Day: January 12, 2009

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My Web Year in Review

I’ve had my web site up for over a decade now and I added the WordPress CMS to the site in October 2005. Until Q4 2007 I hadn’t bothered much about tracking usage on my site but Google analytics made the job so easy I started using it. Since 2008 was the first whole year with data I figured it would be fun to take a look at the stats. This sparked my memory of some of the events over the past year that I thought would be good to review while my memory is still reasonably fresh.

First up the basic stats, around 20,000 unique visitors came from 128 countries/territories and viewed about 35,000 pages. The main browser used by visitors was Firefox (65%) with Internet Explorer a distant second place (26%). Traffic source rankings were, referring sites 68%, search engines 26%, and the remaining 6% were direct traffic.

I want to send a big thank you to the following referring sites for sending visitors my way (ranked by visitors sent):

  1. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy sent 1,181 visits from this post to my follow up post about the teacher fired for wizardry. This also was the main reason that 7/15 & 16 set the first and second place all time records for my biggest days of unique visitors, 1109 & 621 respectively. There was a mandatory 6 month wait before Mr. Piculas could file his lawsuit so there should be some news about this in the coming month. I’m watching this story and will post any information I find. It still bugs me that no local Florida journalists noticed the likely forged documents and followed up on them, even after I and then Mr. Piculas’ lawyer pointed them to the docs.
  2. Orac from Respectful Insolence sent 131 visits via my comment on his Dr. Katz post. I hope people had a good laugh at my funny granting of Dr. Katz’s wish on June 18th.
  3. Martin the Lay Scientist sent 129 visits when he hosted the 92nd Skeptics’ Circle and included a post of mine in that edition of this great blog carnival on July 31st.
  4. Bug Girl sent 93 visits when she thanked me with a link for letting her know about the PBS Nature 2007 season opener. Although Bug Girl’s post and mine where at the end of October 2007 the visits where from January through April 2008, go figure.
  5. Phil sent 56 visits to me from his old site on May 12th when he gave a tip o’ the sonic screwdriver to me for pointing out the BBC overreaction to some knitting patterns from May 12th.
  6. Tyler from PowerUp sent 54 visits spread pretty evenly throughout the year.
  7. Greg Laden sent 38 visits from his post to my post about the chemist in Marlborough on August 20th.

A thank you also goes out to ER for using my old demotivator in an October post at Evolved and Rat/i/onal, I like to see someone make use of one of my creations. That image is responsible for nearly a third of my total page views, I guess ranking fourth in a Google image search helps. Finally thanks to all the Bloggers in my Blogroll for giving me a year of entertaining and informative reading.

Next up the content that was most popular for 2008, I’m excluding the pages that contain the popular image I mentioned above. (value is unique page views)

  1. The main site and blog home pages combined had 2865 views.
  2. “What’s up with that school wizard story“, 2022.
  3. “Happy Birthday Michael Faraday“, 882. I think this was more for the picture than the text.
  4. “Full Screen Playback of a Whole YouTube Playlist“, 516.
  5. “The Linksys NSLU2, aka the Slug, has been discontinued“, 334.
  6. “A professional chemist doing for profit chemistry is not a hobbyist“, 294.
  7. “Spectacular Windmill Failure“, 291.
  8. “A Quack who admits it“, 189.
  9. “An Acrobat Reader alternative“, 180.
  10. “Cell Phone Jammer Foolishness“, 162.

The pages that visitors spent the most time on where: (value is time in seconds)

  1. “Full Screen Playback of a Whole YouTube Playlist“, 339.
  2. “A professional chemist doing for profit chemistry is not a hobbyist“, 231.
  3. “Custom quick launch pop-up menu for XP“, 211.
  4. “What’s up with that school wizard story“, 181.
  5. “The Linksys NSLU2, aka the Slug, has been discontinued“, 156.
  6. “Embarrassing Engineers #3“, 149.
  7. “Cell Phone Jammer Foolishness“, 148.
  8. “A Quack who admits it“, 148.
  9. “Happy Birthday Michael Faraday“, 130. Hmm, maybe someone is reading the text.
  10. “Freedom of speech under attack by Joseph Chikelue Obi“, 117.