Ready for another look at the hum-drum routine of a practically unknown web site? 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, November 2006 Total Visitors: 8,435 Total Pageviews: 18,688 (Corrected Total: 10,857) Total Hits: 22,423 Total Bytes Transferred: 489.1MB Average Visitors Per Day: 281.16 Average Pageviews Per Day: 622.93 (Corrected Average: 361.9) Average Hits Per Day: 747.43
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 higher than last month.
Our top ten most popular pages are:
/index.html 547 /texts/free-movie-tickets.htm 261 /about.html 234 /texts/worldcon-2004-noreascon4.htm 208 /reviews/2006/reviews-2006-09sep... 197 /reviews.html 192 /novel/index.html 125 /reviews/movies-2001.htm 120 /reviews/movies-2002.htm 117 /texts/solaris-explanation.htm 117
Two changes worth noticing this month. The novel/index file is my daily NaNoWriMo blog, which apparently found a modest audience. The surprising inclusion of last September’s reviews will be explained later, as proof that controversy works well in attracting hits, even though the trade-off is being dismissed as offensive.
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 3994 (3804) Explorer|6 2281 (2751) Explorer|5 399 (339) msnbot|1 360 (318) Netscape|2 284 (new)
As dismayed as I am with the presence of Netscape|2 on the list, I note with some satisfaction that Internet Explorer 7 is closely behind with 214 visitors.
2. Where do these people come from?
Our top five sources of referrals (in visitors) were
google.com/search 1089 (1052) www.google.ca/search 338 (337) google.co.uk/search 125 (101) yahoo.com/search/images/view 69 (new) www.google.fr/search 63 (new)
Not much change there, though I will have to see how to block Yahoo’s Image Search Bot from indexing them: I have no problem with the concept of image search, but it usually means more hotlinking attempts by clueless bloggers.
This being said, there were at least two high-profile links to my September Book reviews this month:
First, Jo Walton read my review of her latest Farthing and linked to it from her blog, saying "Christian Sauve is fairly positive with reservations and clearly also knows fewer gay people than I do." Well, true. Her commenters, on the other hand, weren’t so kind… but dozens of them came to visit.
The second case is more interesting. First, I started noticing a fair number of page requests coming from a forum at bksp.org. Going back to check the referring page was impossible: bksp.org is a gated writer’s community that requires members to pay $30US/year in order to access the forums. Digging down in my web log files, I noticed a number of things: First, that the page was pointing to my September 2006 reviews, and that a page request coming from a visitor searching for "phobos ty drago chris" had been made fifteen minutes before the hits started rolling in. Further poking around the bksp.org web site revealed that one of the authors associated with the community was one Ty Drago. Case closed; given that my review was harsh, I can imagine the discussion over there well enough.
Conclusion? A lot more people dislike me now than at the beginning of November. On the other hand –hey, hits!
Much to my surprise, I also found myself cited as an authority on the otherwise impeccable Wikipedia page for Robert James Baker. Yes, it’s true: some people put anything as a reference on Wikipedia.
3. Ohh! Visitor comments!
I blocked the spam messages that so perstered me in October and enjoyed the underrated bliss of a mostly-empty mailbox in November. My own test messages outnumbered the rest. And yet…
1. For perhaps the first time ever, I took the decision not to answer a message. It came in broken French and its nonsensical content (asking me for a "great producer") simply triggered my Nigerian-scam alert. A further Google search for the email address did nothing to deactivate my alarm.
2. Another first: I received a message about my explanation of SOLARIS (2002) not thanking me for the walkthrough, but taking me to task for not noticing a detail. I still haven’t had time to check said detail (believe me, every day not spent watching SOLARIS is a day filled with happiness or, at the very least, two extra hours), but I included the detail in my explanation the hope that it can be useful to someone else.
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:
samantha ivers nude 21 free movie screenings 19 christian sauve 14 solaris explained 14 being canadian 12 billy madison movie script 11 free movie premiere tickets 11 advance screenings 10 sauve 10 solaris explanation 10
I don’t write’em, I just see’em.
The world’s infatuation with a hypothetically-nude Smatha Ivers continues unabated. Having seen INSIDE MAN, I can understand… but would it be possible not to look for it on my site, please?
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.