Blog Statistics
Thursday, November 30, 2006
I try to not get too caught up in the "readership analysis" sort of
stuff with my blog. Blog numbers are always hard to measure because so
many people use RSS aggregators to read blog feeds and don't actually
visit the blog's pages very often. So, it's always hard to know
whether your page count numbers are representative of your total
readership or whether they are just representative of that portion of
your readers who aren't technical enough to have
caught on to the idea of how best to read blogs using RSS feeds. ;-) However, it is interesting to sometimes look at
the numbers and usage patterns just to get an idea of what people are
interested in. My stats for November did show a few surprising things
though.
First of all, the daily usage graph was pretty easy to figure
out:
Those peaks during the month pretty much correspond to my blog
posts for November:
- Nov 6: Summary of lispvan October meeting - The PLT Scheme Inference Collection
- Nov 12: Minimal .emacs for Win32
- Nov 15: We'll always have Emacs
- Nov 19: Black Hat and White Hat Hacking with Lisp
- Nov 22: Macro Stepper for DrScheme
- Nov 29: SBCL 1.0
It shows that most of the referrers are other blog posts of mine (which makes sense as I link to my own posts a lot). The other main referrers are Planet Lisp, Reddit, and Google (which is also understandable).
However, when I look at the main search strings that lead people to my site from Google search this past month, that's where I have some problems understanding the numbers:
| Top 20 of 2566 Total Search Strings | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| # | Hits | Search String | |
| 1 | 94 | 2.24% | debug site:bc.tech.coop/blog |
| 2 | 72 | 1.72% | bill clementson |
| 3 | 52 | 1.24% | kids in africa |
| 4 | 51 | 1.21% | starving kids |
| 5 | 39 | 0.93% | emacs site:bc.tech.coop/blog |
| 6 | 34 | 0.81% | lisp success stories |
| 7 | 32 | 0.76% | tech coop |
| 8 | 29 | 0.69% | video site:bc.tech.coop/blog |
| 9 | 27 | 0.64% | starving kids in africa |
| 10 | 24 | 0.57% | coop tech |
| 11 | 20 | 0.48% | slime tutorial |
| 12 | 19 | 0.45% | starving children in africa |
| 13 | 18 | 0.43% | san francisco |
| 14 | 17 | 0.40% | firefox emacs |
| 15 | 16 | 0.38% | bill clementson blog |
| 16 | 15 | 0.36% | lisp is the red pill |
| 17 | 15 | 0.36% | parallel lisp |
| 18 | 14 | 0.33% | emacs gmail |
| 19 | 14 | 0.33% | java lisp |
| 20 | 14 | 0.33% | termite scheme |
Ok, some of the search strings seem reasonable. For example, I've done a lot of posts on concurrency and lisp, so "parallel lisp" and "termite scheme" seem like reasonable top hits. And, debugging in lisp is always a topic that people seem interested in. However, there are 4 different search strings that relate to "starving kids in africa". I did one post (on Christmas Eve, 2004) on that topic and it is an issue that I feel strongly about; however, I wouldn't think that my blog (and a post that is 2 years old!) would be the one that people would go to for that type of search!
Another interesting statistic relates to the browser that people use to read my blog:
| Top 15 of 623 Total User Agents | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| # | Hits | User Agent | |
| 1 | 589847 | 71.66% | Mozilla/5.0 |
| 2 | 90599 | 11.01% | MSIE 6.0 |
| 3 | 28265 | 3.43% | MSIE 7.0 |
| 4 | 10413 | 1.27% | Googlebot/2.1 |
| 5 | 9062 | 1.10% | Opera 9.0 |
| 6 | 6529 | 0.79% | msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) |
| 7 | 5998 | 0.73% | AppleSyndication/54 |
| 8 | 4538 | 0.55% | NetNewsWire/2.1 (Mac OS X; http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/) |
| 9 | 4284 | 0.52% | Yahoo! Slurp |
| 10 | 2840 | 0.35% | NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; 43 subscribers) |
| 11 | 2503 | 0.30% | Konqueror/3.5 |
| 12 | 2127 | 0.26% | Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html) |
| 13 | 2121 | 0.26% | msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) |
| 14 | 2021 | 0.25% | Accoona-AI-Agent/1.1.2 (aicrawler at accoonabot dot com) |
| 15 | 1835 | 0.22% | Vienna/2.1.0.2108 |
It looks like Mozilla/Firefox is the browser of choice for discerning blog readers. :-)
