Two years of scottstuff.net

Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 27 Aug 2005 03:43:07 GMT

I misses posting it by a day, but scottstuff.net is now two years old. The first post was August 25, 2003.

Last year, I posted a bunch of statistics about how the first year went. Unfortunately, my log rotator went wild for a while earlier this summer, so I only have the most recent 4 months worth of log data, but a few comparisons are still in order.

My "one year of blog" post is post number 259 here; this one will be number 514, so I guess I've fallen slightly behind last year's posting rate--I should have had 4 more articles this year. That's amazingly consistent. Last year I had a total of 110 comments, this year the number's up to 890, largely thanks to two articles.

I've clearly received a lot more traffic this year then I did last year. The Canon 5D article that I posted a couple weeks ago has received more hits this month then the top 4 articles from last year did over the entire year.

Unfortunately, switching from Movable Type to Typo a couple months ago makes it hard to calculate which pages were the most popular, because the URLs for pages changed. I have a conversion table somewhere, but I really don't feel like spending the morning doing programming just to build up half-useless statistics. So instead, I'll give a couple simple statistics and then move on.

Since April 18th (the oldest logs that I still have), I've logged a total of 1.25 million hits. That includes search engines, spam, graphics, and other floatsam, but it's still a lot more traffic then I served up the year before. So far this month, awstats reports that I've taken a total of 482,000 hits, with almost 400,000 of those being from real visitors. Counting search engines, I've served over 9 GB so far this month, which is just amazing. I've served 20,784 unique visitors a total of 75,238 pages this month.

Hopefully next year will be better. At this rate I'll have to pay someone for hosting within a year or so, because my little DSL pipe won't be able to keep up with the traffic.

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Access logs

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 15 Jan 2004 01:08:46 GMT

It seems like there’s always something interesting lurking in web access logs, but actually finding the interesting bit is a pain in the neck. For instance, over the past day or so, I discovered that I was briefly the #1 Google listing for “andy serkis seattle” and that Lockergnome included me on their list of 2004 PDA predictions. I didn’t see that coming. Cool. My MPx200 notes have generated a bit more traffic then usual, too, and they’re only a day or so old. Searches for the Sony/Ericsson CAR-100 have finally slacked off; google was sending me piles of CAR-100 traffic for a while.

I’m seeing a bit of referrer spam, too–mostly for paris-hilton-video.blogspot.com. Either that, or they’ve linked to me somewhere that I can’t see, and that link has generated a dozen hits over the last month, all from different IP addresses in different countries.

The thing is, I spotted all of these trends manually, by running tail -f on the log files, and then grepping for interesting strings. None of the web log analyzers seems quite appropriate for blog traffic. And, interestingly enough, searching for “web log analyzer” in google hits way too many (web logs) on (analysis). If anyone has any suggestions or recommendations, feel free to leave a comment.

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