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, December 2005 Total Visitors: 5,704 Total Pageviews: 11,843 (Corrected Total: 8,047) Total Hits: 13,217 Total Bytes Transferred: 280.0MB Average Visitors Per Day: 196.68 Average Pageviews Per Day: 408.4 (Corrected Average: 259.6) Average Hits Per Day: 455.75
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 significantly lower than last month: December holidays, plus three-and-a-half days of missing logs. (Grrr.)
Our top ten most popular pages are
christian-sauve.com/index.html 345 christian-sauve.com/texts/free-movie-tickets.htm 195 christian-sauve.com/texts/worldcon-2004-noreascon4.htm 136 christian-sauve.com/texts/solaris-explanation.htm 128 christian-sauve.com/reviews.html 122 christian-sauve.com/about.html 107 christian-sauve.com/texts/summer-films1999a.htm 106 christian-sauve.com/reviews/movies-2001.htm 100 christian-sauve.com/reviews/movies-2004.htm 94 christian-sauve.com/reviews/index.html 93
Few changes this month. Movie material continues to be a top draw.
If you care about such things, (and who would not?), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors, last month’s results in parentheses):
Netscape|6 2179 (2618) Explorer|6 1732 (2324) Googlebot|2 304 (411) Netscape|4 304 (364) Explorer|5 255 (New)
This is the first month that Netscape|6 has so distinctly pulled ahead of Explorer|6.
2. Where do these people come from?
Our top five sources of referrals (in visitors) were
google.com/search 656 (733) www.google.ca/search 172 (225) google.co.uk/search 64 (83) yahoo.com/search 60 (77) ask.com/web 58 (69)
No new links this month.
3. Ohh! Visitor comments!
Rummaging through our mailbox, we see…
1. James from Michigan is puzzled:
I’ve only been reading "real" sci fi for about 4 years, and clearly have a long way to go before I could call myself a well-read sci fi geek. On many of these topics I simply haven’t read the books in question…yet. (…) My question involves your praise of the book Red Mars. Currently I’m struggling through it and find it well, just a little boring. Its exposition seems long winded, its description Tolkeinesque. I’m aware that not all books are gonna speed along like early Phillip K. Dick but this seems to go on and on. I’ve considered the possiblity that I haven’t developed enough as a reader but I devoured Dune and loved it. What are your thoughts?
Exerpts from my reply:
I wish I would answer something more interesting than "well, tastes differ", but that’s what the next few lines will eventually suggest.
I find it appropriate that you’re using the term "Tolkienesque" given how many readers love Tolkien, even as a number of other readers (myself included), were exasperated by the wordiness of his prose. Is Red Mars any snappier? Hardly. But by combining careful writing with the breadth of details (both scientific and social) that became mandatory for large-scale SF extrapolation, Red Mars crystallized a lot of what SF wanted to become in the nineties. Its importance as a piece of SF is unarguable. But, as you have found out, so is its length!
I won’t argue that the book is long. But I may argue that I liked Red Mars (and the rest of the trilogy) for those interminable details, for the "sense of place" (and time, and society) that Robinson was able to create. Tapestry of the future and all that, which may not fascinate other readers as much. Personal preferences definitely apply: I may not care too much about the trivia of a fantasy middle-earth, but give me a solid picture of the future and I’ll sit in place for a while. Robinson managed to hit "that spot" and I happily followed along.
(…) I used to place a lot of faith in my eventual development as a reader, only to find that I didn’t like Ursula K. LeGuin ten years ago, and I still don’t today.
(…) Don’t worry about it. Don’t like Robinson? It happens. You’re not alone! Hop on to the next author. It’s a good thing that you’re planning to read a lot more SF: some of it will stick and some won’t. Get ahold of the Hugo Winners (the real list, not my "Alternate Hugos" remix) and make your way through the books, good and bad. The genre is big enough to accomodate all sorts of readers.
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:
>solaris explanation x21 >solaris explained x13 >being canadian x9 >free movie screenings x9 >advance movie screenings x9 >advance screenings x9 >good films x8 >christian sauve x6 >amazon isbn x5 >solaris ending x5
Not much to say here.
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.