Tag Archives: blogging

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.

Just upgraded

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Just upgraded the site to WordPress 2.7 which was released today and wanted to make sure everything was working.  It’s going to take me a little while to get used to the new admin layout, but I’ve played with the beta’s and release candidates and I know for a fact that some things are a hell of a lot easier.

Then I read today that you can move the different boxes around on the admin pages and get to a very nice wide posting area and that made me very happy.

I’ve noticed that the category pages on the site no longer show custom headers after a Mandigo upgrade, hopefully that’ll get resolved soon, but until then, enjoy the default red mandigo logo on the category pages.

WordPress & Grete

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I really can’t praise WordPress enough.  It’s such a simple install (point it at your mysql server, and it’s done) and although out of the box it looks pretty ugly (in my view), there are so many quality free templates that it can look however you want in about 20 minutes.  Of course, it takes more time to use some plugins and decide on a layout in general, but really it’s so easy to use everyone who wants an web presence but doesn’t want to spend much time should use it.  It’s mainly a blog, but the pages feature means you can certain include a lot of ‘non-blog’ content easily as well.

Anyway, the point of this post, Grete has moved her blog from blogger to WordPress over at her old URL (http://www.darkstorm.co.uk/grete) and she’s slowly moving the content over from her old personal website at that URL, so it’ll be more than a blog in the end (she assures us!)  She’s using the Mandigo theme as well, so I put together a few random headers for her site, she’s not seen them all yet so they may not all stay and at least one of them doesn’t work very well in my view, so I’ll probably get rid of it later.  But I liked them all anyway 😉

Google searches

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As anyone who reads this blog already knows, I’m addicted to web stats.  I’m fascinated by how people find the blog on the web.  Here’s a selection of my favourite searches used to find the site over the last few days.

On Google,

  • SHOULD YOU EAT MEAT AND POTATO TOGETHER (link) (my favourite)
  • can tooth extraction result in another tooth moving down into space (link)
  • LEGO perception (link)
  • tesco superstore halloween stock (link)
  • cracking a rib when coughing (link)

Theme header images and meta blog entries

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I’ve added another header image to the site which I’m quite pleased with (matrix-themed), and I forgot to post when I added the two based on recent photographs I took.  I think the one with the leaf looks amazing even if I say so myself.  Rather than making you hit refresh over and over to see the images (and for those of you on feed readers who don’t see them anyway), I’m linking them here.

This is the original image I did.

This one’s based on the sunset photo’s I took recently.

This one’s a close up of a leaf on our apple tree.

And one based on the Matrix falling letters motif.

I must say, I really am still very impressed with the Mandigo WordPress theme, and the ability to include random header images is only one small part of that.  The last update added a feature I wanted as well, since the entire header image is now clickable as a link back to the main page.

You’ll notice the images above are taller than the ones you see on the site, because I check the option to show a smaller section of the image.  I like the images, but I also like seeing some blog text on the page without having to scroll down!

Spamalike

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Got a sudden influx of spam, all of it one line and on random posts.  Looks like a tracking mechanism, so the bot makes a spam comment, and then looks for the tracking ID.  If it shows up, it knows it’s ‘good to go’ with as much spam as it likes.  Askimet stopped 2 out of the 5 and I manually flagged the other 3 as spam.  We’ll see how it goes.  If I end up marking 50 a day as spam I may need to force registrations on comments, we’ll see.

Thanks!

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Just a quick thanks to Grete, who proof reads my posts and keeps me on the spelling straight and narrow 🙂 Thank you 🙂  You may notice spelling mistakes that go away a few hours after I post when Grete reads the articles!

She has a user account and can post entries as well, although she’s not felt the need to do so, so far, but if you see anything from her, don’t be surprised.

A month with WordPress

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It’s just over a month since I left Blogger and started running my own WordPress site.  I’m not new at hosting sites, I have several (some phpBB, various custom stuff, previous goes at CMS’s) and I’m comfortable with apache and mysql.

Here’s a few random thoughts about WordPress.

  • Easiest, cleanest and best ‘default settings’ install of just about any web-app I’ve installed.  Really impressed with the ease at which it goes on, and how it works out-of-the-box without having to worry about any settings.
  • Solid and robust plugin architecture.  It’s a constant battle when you host your own sites to keep the number of plugins down while still adding some stuff to the site which makes it easier to use.  WordPress handles the plugins really well, I’ve not had any conflict with each other yet and I’ve not had any cause any weird issues.  I’ve added one or two that I think really add some value and I’ve added a few that are just fun stuff for me (like Pull Quotes).  Overall I’m really impressed, and the automatic one click upgrade for plugins rocks.
  • Because WordPress is popular, there are a lot of templates and I was lucky enough to find one which is basically bullet proof and ideal.  I usually have a lot of problems with templates and CMSs, either having to do a lot of customisation or losing out on features because the templates are old.  This isn’t really a WordPress ‘good point’ since it’s the template designer who’s done the hard work, but I guess the popularity and template system in WordPress helps.
  • The actual process of writing posts is pretty easy.  Sometimes I find the editor a bit clumsy, and having to flick between HTML and Visual editing mode for the more complex post styles can be annoying.  The built in media manager seems powerful and I’m probably only just scraping the top of that but it does what I need (allowing me to upload images and then including them in posts without having to FTP them to my hosting provider and work out a URL).  Compared to Blogger it’s far more flexible and powerful.
  • I like the pages feature – I felt it was a major issue that Blogger didn’t provide a built-in method of including non-dated pages/posts.
  • Managing posts / tags and categories is a pain (in 2.6 you have to edit a post to change the category / tags).  I think they’re changing this in 2.7 or later.  But, a simple plugin fixed this for me anyway and made it a lot easier.  Blogger’s tagging / category feature was reasonably limited and although I don’t think I’m benefiting yet fully from WordPress’s tagging / category system it is far more flexible.  I love the tag to category and category to tag feature, which has saved me a lot of work in restructing the posts.
  • Overall page views are down a great deal since leaving Blogger.  This is party because of the (bizarre) popularity of my posts on my thumb pain / tendonitis and party because the site doesn’t rank as highly in Google for other random topics.  Generally, I don’t mind.  This is a personal blog for me to vent and my friends to read, so how highly it ranks on Google isn’t an issue.  I could have spent a lot more time with the redirection from the Blogger blog, sending visitors to specific posts on this site, but I decided it really wasn’t worth it to preserve the people reading about thumb pain.
  • I think i already blogged about the fantastic seamless import of Blogger content into WordPress.  If not, it was fantastic.
  • I like trackbacks.  I like sending pings when I link to another blog.  Part of the reason why I left Blogger was a lack of trackbacks / pings.  If I link to someone’s blog I want them to know it, so they feel like their blog is valuable and being read.  Even if they don’t display the pings / trackbacks on their site, it’s just a nice easy way of letting people know they’re being read.
  • I never did find a plugin that worked as well as the Blogger blogroll one (which shows the last post in an rss feed you choose, for each entry).  Which is a shame.  There are some, but they seem over complex.

Overall, I’m more than pleased with the move.  I feel more in control of how the blog looks (even though I’ve hardly touched the template I’m using) and I have direct and immediate access to the content (I back the mysql database tables up each night).  WordPress itself performs flawlessly, and there aren’t any major features that I wish it had.

Happy Geek

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Today I am a happy geek.  I’ve ticked all my boxes.

  • Fantasy Miniatures – check
  • Blogging – check
  • Photography – check
  • Using Picasa to manage photo’s – check
  • Using Picasaweb albums – check

Pretty good day.  We popped into the Games Workshop Warhammer World shop to pick up some paints (white and black) that I’m missing (I can cope with other colours missing, but white and black are pretty essential).  The guy behind the counter was as chatty as they always are in Games Workshop shops, and he was asking what I was painting (I said undead), and if I was looking at getting any other miniatures.  I sort of laughed and said no, I had plenty to keep me going.  He asked what I was interested in, and I had to just say, “I’ve been painting for over 20 years, with some breaks, I’m really not into playing, just painting the miniatures”.

It was a number I plucked out of the air (20 years), but it turns out it was pretty accurate.  Started when I was 14ish, which makes it 23 years.  I’ve probably been painting for longer than the shop assistant has been alive.  When I started painting the miniatures were made out of real lead (probably).

So anyway, didn’t manage to get any painting done this evening but I did end up finding a lot of miniatures I’d forgotten about, and did some web geekery, so yeh, pretty happy.