More Statistics
Mar 06
Posted: under General.
Just in case this bores you at all, I’ll move across the numbers quickly and just get to a few observations.
Business is good. Isn’t it always though? I keep on growing here, and that’s great. It basically boils down to this. There was a huge jump all around from December to January. Uniques, page views, search engine hits, and spammers were all up. Going from January to February, there is an insignificant change in uniques, yet page views jumped astronomically while search engine hits fell a bit and fortunately spammers cooled off a tad as well (though now I’m getting trackback spam, which blacklist cannot handle. It’s too bad because I don’t use trackback anyways….I’m working on turning it off.). Seeing as though it was a slow posting month and also as though I really didn’t visit anyone else’s blog or use BE at all, I’d say it didn’t turn out too badly.
When I determine how the spammer’s are doing I look directly at how many hits are registered directly to the cgi file that handles comments (and also the cgi file that serves up my security code). Most real people don’t view my site by punching directly into there….that would be like using google by typing in the actual search paramters in your address bar (except worse because the comments aren’t the real meat of the site). No one really does it. Minus trackback spam, I actually had 0 actual comment spams last month. This is all thanks to my security code. I have actually had a handful of spams ( < 10) get through since I put it up back in November. These must have been entered by hand, which no true spammer likes to do of course 
. It’s possible as well that blacklist picked some off that got through the code in the last month. I haven’t checked the log.
Of course the hugely increased page views started happening about the time Milenka left….everyone wanted to know what was going on.
I originally put the counter on the bottom of the sidebar because a) I thought someone might find it interesting and b) I’d seen counters on other sites I’d been too and they would often only have a few thousand hits after 8 or 10 months of being up. I thought hey, I can outdo that…. I’m not sure if it’s showing a better or worse picture of how many people are actually showing up…it shows page views and not uniques, but then again I think it’s better at filtering out bots and the like since I can’t properly tweek AWStats to do so.
I feel good about where I’m at. I have every reason to believe that between 50 and 100 real people actually show up every day. How many are regulars I have no idea. I’m sure many are from search engines and never come back, but that’s OK too really. At any rate, I feel like a reasonable number of people show up and I don’t feel any particular urge to even try to increase traffic (but I know I will here soon…. )
Perhaps just a importantly, I think I might have my own people. Most of my initial traffic came from Milenka’s site and people I knew through Milenka. These are Milenka’s people. They’re really our people I guess though. At any rate, I was looking for my own people. I think you’re out there. I suspect as much anyways. Finally.
Also worth noting is that next Saturday is the 1 year anniversary of the first post here. You may notice the archives go back further. That’s due to me importing all of my entries from a previous blog. There really aren’t that many of them and I lost the pictures so some of them really don’t look quite right anyways.. For that month, I had about as many uniques as I get a day now. We’ve grown a touch
