering alternative arrangements, but inertia is a bitch and while Gradwell is having issues isn’t a good time to start trying to transfer things away anyway (unless it goes on).  They are rejigging their kit and making some pretty major changes over this weekend to try and smooth things out, we’ll see how it goes.

Until then, if you get issues with any of the sites I host, please wait a little while and give it another try.  Thanks for your patience.

An Evening With Kevin Smith 2 – Evening Harder

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We finished watching the second Kevin Smith Q&A DVD today (I wrote about the first one here).  This time Kevin is in Canada and Britain with the first DVD covering Canada and the second the UK.  The Canadian Q&A is really good, very funny.  The British one is ok, but I didn’t find Kevin as on-form as he seems in Canada.  Maybe the English accents sound weird to me (you don’t often hear natural English access alongside American ones), maybe I just got annoyed by some of the dumb ass British questions.

Either way, the DVD was still excellent and well worth watching for any Kevin Smith fans.  It’s not quite as revealing as the first one though, so it’s probably for pure fans of Kevin, rather than just for entertainment.

The questions cover the whole range once again, and Kevin is candid and open about his life, his wife and his mother.  I learned a couple of things I never knew about Kevin (and that his wife appeared in Playboy, Kevin took the photo’s), and found it really easy to listen to him.  Jason Mewes seemed as out of place as ever, and although sometimes he managed to answer a question he mostly looked like he wanted to be somewhere else.

Kevin is clearly a superb orator, although you have to be prepared for about a 77% hit rate on profanity, and when he has a decent story to tell it’s very entertaining.

Five days adrift

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Haven’t blogged anything for a few days, because Gradwell’s hosting hasn’t been very reliable among other reasons.  So here I am.  And I guess I don’t have much to say.  Not painted anything, not done much, oh I watched some CSI.

Quite a bit of CSI.  Two Miami episodes (penultimate and series finale), one Vegas (start of new season) and one New York (start of new season).  Turn away now if you don’t like spoilers.

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Responsible web sites

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Most small websites on the ‘net sit on shared hosting of some kind or another  ((this is an educated guess)).  Shared hosting means that a small number of servers handle all the requests for a large number of web sites.  How that’s achieved varies, but the bottom line is that it’s a shared infrastructure.  It’s a bit like living in shared accommodation.  There’s a single door through which everyone gets into the building, then a number of apartments which have their own doors.  But they all share the same electricity supply and water and other utilities.

With shared web hosting, all the traffic comes into the same web host network and web server cluster, and is then handled by all the different web site configurations.  In the same way that there are people who would like to break into your apartment, there are people who’d like to break into your web site to steal stuff, deface it, or to try and gain further access to the shared infrastructure.

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WordPress search sucks

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I really like WordPress, I’m glad I moved to it from Blogger.  I think with the right templates it’s pretty flexible, I wish I had a) more time and b) more css/layout skill to do some template work.  However, WordPress search sucks.

It sucks for a few reasons,

  1. results come back in reverse date order (which makes sense for a blog but is too inflexible)
  2. there’s no indication in the search results which words matched the article
  3. the search just takes all the terms and does a basic sql query for any of them, so if you search for ‘i like bacon’ you get posts with the word like and then posts with the word bacon
  4. the standard navigation doesn’t tell you how many pages of results you got, just that you can read the next page

For blogs, I guess it’s ok as a basic tool, but really it should,

  1. return posts by most relevant first
  2. do proper searches based on the phrase you submit
  3. indicate which words matched the post
  4. show how many posts matched
  5. list the posts by just title, or summary or full and allow you to switch
  6. show which page you’re on, if there are more than one page of results

I’ve looked at various plugins, but not really had any luck finding one which fixes all the problems.  I’ll keep looking.