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, April 2006 Total Visitors: 8,739 Total Pageviews: 29,986 (Corrected Total: 15,287) Total Hits: 38,861 Total Bytes Transferred: 836.2MB Average Visitors Per Day: 291.3 Average Pageviews Per Day: 999.53 (Corrected Average: 509.6) Average Hits Per Day: 1,295.36
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 higher than last month; see below for reasons why.
Our top ten most popular pages are:
christian-sauve.com/index.html 910 christian-sauve.com/texts/free-movie-tickets.htm 363 christian-sauve.com/texts/solaris-explanation.htm 272 christian-sauve.com/texts/worldcon-2004-noreascon4.htm 246 christian-sauve.com/reviews/2006/...02february.html 225 christian-sauve.com/reviews.html 186 christian-sauve.com/about.html 179 christian-sauve.com/texts/100films.htm 134 christian-sauve.com/texts/worldcon-2003.htm 133 christian-sauve.com/links.html 132
Few changes this month, except for the unusually high ranking of reviews from February 2006 (see below). Movie material continues to be a top draw. The Solaris Explained page got a predictable boost from SOLARIS showing on IFC this month.
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 4259 (5774) Explorer|6 2721 (2244) Explorer|5 380 (new) msnbot|1 304 (245) msnbot|0 234 (new)
Hmmm… a lot of msnbot, not much Googlebot.
2. Where do these people come from?
Our top five sources of referrals (in visitors) were
google.com/search 847 (791) www.google.ca/search 217 (228) google.co.uk/search 171 (75) google.com/imgres 135 (new) ask.com/web 81 (new)
This being said, the real links story is to be found lower down the list. Thanks to the Technorati visibility of my blogging at fractale-framboise.com, two authors followed the links and found "translated" version of my reviews that they could understand. (They’re entirely different reviews, damnit, but I’m not bitter.)
This led Tobias Buckell (great guy; met him on April 1st at Toronto’s Ad Astra convention) to mention my review at www.tobiasbuckell.com/wordpress/?p=2133 which follows-up on the original message at www.tobiasbuckell.com/wordpress/?p=2112 :
The group blog Fractale Framboise has a review of Crystal Rain up by Christian Sauve (sorry I can’t get the accent over the e there, I can’t seem to find the HTML code on hand quickly) who I was lucky enough to meet in Toronto this weekend. Based on his comments there and on this blog he seems to have liked the book.
I just like that the review is in French.
A similar process of link-following from Fractale Framboise to here led John Scalzi to my review of The Ghost Brigades, which ended more or less on
When will Scalzi try his hand at a more ambitious project? As coldbloodedly professional as he appears to be in his approach to his career, I doubt that he will suddenly drop everything else to produce an insanely ambitious 500-page work of art ready to challenge, say, Ian McDonald’s River of Gods. But I wonder.
This led to Scalzi commenting (at length) my musings on his next projects as a weblog entry at scalzi.com/whatever/004149.html
But in response to Sauve’s question: The direct answer to his question is "soon," although soon in publishing is not the same as "soon" in the real world, since the project I’m thinking of has yet to be written and won’t see the light of the bookstore until late 2007 at the earliest.
I had the good luck of seeing Scalzi mention my review right after another (more severe) review of Ghost Brigades, with the lucky consequence that Scalzi’s commenters spent more time discussing the "bad" review than taking mine apart. Whew!
But just to show that one can never completely escape third-generation commentary, another blog at mrissa.livejournal.com/276953.html summed up my final questions as…
someone was saying they were wondering when [Scalzi would] do something ambitious
…and then grabbed the ball as the kernel of a rant on how YA writing is not unambitious at all. Well, yes. But seeing my review making a small splash in the blogosphere is what fascinates me most of all.
This ripple-effect ended up making me wonder how many cumulative hours of worldwide productivity I ended up consuming that particular day. It’s one thing to waste my evenings writing reviews… it’s another to realize that other people are spending time reading and responding. I feel guilty –but only slightly.
No other links were discovered this month… but that’s more than enough already.
3. Ohh! Visitor comments!
One general-interest message in my mailbox this month. Here it is:
1. After reading my review of Airforce One is Haunted, in which I wondered what had happened to author Robert Serling, an anonymous but helpful visitor wrote to say…
Author Robert J. Serling is alive and well and currently resides in Arizona.
(The review was duly annotated.)
…and that’s it.
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 explained 41 solaris explanation 39 good films 18 christian sauve 16 solaris ending 15 free movie screenings 15 advance screenings 9 sauve 9 being canadian 9 solaris film explanation 9
As mentioned previously, the Independent Film Channel showed SOLARIS in April 2006. You can imagine how my "Solaris Explained" page got popular all of a sudden.
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.