Ready for another look at the dull 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, January 2009 Total Visitors        6,657   Total Pageviews      20,673   (Corrected total   13,292) Total Hits           23,211   Total Bytes Transferred   447.0MB   Average Visitors Per Day  214.74   Average Pageviews Per Day 666.87   (Corrected average   429) Average Hits Per Day      748.74

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 oh-so-slightly higher than last month, but well within .

Meanwhile, Google Analytics slams my head in a snowbank and twists by pointing out that I only really managed 702 visits and 1,069 page views, both slightly above December. You suck, Google.

According to Urchin, our top ten most popular pages are

 /index.html                    952 /reviews.html                  246 /texts/free-movie-tickets.htm  246 /about.html                    231 /cdtac6t.html                  226 /writings.html                 198 /reviews/index.html            196 /search.html                   195 /links.html                    192 /texts/solaris-explanation.htm 188

Little change here. Meanwhile, Google Analytics says…

…which is roughly consistent with the usual results.

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

Same as usual, although I’m finally seeing some movement from IE6 to IE7. People with new computers, maybe?

2. Where do these people come from?

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

 google.com/search     535 (484) live.com/results.aspx 118 (51) www.google.ca/search  110 (104) google.co.uk/search    55 (44) google.com/books       34 (new)

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.)

As the “twitter.com” source above suggests, there were a few new links to this site this month: I attended an event in a semi-professional capacity, presented a few thoughts regarding what I do at work and found my presentation twittered and subsequently blogged, with quite a few links back to this site. All good: I was able to send the blog report to my bosses as independent validation for my own event report.

Google now lists about 3550 links for “Christian Sauvé”, slightly down from last month.

3. Ohh! Visitor comments!

It may be a new year, but the spam just keeps on piling up. One of those days, I’ll have time to implement my anti-spam plan.

But there were other things worth noting in the mailbox besides the spam. A few comments regarding the presentation mentioned above, plus a few anonymous words of encouragement:

wow i love how you critique these novels. I agree with you on hidden talents.

(Here’s my review of David Lubar’s Hidden Talents. It’s a clever YA novel.)

Plus Alain Miguelez, author of the definitive history of Ottawa-area movie theaters, A Theater Near You, wrote in to say that he has appreciated my review. Hurray!

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

Same old.

Other odd, special or amusing search keywords:

• “the departed” caprio spank
• assassin “science fiction novel” -atwood -moorcock -vatican -vogel
• baen tacky book covers
• canadian fantasy writer/janitor 2005
• clive cussler is a curmudgeon
• detectives solving mysteries with magnets
• post-apocalyptic domestic drama

Report for: christian-sauve.com, February 2009 Total Visitors        6,001   Total Pageviews      19,320   (Corrected total   12,091) Total Hits           21,836   Total Bytes Transferred    414.4MB   Average Visitors Per Day   214.32   Average Pageviews Per Day  690   (Corrected average    431) Average Hits Per Day       779.85

 /index.html                    732 /reviews.html                  221 /texts/free-movie-tickets.htm  201 /writings.html                 190 /about.html                    187 /links.html                    174 /search.html                   163 /cdtac6t.html                  161 /texts/solaris-explanation.htm 140 /reviews/index.html            133

 google.com/search     478 (535) www.google.ca/search  91  (110) live.com/results.aspx 70  (118) google.co.uk/search   67  (55) google.com/books      47  (34)

Ready for another look at the dull 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, March 2009 Total Visitors        7,433 Total Pageviews      23,939 (Corrected total   13,795) Total Hits           27,171 Total Bytes Transferred    506.5MB Average Visitors Per Day   239.77 Average Pageviews Per Day  772 (Corrected average    445) Average Hits Per Day       876.48

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 higher than last month, which I can’t explain. (Sunspots?)

Meanwhile, Google Analytics destroys my dreams and leaves me a quivering husk of lost illusions by pointing out that I really had only 806 visits and 1,300 pageviews. Oh Google; I liked you so much better when you just gave me good search results.

According to Urchin, our top ten most popular pages are

 /index.html                   993 /texts/free-movie-tickets.htm 282 /reviews.html                 267 /contact.html                 219 /about.html                   215 /writings.html                208 /links.html                   189 /search.html                  179 /francais/index.html          147 /reviews/2002/books02d.htm    146

Little change here. Meanwhile, Google Analytics says…

…which is roughly consistent with the usual results.

If you care about such things, (Oh w00t! Oh joy!), 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.

2. Where do these people come from?

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

 google.com/search     589 (478) www.google.ca/search  121 (91) live.com/results.aspx 112 (70) google.com/books       76 (47) google.co.uk/search    53 (67)

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 3170 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.

Otherwise, the biggest mailbox story of the month was a renowned SF writer writing to me to continue a decade-long feud with a renowned scientist. The details are elsewhere if you’re interested, because I’m not.

4. Search Queries Oddities

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

The usual.

#8 isn’t as stange as you think; I’m responsible for at least one of those hits.

Other odd, special or amusing search keywords:

• “acapella” christian submarine
• darkly masterpiece happy feet
• old montreal road and trim road+shotgun murder+sauve

(it wasn’t a good month for odd, special or amusing)

Ready for another look at the dull 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, 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

Ready for another look at the dull 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, 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?

June 2009 was a huge month for www.christian-sauve.com, probably its single most important month since the site became a dot-com in 2002.  In a manic blaze born out of boredom, I completely redesigned the site, not simply updating the sorely-outdated visual look, but crammed about nine megabytes of flat HTML content into a WordPress-powered dynamic architecture.  (While, in the process, going from about 250 static pages to 2,700 dynamically-generated ones.)  The more curious among you will find a summary of the process in the last section of this report, but in the meantime do enjoy the last Web Site Report of the non-dynamic era, since I’m completely updating the methodology of those reports next month to reflect the new architecture of the site: Goodbye Urchin, hello Google Analytics!

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…

July 2009 was the first full month of operation of christian-sauve.com as a fully-dynamic database-powered web site. As such, this report also marks a transition to a new way of counting the site’s activity metrics.  Don’t be afraid, and have a look at the stats below…

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

After a summer of changes, August 2009 was more business-as-usual for the site.  While remnants of the old static site are still kicking around the server like dusty underpassages to appease the Google, christian-sauve.com is settling down in its new CMS routine.  Let’s look at how this is shaking out numerically…

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?

As christian-sauve.com slowly settles into its new dynamically-driven profile, September 2009 doesn’t stand out as a particularly note-worthy month.  Let’s see the numbers…

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?

End of the year! Let’s see the numbers…

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?