Here are the monthly highlights for christian-sauve.com:
1. Mmm. Numbers…
My prickly "Urchin" web stats engine tells me that…
Report for: christian-sauve.com, July 2005 Total Visitors 6,564 Total Pageviews 14,774 (Corrected Total: 9,388) Total Hits 16,738 Total Bytes Transferred 382.2MB Average Visitors Per Day 211.74 Average Pageviews Per Day 476.58 (Corrected Average: 302.8) Average Hits Per Day 539.93
The "corrected" numbers take out the CSS, robots.txt, PDFs, mis-filed graphic files (ICO, GIF, JPG) and other non-public files mistakenly considered "pages" by the statistics pre-digestion engine. All results are a bit lower than last month, which isn’t unexpected or abnormal given the summer.
In any case, our top ten most popular pages are
/index.html 440 /texts/free-movie-tickets.htm 277 /reviews.html 202 /texts/worldcon-2004-noreascon4.htm 158 /reviews/movies-2001.htm 142 /about.html 133 /texts/100films.htm 127 /search.html 123 /reviews/movies-2002.htm 120 /links.html 119
Few changes this month. Movie material continues to be a top draw.
If you care about such things, (who would not?), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors, last month’s results in parentheses):
Explorer|6 2499 (2988)Netscape|6 1985 (1568)Netscape|4 519 (401)Googlebot|2 344 (555)Explorer|5 307 (352)
Argh. Netscape|4 still there. Netscape|6 (FireFox) is on the rise, though…
2. Where do these people come from?
Our top five sources of referrals (in visitors) were
google.com/search 1092 (1307) www.google.ca/search 204 (343) google.co.uk/search 125 (148) yahoo.com/search 88 (95) google.com.au/search 58 (New)
Not much change here. Google-England replaces Google-India in the Top-5. The usual summer decrease in hits from search engines.
Two new link this month: Someone using my review of one of The Onion’s collections to "prove" that an article had appeared on the site previously. Not particularly interesting, but you can check it out at www.hyperorg.com/blogger/ mtarchive/004210.html
The other new link is short but very very sweet: yetikeeper.stumbleupon.com gives a thumbs-up to christian-sauve.com and adds "Solid reviews on a variety of books." Whee!
(There was also a whole new slew of spamming sites, but there’s no point in listing those, isn’t it?)
3. Ohh! Visitor comments!
It’s summer. People are doing off-line things. One loose message gently floats down from our upturned mailbox.
1. I was amused at the directness of this message (from a Greek visitor, using a German email provider, asking a Canadian about "foreign" movies… proving that globalization never ceases to amaze.)
i am looking for goddamned foreign films…..any suggestions????.!!
Here’s the answer I sent back:
I should start by saying that your definition of ‘foreign’ is likely to be different from mine. Possibilities in Ottawa, Canada may not be valid in your city. This being said, here are a few more suggestions in increasing order of difficulty/cost:
1. Television: I’m always surprised at what plays on TV late late at night. Scour your weekly schedule (on-line versions can be searched), learn to program your VCR and you could net at least two or three foreign movies per week.
2. Your usual video store: We North-Americans always complain about the Blockbuster chain and its bland selection of mass-market films (though things a slightly more adventurous in Canada than in the US, I gather), but it usually has a small but interesting selection of big foreign hits and current foreign releases.
3. Unusual video stores: Big cities often have specialty shops catering to the city’s ethnic communities. Those stores often carry a selection of video titles to rent, though this may not be obvious from the storefront. Ottawa, for instance, has a number of small Chinese, Philipinese, Lebanese or Indian stores where it’s possible to get foreign movies sub-titled in English. Also have a look at comic or gaming stores (another ethnic community, one may say), which often carry a good selection of anime films or Chinese/Japanese action movies.
4. Online shops: Yes, everything can be ordered up online, should you be willing to pay and put up with possible DVD-Region issues. Pay particular attention to the possibility that an online retailer in your country may specialize in imports, and deal with the customs/taxes/DVD-Region issues for you.
5. Travel! Expensive, but hey –sometimes you just have to do shopping by yourself.
I’m purposefully leaving off on-line file sharing from this list. Its legality is dubious, the payoff is low and the quality often execrable. Plus, I figure that other people have a lot more experience with it than I have.
In some ways, on-line file sharing is eroding many of the artificial market restrictions imposed by studios. (I ended up buying a copy of the only film I downloaded illegally, EQUILIBRIUM, and that was because it was never released theatrically in Canada) This, however, doesn’t make it any more justifiable from a copyright point of view.
If, however, you were looking for foreign movies literally damned by God, I’m afraid you’re going to have to ask him directly for the list.
4. Search Queries Oddities
(This being the section in which we take a look at the search engine queries used by various visitors to find christian-sauve.com)
Here are our top-ten queries:
>amazon isbn 11 >solaris explanation 10 >good movies list 8 >frank camper 8 >roderick thorp 6 >advance movie screenings 6 >free movie screenings 5 >list of good films 5 >advance screenings 5 >movie test screenings 5
Not much to say here.
>aftertaste of eating in a christian context
Too easy!
>battlefield earth is utter cinematic tripe
I am proud and honoured to show up whenever this query is typed into Google.
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.