1. Mmm. Numbers…

According to Google Analytics, the crucial metrics for the month are…

Good news all around; even the increased Bounce Rate and lower Pages/Visits is indicative of more visitors via the search engine.

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:

Harrumph.  I was about to joke that the decrease in activity must be because of fewer spammers, but as a matter of fact June has been a quiet month on the spam front.

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

Solaris-explained appears unkillable at the top of the ranking, although the more interesting entry here is the review of “Nest of Spies”, given the media attention given to the authors following this month’s back-to-back interest in foreign spying in Canada and G20 security.

Since I know you care, here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

Stability and good news at the same time.

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(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.)

Anyone doubting that the increase in this month’s numbers came mostly from Google indexing the new XML sitemap should take a look at the table above.

Google now gives 12,800 results for “Christian Sauvé”, up sharply from last time I checked. Somehow, christian-sauve.com went back on top of the results after a few humiliating weeks spent in #2 after a Facebook page. I’m thinking that the raft of updates to the site over the last week of June had something to do with this.

3. Ohhh! Visitor comments!

Not much spam, but the ones I got were from “ethical SEOs” (ah-ah-ah) trying to send me to the top of the search rankings.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

My amazing powers of deduction tell me that Solaris was shown at least once on a popular TV channel somewhere in the anglosphere in June. Maybe it would be more interesting to show you the 11-20 spots from now on.

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:

• i dont get solaris movie
• la vie exemplaire et héroïque de l’employé de bureau
• search babylon web vache

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

1. Mmm. Numbers…

According to Google Analytics, the crucial metrics for the month are…

Generally lower results.  Oh, well.

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:

Ha!  You liiie, Google.

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

Pretty much the same old stuff, although this is the last time you will see a good-old .htm file here, as I wiped out the remainder of the old static site while cleaning up the site during the month.  (I also made other changes, including an automated site-map, that should prove significant over the next months.)

Since I know you care, here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

Chrome in fourth place, IE7 on its way out… everything is going according to plan.

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(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.)

Google has started indexing more pages from the site, no doubt prompted by my new automated site-map.  This should drive search referrals up in the next few months.

The one significant Google-egosurfing event of the month is that for the first time in a decade, christian-sauve.com is not the first result for “Christian Sauvé”, having been replaced by (ack, ptui!) a Facebook page.  In identity-theft terms, though, I consider this to be excellent news.  Heh-heh-heh…

3. Ohhh! Visitor comments!

Not as much spam as I used to get, (I made a few changes that should keep me mostly-spamless for a few weeks/months) although reader “Mike” took pity on me and sent me Monty Python’s Spam song to offset that gaping void in my life.  You’re evil, Mike.  Don’t change.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

More Solaris… sigh.  On the other hand, “adam roberts gradisil sauve” makes me giggle, because I really, really, really didn’t like that novel, and it looks as if someone noticed.

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:

• “she’s turning into a tree”
• christian sauvé pavé
• the adrenaline rush while writing a novel
• what is the movie called where the guy eats mcdonalds for thirty days straight

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

1. Mmm. Numbers…

According to Google Analytics, the crucial metrics for the month are…

Mixed results all around.

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:

Significantly down. Ah, well.

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

Again: Interesting mixture of specific articles and top-level pages here, even though I wish the index would be ranked higher than the Solaris Explained article.

If you care about such things, (and even if you don’t Microsoft does), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

Not only has Chrome gone back to fifth place (with IE6 a distant sixth place), but Safari beats out IE7 this month!

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(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.)

Google results for “Christian Sauvé” were up slightly this month, with no new noticeable links.

3. Ohhh! Visitor comments!

As usual, Spaaaaam.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

A bit dull, really.  Using my divination powers, I see that Solaris has been broadcast at least once on network TV this month.

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords: (Warning: Pretty dull month)

• caucasian view on quebec referendum
• is anthony bourdain christian
• is michael pollan a christian

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

1. Mmm. Numbers…

According to Google Analytics, the crucial metrics for the month are…

Mixed results all around.

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:

More mixed results.

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

Again: Interesting mixture of specific articles and top-level pages here, even though I wish the index would be ranked higher than the Solaris Explained article.

If you care about such things, (and let’s face it, few people do), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

Oh no!  IE 6.0 beat Chrome by three lousy points to take the fifth spot!  Die, IE6, die!

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(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.)

Google results for “Christian Sauvé” were up slightly this month, with no new noticeable links.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

Like usual, Spaaaaam.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

Well, ignoring the result at #7 (which is me testing a few things), at least it’s not all-Solaris-all-the-time this month. #6 is apparently explained by a YouTube comment telling people to search exactly for that string to understand Solaris.

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:

• i need to read the epilogue of the fifth horseman
• was there a quote in the demon in the freezer in section 4
• what factors led to canadian confederation and why didn’t all north american british colonies join at first?
• what happened at the end of solaris movie
• what happens at the end of solaris film
• what is the american holocaust in the dale brown books
• what is the ending of solaris
• what is the main idea of freakonomics by stephen j. levitt and stephen j. dubner using steps
• what is the name of the movie that has a man who cheats on his wife and then is forced with things to do to get his kidnapped daughter back
• what is written on the side of the cheese monkey good is dead
• what were surgeries like before laser surgery was invented

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

1. Mmm. Numbers…

According to Google Analytics, the crucial metrics for the month are…

Yikes, even the relative numbers are worse.

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:

No doubt about it; numbers are lower.

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

Interesting mixture of specific articles and top-level pages here, even though I wish the index would be ranked higher than the Solaris Explained article.

If you care about such things, (and let’s face it, few people do), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

This faint cheering you’re hearing is me, celebrating the fact that for the first time in almost a decade, IE6 is not in the top-5 any more. Hurrah!

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(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.)

Google results for “Christian Sauvé” were up slightly this month, with no new noticeable links.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

Spaaaaam.

And that, again, is pretty much the total for the month.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

The usual Solaris stuff, plus an amusing surprise at #8 (amusing, because it’s a direct link to an exasperated review of a book I wanted to like.)

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:

• “killing lizards” utah
• all there is to know about being canadian
• are levitt and dubner really qualified?
• christians operating on deadly grounds
• essay on why i love being canadian
• jude law/robert downey slash fiction
• mark wahlberg science fiction book astronauts return to homosexual population
• sauve & debonair clothing inc
• what happened at the end of solaris movie ending explain
• what happens at the end of solaris movie
• what happens at the end of the movie solaris
• what is the movie solaris ending about

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

1. Mmm. Numbers…

According to Google Analytics, the crucial metrics for the month are…

Generally stable, then.

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:

Strange, isn’t it?  Could this possibly be something explained by spam?  Well, yes: A tiny number of visitors hammering comment spam will do that to web statistics.  Moving on…

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

This may not be obvious at first glance, but these results are solidly better than last month in that they show the consolidation (via clever redirects in early January) of old template content with new, with the notable exception of the Solaris Explained article..

If you care about such things, (and even if you don’t, I do!), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

Chrome is is close sixth place, seven visitors away from overtaking IE6.

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(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.)

The hits coming from carnavalboreal2010.com are the consequence of a one-time virtual event.

Google results for “Christian Sauvé” were up slightly this month, with no new noticeable links.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

Spaaaaam.

And that’s pretty much the total for the month.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

Not many surprises here.

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:

• i hope that doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone with a limited quantity of knowledge and a “necessary” attitude. although separation of a whole into different kinds of parts (i.e. different people) can lead to that attitude of a helpful reminder; some of the questions levitt and dubner study felt brilliant and then okay to me(but there are also some things talked about in the book that are really good).
• jet li slash fanfic
• christian hugo winners
• i dont understand the film solaris 2002
• saving private ryan slash fanfiction

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

1. Mmm. Numbers…

According to Google Analytics, the crucial metrics for the month are…

The number look better, but there’s something wrong with them.  Keep reading to find out what.

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:

Definitely something wrong; my site just isn’t that popular.  Keep reading for the answer.

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

Not too bad, although I wish the Solaris article didn’t outrank my index page. (Google tells me there was a hug spike on December 20th, probably due to another network TV showing of the film.)

But the answer to the grossly overinflated page view numbers are to be found in the unfiltered Urchin stats, which tell me that my Mimic review has been requested 2,519 times, that my Post Grad review has been seen 279 times and other bizarre results: Simply put, I got hammered by spammers.  Which I could tell from the spam itself.

If you care about such things, (and even if you don’t, I do!), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

What you’re not seeing is that Chrome is within 25 points of taking over IE6 in 5th place.

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(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.)

The hits coming from alecospapadatos.blogspot.com are consequence of a mention of my review of Logicomix.

Google now lists about 13,700 links for “Christian Sauvé”, down from last month by almost a third, although at those numbers it doesn’t mean a lot.

According to Google Alerts, there weren’t any new major links this month.  A lot of blog-spam, but no new links worth investigating.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

Guess what?  A lot of spam.

Much of the spam comes in as blog post comments, by the truckload.  Much of it can be scapped without a moment’s thought, being identical and making no pretence at being anything but spam.  But from time to time, spammer get craftier.  Consider this:

I want to quote your post in my blog. It can? And you et an account on Twitter?

Intriguing… except that the attached link to a Twitter-spam blog, and that a quick search on “And you et an account” nets hundreds of identical results.  Deleted, mister spammer –you idiot.

There there are the people leaving asinine content-free comments in the hope of getting a link back to their site.  Not gonna happen!

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

So, yeah.  Solaris.

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:

• “black actresses” and danger in action movies action movies for
• drop the gun! and you, santa, drop the elephant” 2003 comedy
• what is in gordons room? solaris
• why are christian movies so bad?

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

7,147

1. Mmm. Numbers…

According to Google Analytics, the crucial metrics for the month are…

Aaah, panic!  All numbers are down! Doom is upon us! What?  It’s just a web site? Well, okay then.

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:

What?  Urchin also agrees that my site is going down?  We’re dooooomed!

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

It’s more and more interesting to see recent individual reviews of topical books rank highly in the top-10.  If I was smart, I’d write even more of them.

If you care about such things, (and even if you don’t, I do!), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

IE8 takes over from IE7 (something I’ve noticed elsewhere as well) and IE6 keeps dropping on.  This is all very sweet.

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(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.)

Google now lists about 17,900 links for “Christian Sauvé”, up from last month. I’m not sure where they all go.

According to Google Alerts, there weren’t any new major links this month.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

Not a whole lot fit to be shared with you, constant reader, in the mailbox this month.  A lot of spam, mostly.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

The “sex hunter” stuff worried me until I realized that all those queries were going to my review of Hunter S. Thompson’s political essay Better than Sex.

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:

• “why be original when you can be good”
• christian sauve facebook
• meow mix tracie thoms
• what is the readership of malicious intent
• what christian has to say about dan brown’s ‘lost symbols’

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

7,147

1. Mmm. Numbers…

According to Google Analytics, the crucial metrics for the month are…

For the second straight month, numbers are generally down from all across the board.  Oh, woe.

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:

Doesn’t look so catastrophic from that angle, so let’s put Urchin and Google in a ring and shout fight! fight! fight!

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

Very nice showing here by Dan Brown. If I learned anything from this, it would be to post more reviews of topical content.  Hmmm…

If you care about such things, (and even if you don’t, I do!), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

Not much movement there. IE8 is now within spitting distance of IE7 and IE6 can’t stop dropping, so there’s hope out there for all of my web designer peeps.

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(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.)

Google now lists about 17,750 links for “Christian Sauvé”, up from last month. Most of that number seems illusory: this site itself only accounts for 6,100 results, and there are less than 1,000 results shown in the paged list.

The big new link of the month is a re-tweet of my review of Logicomix, which was another one of those “I get a Google News Alert of the author’s mention of the review 24 hours after posting the review” deal.

Otherwise, not much.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

This month featured a particularly empty mailbox, except for the spam. Harumph.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

It would worry me witless to think that my site is a source of information about the canadian political/governance system, but I have concluded a while ago that Google is just making things up when it comes to search keywords.  (Well, except for the “christian sauve” searches.  Those are legit, you hear me? Totally legit.)

Assorted popular topics of search keywords this month included Hunter S. Thompson, Dan Brown and his Lost Symbol and the “Nikola Tesla Rockstar Scientist” poster I mentioned in my review of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:

• “bon cop bad cop” slash fanfiction
• “i’m not here to tell you how it ends”
• “love being tortured”
• the 100 most amusingly bad movies ever made
• vancouver terminal yellow mound
• what the hell happened at the end of solaris? movie
• when will mutineer hunter thompson letters be published

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

7,147

1. Mmm. Numbers…

According to Google, the central metrics for the month are…

Most of the numbers are worse.  Oh well…

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:

Well isn’t that just cute: Better numbers all the way down.  Oh, Google, you suck when you tell me bad news.

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

For the first time, dynamic content takes a top spot, with a surprise appearance by a single review.  I never thought I’d say this, but they ya go: Thank you, Dan Brown!

If you care about such things, (and I do!  I do!!), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

Not much movement there.

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(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.)

Google now lists about 17,600 links for “Christian Sauvé”, down almost 1,100 hits from last month.  Most of that number seems illusory (this site itself only accounts for 4,300 results, and there aren’t more than 550 results shown in the paged list.

Now that I have a Google Alert on my name, it’s easier than ever to note the various new links to the site.  Certainly, those alerts have clearly demonstrated how quickly the web can move now that I’m part of the blogosphere: Not much more than 24 hours after posting the review of a particular book, I received a notice that the book’s author had linked back to my site in noting the review.  For those of you taking place at home, it means that the following had occured in barely a day:

• I post a review
• Google indexes review
• (I presume) Google sends an alert to the author
• Author writes, posts mention
• Google indexes mention
• Google sends me an alert

Whew!

Otherwise, those alerts were goodenough to notify me about another Christian Sauvé taking up residence on Facebook, and (probably) another another 15-year-old Christian Sauvé taking up MMA.  Good luck to him… and I hope he grows up to become a feared competitor who will make the name “Christian Sauvé” interchangeable with “fierce fighter”.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

There wasn’t anything in the mailbox this month, but the spam is certainly picking up on the blog.  Most of it is forgettable, but there’s one that I particularly liked:

“Chicken” writes to say

I used to have money but after 6 months of a 10 Roosters per day habit I am now broke

I know it’s spam because I can Google that exact same sentence (and also because it links back to a US chicken fast food chain), but it still made me laugh.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

The christian sauve and solaris stuff I understand; the rest, not so much.  Sometimes, I think of Google Analytics are the brilliant PhD guy who occasionally goes on absinthe benders and ends up ranting profanely about telepath geckos in the middle of his thesis.

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:

• how to build a crate
• big screen vs small screen at ottawa’s world exchange theatre
• poissonnerie christian sauvé
• postmodern struggle in dude wheres my car
• what does dan brown have against christians?

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

7,147

1. Mmm. Numbers…

According to Google, the central metrics for the month are…

The first three numbers are better; the last three are worse.  That’s the way it goes, right?

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:

There’s a little bit of everything here, but compared to last month’s changes, it looks as if everything is stabilizing.  Bandwidth, most notably, seems to have stayed the same.  I expect the next few months to be roughly similar, as I delete more of the old static pages, refine my search engine exclusion directives and start having a presence on blog search engines.

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

There’s a mixture of old-static and new-dynamic content here, which is to be expected as I slowly phase out the old material.

If you care about such things, (and boy it is mesmerizing!), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

Excellent news across the board: Every browser increases its numbers… except for you, IE6.

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(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.)

Urchin, meanwhile, pegs the number of people coming in from bing as being much higher. Eh, who cares: Google remains on top no matter how you slice the data.

Speaking of which, Google now lists about 18,700 links for “Christian Sauvé”, up by almost one order of magnitude from last month. Since my own newly-redesigned site accounts only for 4,000 of those hits, I’m guessing that something has changed in the way Google indexes results.  (In fact, if you try to get to the end of the list, it chokes out at something like 550 entries) There’s little of significance in the new links, although I got name-checked a few times for this I did at or around the Montréal Worldcon.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

Just one tiny whisper of activity in the mailbox this month. Let’s have a look:

1. An anonymous complaint:

Hi..I can’t see what the prickly urchin is doing because your site reports aren’t working. (404 File not found).  I’m interested in what people search to get your site.

This is either because our anonymous visitor is still hanging in the static catacomb of the site, or because I hadn’t updated the links on the dynamic page. Oops. I have fixed the second and am working on the first.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

the torcon3 thing is a bit of an outlier, but the rest is depressingly in-line with the usual. When I pass away, I hope they don’t stick “he explained Solaris okay” on my tombstone.

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:

• @www.jesus sauve.com
• an animated movie where the main characters have to avoid hammers in order to keep their memories
• christian le suave
• is surrogates based on altered carbon?
• leelee sobieski aristocratic polish last name
• what fictional modern day vampire hunter use a +mathematical equation to track vampires?

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

7,147

1. Mmm. Numbers…

This report used to depend on straight web-log statistics to estimate its number of visitors and page views.  This isn’t such a good idea with a database-driven engine such as WordPress: Modern content-management systems use a lot of support files, even for the simplest humblest page views.  Simple page counts don’t work well when each page requires about fifteen hits…

Fortunately, there’s Google Analytics, which crunches a lot of the numbers for me.

According to Google, the central metrics for the month are…

There’s no sense pretending that those are good numbers, but a few good metrics are, at least, improving.  This being said, much of this improvement is artificial: to help people poke around the site after its redesign, I have kept much of the old static site active even as Google and everyone else come to grip with the new dynamic one.

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, groos hit over-inflation and all:

The (Corrected) numbers I used to depend upon now makes little sense: How can you tell when a page request is a legitimate page request when there are tag pages and category pages and feed URLs?

Otherwise, well, the number are more or less as expected: a lot more activity (mostly from search engines) a staggering increase in bandwidth and all the other hallmarks of a site with a sudden ten-fold increase in pages.  This is the new normal.

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

There’s some cold irony, I suppose, in seeing that my old pages are still dominating the top-10.  That will change once Google catches onto the new site structure.

If you care about such things, (and it is fascinating stuff!), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

The faster IE 6.0 dies, the better everyone will be. Yes, even you.

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(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’s an interesting rise in hits from books.google.com; I wonder if this is SEO in action now that my books reviews have prominent meta-data.

Google now lists about 3150 links for “Christian Sauvé”, up from last month. A look at the top-100 results showed no new links of significance.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

A bit of activity in the mailbox this month.  Let’s have a look:

1. Jeff from the UK had something to say about SOLARIS (2002)…

I would like to touch on the confusion about the higgs machine and the final warning from phantom-snow.

Firstly the higgs field is a theory which gives rise to mass throughout the universe. Gordon and phantom-snow decide that the phantoms are stabalised atomically by this field, and create a machine to unstabilise the particles of the phantoms, dispersing their matter into the universe. Playing with the higgs field distured the mass distribution and caused the ship to increase in mass thus the gravity acting on the ship increased, causing them to plumit to the surface of solaris.

I think this film may have something to do with parrallel universes and solaris somehow allows the crew members to dip in and out of this alternate universe. One theory behind alternate universes is that everytime a desicion is made multiple universes branch from ours with every possible out come of the desicion occuring in each new universe. This would give rise to the child and rheya still being alive but not having the same memories (she remembered taking the pregancy test, chris wasnt there to “pass” the memory to phantom-rheya, the choice of aborting the child resulted in the splitting of the universes). its a possibility

Intriguing!

2. Dana from Oklahoma asked…

I would like to offer my review of a new Christian DVD coming out (…)

No, I don’t accept review copies.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

Much Solaris again. Kind of wondering about the site-specific “crazy navy” thing, though…

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:

• csi blooper cats cradle eric george
• bite me, bitch” harlan ellison
• “for every timeless” zomby
• gloria fluffy novelty
• lighting cigars with dollar bills
• sex at conventions worldcon
• what 2002 movie was marketed with the tagline:the only way he can stay pro, is to play (like) a girl.
• what happened in the book brasyl

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

7,147

1. Mmm. Numbers…

One last time, my prickly “Urchin” web stats engine tells me that…

Report for: christian-sauve.com, June 2009
Total Visitors      7,147
Total Pageviews    25,812
(Corrected total   12,155)
Total Hits         32,295
Total Bytes Transferred    477.8MB
Average Visitors Per Day   238.23
Average Pageviews Per Day  860
(Corrected average    405)
Average Hits Per Day       1,076

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 up from last month, but a good chunk of that is a consequence of the architecture switch and my own testing of the site.

Meanwhile, Google Analytics is a bit savvier in telling me that I only had 650 visits and 1,471 pageviews.  Visits down; pageviews up, in keeping with the expected consequences of the redesign.

According to Urchin, our top ten most popular pages are

/index.html                     966
/texts/free-movie-tickets.htm   316
/reviews.html                   241
/about.html                     225
/writings.html                  208
/texts/solaris-explanation.htm  204
/links.html                     199
/search.html                    170
/contact.html                   146
/francais/index.html            138

Little change here, just some re-ordering. (My redesign took place on June 27, too late to have an impact on the rankings.) Meanwhile, Google Analytics says…

This is a bit different from the usual results, and I can already see some of the new-template files sneaking onto the top-10, not so much as evidence that new visitors are flooding in, but as a consequence of the top-level site testing.

If you care about such things, (and it is fascinating stuff!), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

The sudden jump in IE8 numbers is heart-warming, but I won’t rest until IE6 disappears from this list.  (Since the new site looks really really weird in IE6, the process may accelerate next month.)

I should mention once again that as of next month, I’m going to use Google Analytics are the primary source of data, and maybe look at the Urchin stuff for fun: With the new dynamic architecture, Urchin is becoming more technically useful than analytically valuable, and trying to extract useful data out of it is going to be just too time-consuming.  Fortunately, I have used Google Analytics for long enough that I won’t be too disturbed by what I’ll be seeing.

2. Where do these people come from?

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

google.com/search	474	(486)
live.com/results.aspx	109	(94)
www.google.ca/search	104	(80)
google.com/books	49	(51)
google.co.uk/search	47	(64)

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

(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.)

Google now lists about 2980 links for “Christian Sauvé”, down from last month. A look at the top-100 results showed no new links of significance.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

Plenty of activity in the mailbox this month.  Let’s have a look:

1. Chris from Boston wrote to say…

About 2002 Solaris- a new interpretation which also reveals Andrei Tarkovsky s Solaris (1972) to be genius, and not so self-indulgent! The faux Rheya, and the other “visitors”, are presented as projections of the Crew’s unconscious– but as such they symbolize film itself! These non-human creatures who do not die; who are imperfect copies of actual memories; who are sometimes rejected violently, sometimes loved irrationally; artificial products of advanced technology (moviemaking). Soderbergh, like Tarkovsky before him, is writing about our relationships to film itself (and by extension to the actors, etc, etc) I’m not sure if Lem’s book has the same self-conscious self-references to creative writing and reading- but this idea really opened up a new appreciation for me. I’ve also discovered a ’68 Soviet made-for-TV version- great stuff!

Interesting!

2. Sofie from Belgium says…

Hi! My name is Sofie, I’m 15 years old and I’m from Belgium. We watched  the movie “Solaris” during English class, but I didn’t understand the movie well, especially the end. I was wondering if maybe you could help me to understand the several possible endings, because I already read a lot of different ones. And I have to explain them on my final, but the teacher doesn’t want to explain it to us. My final is the 18th of Juin. Thank you!  Sofie

and then, moments later:

It’s sofie again… Where can I see your answer?

I really wanted to help, Sofie, but you didn’t include a return email address.  Given the date of your final, I doubt you’re reading this, but that’s just as well: Everything I’ve thought about the film is in my Solaris Explained article, and I’m not holding anything back. To anyone else: please re-read the article, it’s all there.

3. An anonymous drive-by:

Your interpretations are not scholarly.

Well, as a way of saying “You suck!”, that’s more polite than usual.  Poking around at the server logs to figure out what had so provoked my anonymous correspondent,  I discovered (without any surprise) that a disappointed review of a right-wing political thriller (Vince Flynn’s Term Limits) had once again earned me some nameless name-calling.  For the record, I note that whenever I get a nasty anonymous comment, it’s almost always about a not-entirely-positive review of a right-wing thriller.  What really makes me laugh is that the review essentially says “someone smarter than me will have to review the political implications of this.”  Anonymous commentator’s reading comprehension: Poor.

4. Finally, a chance real-time encounter with a former local SMOF earned me the first real message handled by my new technical infrastructure…

For your SF reading, I suggest that you add Hal Clement and Harry Harrison.  Harry’s Stainless Rat series and “Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers” constantly bring tears (of laughter) to my eyes.  And for complete obsure – look for Charles R. Saunders…

They may not have been reviewed at length, but I have read plenty of Hal Clement (Mission of Gravity and others) and Harry Harrison (both works mentioned, and more).  On the other hand, Charles R. Saunders was a new name I should have known!

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

Much Solaris again…

Other odd, special or amusing search keywords:

• “plenty of cleavage” cleavage movie review
• a movie about a bartender who becomes a hero and is hunted by a past
• how edible is the book from the christian writer mary backster to hell and back?
• review of symbolic, technical and audio codes used in the devil wears prada
• when you trust a person’s word only, is this wrong

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

X. Special section: Site Redesign Notes

I woke up in mid-June with a few new priorities: I was pretty much caught-up in what I had to do, was giving a speech to a few dozen people at the end of the month, and couldn’t stand looking at my current web site.  Taken together, those three elements forced me to do something I had thought about since at least January 2008: Not only redesign the site visually, but convert the content to a database-driven Content Management System.

Picking WordPress was easy given the amount of experience I had with the system, and the just-right capabilities it offered.  But converting 250+ files of HTML code totaling about nine megabytes of data isn’t the find of thing you do in a lazy afternoon.  It’s pathetic to do elementary project management for a personal site redesign, but that’s what I ended up doing, with a real schedule on paper, deliverables, day-by-day objectives and critical paths.  All the HTML data had to be concatenated, then meta-tagged, corrected, normalized and exported to a format that could be automatically imported in a WordPress database.

I ended up doing things I wasn’t planning on doing, in ways I hadn’t even imagined.  I never could have finished the project without the industrial-strength text editor NotePad++ and the latest version of Microsoft Excel: Both applications covered for the other, but it’s Excel’s string-manipulation capabilities and ability to combine data in an XML template that really saved the day.  I ended up reverse-engineering the WordPress XML format and then generating files to import 2,500+ items back in the system.  The really dull stuff?  Adding the date meta-data that was until then implicit in the HTML filenames, and converting my MOVIE TITLES to semantically-rich Movie Titles.  There weren’t many programmatic ways of solving those issues.  Also annoying?  Finding out that being 90% accurate in entering meta-data over a dozen years is far from being good enough when that means hundreds of corrections over a thousand-items database.

It’s fair to say that my ambitions for my visual design were much, much higher than what I ended up applying.  But the bulk of the redesign time budget went to the data formatting, with the “fun” visual design ending up “good enough” early on.  There was a lot of tweaking (save for the commenting module code blatantly taken from the default Kubrick template, most of the template for this site was written from scratch), but it sort of came together.  I only tested with last-generation browsers: this is my personal site, and I don’t really care if IE6 blows up for visitors sad enough to be stuck with it.

Overall, the project took about forty-to-fifty hours, spread over four-hours weekdays and twelve-hour weekend days.  As an occasional web designer, I would have turned down that particular commission if it had come from an outside client.  On the other hand, there’s little in WordPress that scares me now that I’m done.

I have opened comments on nearly all items: I wonder how long it’s going to take until I regret it.

Very little content didn’t make it from the old to the new architecture.  What disappeared were usually essays I now strongly disagreed with (including one explaining why this site wasn’t a blog!), or collections of mini-reviews I couldn’t fit in the new site architecture, necessarily more rigid than the old one.  I really wanted to review my older reviews to remove the more embarrassing ones, but simply didn’t have the time.

I felt pretty proud of myself for finding a way to automatically integrate posters and book covers to my reviews, but plans to provide scans of all book covers and movie posters quickly disappeared once I realized how many of them there were (2,500+) and how long it would take to generate every graphical item even if I was on a fully-automated process.  (Basically: five minutes per book cover, two minutes per movie poster. If everything went well.)  I compromised by including full imagery for everything reviewed since January 2008… and will provide images from now on.  I hope, though, that my server space and bandwidth will be able to accommodate all of that new data.

What else should I note?  Well, XAMPP worked superbly as a local development web server. Facebook was useful to send a “new site” announcement to my usual network. I’m still learning The GIMP –now that’s another full-time project not to attempt in the middle of a major redesign!  I had some trouble with my host in installing WordPress, but nothing we weren’t able to handle after a few emails back and forth.  I had a lot of trouble sleeping during the twelve days of the project: Hot temperatures, heightened stress, lots of sugar and a head boiling with ideas.  But the site was more or less ready on-time, the speech went well and the project management worked more or less as planned.  Hopefully, future redesigns won’t be so difficult!

Expect a lot of changes in the statistics next month: More pages, but smaller pages: I can’t really predict what will be the impact on Google referrals, especially since I won’t remove the majority of the old static pages until August 1st.  We’ll see…

1. Mmm. Numbers…

My prickly “Urchin” web stats engine tells me that…

Report for: christian-sauve.com, May 2009
Total Visitors     6,972
Total Pageviews   19,592
(Corrected total   11,537)
Total Hits        22,417
Total Bytes Transferred    399.4MB
Average Visitors Per Day   224.9
Average Pageviews Per Day  632
(Corrected average    372)
Average Hits Per Day       723.12

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 slighly (and by that, I mean “nearly identical”) lower than last month.

Meanwhile, Google Analytics wastes its prodigious intellect by telling me that I really only had 708 visits and 1002 pageviews. Adding insult to downer, Google adds that this is considerably lower than last month. Then it kicks me for good measure.

According to Urchin, our top ten most popular pages are

/index.html                     966
/reviews.html                   316
/about.html                     241
/texts/free-movie-tickets.htm   225
/writings.html                  208
/links.html                     204
/search.html                    199
/texts/solaris-explanation.htm  170
/contact.html                   146
/francais/index.html            138

Little change here. Meanwhile, Google Analytics says…

…which is roughly consistent with the usual results.

If you care about such things, (And it’s important that you do!), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

Not much movement this month. You would think that I would make a fuss about Firefox being on top, but I won’t even do that.

2. Where do these people come from?

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

google.com/search      486 (688)
live.com/results.aspx   94 (75)
www.google.ca/search    80 (104)
google.co.uk/search     64 (53)
google.com/books        51 (74)

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

(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.)

Google now lists about 3070 links for “Christian Sauvé”, down from last month. A look at the top-100 results showed no important new links.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

Spaaaaam. It just never stops.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

That’s a whole lot of Solaris…

Other odd, special or amusing search keywords:

• “how to convert a conservative”
• “il faut blamer le canada” south park en francais
• a movie in las vegas with a wanna be formula driver gigolo
• explain how to win a small breakthrough in thirty days
• is it okay to watch the rocky horror picture show if you’re christian?

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

1. Mmm. Numbers…

My prickly "Urchin" web stats engine tells me that…

Report for: christian-sauve.com, April 2009 Total Visitors      6,985   Total Pageviews    19,658   (Corrected total   11,294) Total Hits         22,016   Total Bytes Transferred   393.6MB   Average Visitors Per Day  232.83   Average Pageviews Per Day 655.26   (Corrected average    376) Average Hits Per Day      733.86   

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 were significantly lower than last month, which I blame on fibre-eating badgers.

Meanwhile, Google Analytics slaps me on the head by using its sophisticated algorithms to prove that I really had only 883 visits and 1,464 pageviews. This may be a downer, but Google, at least, thinks my stats are up from last month.

According to Urchin, our top ten most popular pages are

 /index.html                     804 /texts/solaris-explanation.htm  323 /texts/free-movie-tickets.htm   219 /reviews.html                   210 /about.html                     179 /contact.html                   178 /links.html                     174 /writings.html                  168 /search.html                    162 /francais/index.html            114 

Little change here. Meanwhile, Google Analytics says…

…which is roughly consistent with the usual results.

If you care about such things, (And you should!), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

Not much movement this month, although the surge in Safari visitors may or may not mean anything.

2. Where do these people come from?

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

 google.com/search     688 (589) www.google.ca/search  104 (121) live.com/results.aspx  75 (112) google.com/books       74 (76) google.co.uk/search    53 (53) 

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

(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.)

Google now lists about 3130 links for "Christian Sauvé", down from last month. A look at the top-100 results showed no important new links.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

Spaaaaam. It just never stops.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

So… do you think SOLARIS was shown at least once on TV this month?

Other odd, special or amusing search keywords:

• is "who am i" the most asked question on web
• what does a christian man with a computer science degree do?
• what was the point of the movie solaris

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