Feh! v2

I'm so popular now

Posted by Ian Holsman Sat, 10 Dec 2005 18:49:00 GMT

wow.. I really jumped over a lot of people with that uptime story didn’t I. according to one blog ranking engine (not named) I am the 711th most popular blog on the planet for that day.. woot. but sadly for me I am expecting the fame to be fleeting.

just a couple of data points here.

1. A ‘mention’ on tech.memorandum.com scored me ~100 hits. a mention in the other blogs got me another 180. I was pretty pschyed.. as i got about 450 visits that day overall.. a record for my little blog which been up for less than a year. (If I had 20 more page visitors I could have claimed I got more traffic in that day then I did in the first month I started!)

2. No follow on, this was a true flash crowd, I got no extra readership the next day.. not one extra RSS subscription, and page views back to normal after 24 hours. (and if you are a new subscriber reading this, someone else got so pissed off about reading about uptime they unsubscribed ;-)

3. For all my popularity, I got ZERO clickthroughs on the ads.

4. The bounce rate was above 80%. people just looked at the thing, and clicked away.

So what did I learn from this?

1. Not to quit my day job, blogging about network performance and open source won’t pay as much as actually doing it ;-)

2. Crowds don’t matter. It’s the type of crowd that matters. For whatever reason people coming here via a MSN search are much more likely to click an ad. For a publisher, 1 person coming from MSN is worth 10 from google, and they should factor that into how much they pay the search engine.

3. Rankings (as they are currently calculated) are worthless. No way this blog is anywhere near 711 of anything.

4. If you want traffic posting your comment on your own blog (and doing a trackback) is much more effective than just leaving a comment, and you get the benefit of your readers visiting the original blog who would have never heard of it before.. so it better both ways.

5. Blogging software needs in general needs to learn a bit from traditional content producers.. and have a option to either let the blogger put in ‘related’ links or show the titles of those links in the category bar.

6. If you are planning on doing this for a living, you should talk about wagering, or texas holdem, or how to refinance your mortgage, as those ads are worth a whole lot more ;-) and I still think ad-clicks are more of a random walk then scientific planning.

but I still have an open question.. who the hell is searching for my name?

Posted in General | Tags stats | 2 comments | no trackbacks

stats (yet another stats package)

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 15 Nov 2005 04:43:00 GMT

google has just released a free service to do web site analytics which is/was their ’urchin’ product.

sorry all you startup’s who were in that space?.. maybe next time ;(

Installation was easy enough. Just add a javascript tracking tag, similar to how the other stat-sites work.

Now the REALLY big question for me. at the moment I have 4 trackers on this page. and none of them agree on how many unique visitors and page views I’m getting ;(

I’d like to see if google’s analytics matches what google’s ad-words is saying.

So I’m kinda Ok with google monitoring this site, it was being monitored by their ad-words program anyway..

oh.. and I think i’ve bored enough people with my Obsession about web-site stat’s packages. I promise no more talking about them for a month.

Posted in General | Tags stats, urchin | no comments | no trackbacks

stats (again)

Posted by Ian Holsman Fri, 11 Nov 2005 18:41:00 GMT

so in my never ending question to get my page analyzed in every which way I installed railstat for my blog. if you want to see how popular this blog really is go look for yourself. I’ll keep it up for a little bit.. but in general I like to keep this stuff protected.

why?

well.. two reasons.

1. I don’t know how well this application is written, and although I keep track of security alerts as part of my day job, i’d rather minimize the footprint on my home box.

2. It’s a open abuse for spam. there are a lot of bots out there which use fake referrals for things like casino’s and viagra and it from what I can see this page doesn’t use ‘nofollow’ and is wide open for abuse in that fashion.

3. It’s none of your damn business how many hits I get anyway ;-)

at the end of the day, the numbers are meaningless, as they don’t take into account RSS feeds, and there is no ‘time scale’ and from what I can see most people don’t ‘browse’ blogs, they come directly in to a page via a search or RSS feed, or they just hit the front door.

But I still like to look at them.

and talking about stats, why can’t del.icio.us show me ALL the people who have tagged a url on this host? inquiring minds want to know.

Posted in blogging | Tags logging, railstat, stats | no comments | no trackbacks

A dedicated blog/CMS stat viewer

Posted by Ian Holsman Sat, 29 Oct 2005 01:18:00 GMT

I must be getting a reputation for being anal retentive about monitoring and stats. I have just been invited to a ‘alpha’ (I thought people went straight to beta and stayed there until they IPO’d) of a new web-based stat tool called Measure Map which is from Adaptive Path.

I’ve spent half an hour with it and this is what makes it interesting.

1. It measures articles+comments, not pages. I’m not sure how it copes with the standard front door with multiple articles on the front door.. I’ll find out when america wakes up and I get some page views ;-)

2. You need to modify the code itself. with most of the other popular stat monitors you just add a single javascript file. It is easy enough to do if you can be bothered (and you have access to the source to do it). This rules out things like wordpress.com and blogger, where you don’t have any access to the html. (you can still stick in some javascript if you are sneaky, but not in the way measuremap requires)

3. Heavy use of flash. I usually surf the net with flash disabled.

4. It looks like you can only monitor a single blog per email address. This makes it hard for me as I also write on Feather, a open source marketing blog.

5. I can’t see the bots. I like to see how often google, yahoo, and MSN hit my site.

6. Link path tracking, or even average number of stories read per visitor is not there.

Overall it looks very nice, I like the way it focuses on posts, not pages. I think they need to fix up the default install to make it easier for non-techies. I don’t expect them to write a plugin for Typo, but one for wordpress would be nice.

I’ll leave it up for a month, and see how often I actually use it, compared to my tried and trusted awstats.

Posted in blogging | Tags blogs, map, measure, stats | no comments | no trackbacks

Blogging Ping Stats

Posted by Ian Holsman Mon, 22 Aug 2005 01:09:00 GMT

I hooked up a simple listener to the Blo.gs cloud and recorded how often pings were received, and who sent them for 1 Day.

as you can see there are some people abusing the system, sending hundreds of pings a day, but they shouldn’t be causing too much trouble for the ping servers. I’m guessing someone’s RSS creation library pings automatically, and people are just blindly using the library in their code or something..

Another way to look at the same data:

Of all the pings sent 67% ofthem are from individual sources, with it reaching 90% at 7 pings from a single source. (95% is at 31 pings)

FYI Robert Scoble sent 8 pings that day, so he needs to work a bit harder to get himself out of the curve ;-)

Posted in blogging | Tags blogging, stats | no comments | no trackbacks

Why Page weight Doesn't matter

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 20 Jul 2004 15:49:00 GMT

$50/month for a 15Mb/s link to your home. Thats ~10 times faster than a standard DSL link... at the moment it's just a town in texas somewhere, but in ~1-2 years it will be available for most people (read Silicon Valley)

What *IS* important is latency.. how do we get the page out FASTER with minimal delays...

when modems were the majority, it didn't really matter much how fast your server was, the major bottleneck was the size of the HTML (and images) being pushed down the users end. (be it a T1 or a 56k modem).. basically 10 seconds for 50k. now.. the pressure has moved back to the server, and speeding up your applications, as that is where the large percentage of the wait will be.

source: http://news.com.com/Verizon's+fiber+race+is+on/2100-1034_3-5275171.html

Posted in monitoring | Tags monitoring, stats | no trackbacks

[bgr]zip timings

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 08 Apr 2004 15:16:00 GMT

Jeremy Zawodny compared some timings of bzip2, gzip, and rzip to compress his mail folder (which I'm assuming is 90% text)

I thought I would do it on one of our largish indexes (which we have to copy around to different places several times a day) and see if it would help.

it's original size is 1.1G and is mainly binary data. Machine stats: OS: RH ES3.0 2x 2.4 P-IV xeons with hyperthreading Mem: 6G

basic summary: when you have a 1G card in machines don't even bother compressing it, unless you have to distribute it to >20 machines.. and if so.. any of these will do ;( If you have to use a slower link, then I still think any of these will do.

on the plus side.. I watched The Adventures of Seinfeld & Superman while waiting for the tests to run.. very funny.. the macromedia streaming via flash is a VERY cool idea and seem to work quite well.

Posted in monitoring | Tags monitoring, stats | no trackbacks

I've Installed Smokeping on the server

Posted by Ian Holsman Mon, 29 Mar 2004 15:04:00 GMT

After suffering through 400ms latency times to work. (I live in Melbourne Australia, and work in San Francisco) I installed Smokeping Something I can look at while waiting for my terminal to respond.
It isn't all that bad, as I can do most of my development type work locally and just push it over.. thank god for portability between my Mac & the Linux boxes.

Posted in monitoring | Tags monitoring, stats | no trackbacks