Web Site Report - June 2008

2008, Christian Sauve

Ready for another look at the hum-drum routine of an obscure 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, June 2008
  Total Visitors     9,551  
  Total Pageviews    21,805  
    (Corrected total  13,651)
  Total Hits    24,889  
  Total Bytes Transferred   521.6MB  
  Average Visitors Per Day   318.36  
  Average Pageviews Per Day   726.83  
    (Corrected average      455)
  Average Hits Per Day   829.63

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 numbers are lower than last month, which I blame on the end of the school year.

Ever-gloomier Google Analytics puts the monthly result at 886 visits and 1563 page views, both lower numbers than last month. Damn your more accurate algorithms, Google!

 

According to Urchin, our top ten most popular pages are 

/index.html                         820
/texts/free-movie-tickets.htm       424
/texts/solaris-explanation.htm      212
/reviews.html                       192
/about.html                         149
/reviews/index.html                 147
/texts/worldcon-2004-noreascon4.htm 140
/writings.html                      129
/links.html                         125
/ct.html                            124

No changes here. Meanwhile, Google Analytics says...

1. /reviews.html 262
2. /texts/solaris-explanation.htm 128
3. /index.html 110
4. /reviews/index.htm 47
5. /francais/index.html 38
6. /reviews/movies/1980s.htm 29
7. /reviews/1999/books99f.htm 27
8. /reviews/2003/books03k.htm 25
9. /reviews/2004/reviews-2004-08august.html 23
10. /texts/100films.htm 23

...which is roughly consistent with last month's results except for the index slipping in third place.

 

If you care about such things, (and who would not?), here's a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

  Browser This Month Last Month
1 IE 7.0 345 338
2. Firefox 262 288
3 IE 6.0 158 178

 

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Urchin, our top five sources of referrals (in visitors) were

google.com/search     830 (869)
live.com/results.aspx 182 (78)
www.google.ca/search  132 (199)
google.co.uk/search   72  (68)
google.com/books      49  (57)

As you may expect by now, Google Analytics has a slightly different view of the situation:

  Source This Month Last Month
1. google / organic 621 667
2. yahoo / organic 27 38
3. aol.com / organic 12 (new)
4. books.google.com / referral 6 (new)
5. live / organic 6 (new)

(Lingo key: "Organic" is Google's way of saying that no one has paid for links leading back to christian-sauve.com on those search engines. "Referral" is supposed to be a direct link to this site.)

There were no other new links this month.

 

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

This was a month for gratuitous abuse in the christian-sauve.com mailbox.

Oh, the news weren't all bad: I received a kind word from a Swedish blogger I've been reading for a while. While his request to have a look at his sites comes a bit late (I've been doing that for a year, now), it was a thrill to see a well-known name in my mailbox.

There was also a very nice inquiry regarding Flash-based design work, which obviously must have gone to the wrong Christian Sauvé given how this site is a living monument to my willful lack of Flash expertise.

But as for the rest of the month, oooh...

First, there was the automated spam: one-and-a-half message per day, all blindly trying to stuff Google with links to their dubious pharmaceutical come-ons.

Second, there was the targeted spam: an author sending me barely-literate copypasta promoting the so-called publication of his latest at a vanity print-on-demand publisher. Twice. No, thanks.

Then, there was the usual hit-and-run complaint from an anonymous but disappointed reader, which I'll quote verbatim:

dale browns tin man doesn't seem so outlandish 10 years later maybe he did something called research those 10 years ago into future weapons systems. every toy in his books is at least under study and or development and feasible sometime down the road they break no laws of physics so maybe you guys need to do some research into a subject called physics

(Those who remember my review of Dale Brown's The Tin Man may be puzzled as they remember that I actually spend very little time discussing plausibility issues versus the novel's more basic storytelling flaws. But this isn't the first time that a midly positive review of a conservative thriller has earned me some puzzling flack from fans. I almost wonder if it's got something to do with the people most likely to read conservative thrillers.)

Finally, there was the succinct but mystifying:

You're an idiot.

which doesn't give me much to improve upon.

 

4. Search Queries Oddities

According to Google Analytics, here are the month's most popular search keywords:

  Keywords Visits
1 solaris explained 22
2 solaris ending 14
3 solaris explanation 13
4 langford space eater novel reviews 11
5 tia layne 11
6 christian sauve 9
7 christian sauvé 9
8 glenn kleier 8
9 solaris movie synopsis 7
10 solaris movie ending 5

SOLARIS, still confusing people after all these years...

 

Other amusing search keywords:

 

Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain... obsessed by web statistics.