Author Archives: Maria Langer

Article Hits

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An aberration?

I don’t want new readers to this site to think that I’m consumed by stats. I’m not. I just find stats very interesting, whether they’re baseball stats, voting stats, Web site stats — or just about any kind of stats you can think of.

That said, I noted another interesting thing related to stats on this Web site. I recently installed a WordPress plugin called Readers Post by Stefan Groenveld. The plugin has several features that track when and how many times a post has been read and I’ve been implementing them one by one. The other day, I “turned on” the reader count feature, which displays the number of times a post has been read (since the plugin was activated). I use this in the sidebar to list the most popular articles and in The Loop to display a reader count at the end of each article.

The result, of course, is more stats.

What’s fascinating to me is how many times the top post has been read. Vancouver Waterfront (1643 readers) has almost twice as many readers as the second most popular post, On Blogging (874 readers). (Remember, the count started on November 15, 2006.) This baffles me because the Vancouver post is a short “About the Photos” article that displays a nice (if I do say so myself) photo of the Vancouver waterfront and tells a brief story about my 5-day stay in that very nice Canadian city. There’s really nothing terribly interesting in the post, only one photo, and not very much info for readers to take away with them.

So why is the post so darn popular?

At first I thought it might be Google. For some reason, my posts seem to rank very highly on Google. So I did a search for “Vancouver Waterfront” to see where the article placed. It placed at the top of the second page. Not very good placement, but perhaps enough to get some hits from Google.

I then attempted to go through my server log, which is not an easy task. I don’t use any log analysis software on my server, so I have to look at the logs prepared by GoDaddy.com, which cover all of my sites together. There were a lot of lines. I gave up.

I then looked at the logs prepared by W3Counter for my site as part of the counting service. I went to the Search report to see if lots of people had searched for Vancouver or Waterfront. The answer was no.

At this point, I’ve run out of research options. I’ll probably never know why the post is so popular. But it will be interesting to see how long it takes for other posts to surpass it in reader views. It can’t possibly stay at the top of the list forever.

And this brings up another question. Is it good to have so many stats? After all, I just wasted about 45 minutes researching this particular issue and writing about it. When does information become too much information?

Hits

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I review my weekly hit levels for my two most popular sites.

I use W3Counter (thanks to a recommendation by someone who commented here) to keep track of site activity. I don’t use their pay service — the features it adds are not worth the money to me — but I do use their standard service to keep track page visits (which appears in a tiny graphic on each page) and page hits.

Stats for two of my sites.W3Counter, among other things, creates customizable charts for site activity. What you see here are the charts for my two busiest sites: wickenburg-az.com and aneclecticmind.com. I set up these charts to display results for each week for the year. Since I installed W3Counter in late June, that’s the first week that displays. Those nasty dips in July and September are for periods when my server was down for a few days (one of the reasons I moved the sites from my own server to GoDaddy.com). And this week isn’t looking too good because it’s only half over. And in case you’re wondering, W3Counter does not track my visits to the sites — I’ve installed a cookie on all my browsers so it ignores me. (Don’t want to get an inflated count.)

I wrote about the importance of statistics in “Site Stats and Why They’re Important,” which is also available as a podcast. I’d been looking at stats on a daily basis, primarily because that’s the default view W3Counter offers. Seeing the stats on a weekly basis is much more interesting. I can clearly see the trends. For example, in the top illustration, which is for wickenburg-az.com, hits go down in the summer. Why? Because it’s so darn hot here, fewer people are interested Wickenburg. Not only the people who might visit — at least 90% of the site’s visitors are from out of the area — but the people who live here part of the year and have abandoned the town for cooler climates.So you can see that flat line or dip (depending on which line you’re looking at) that ramps up in the fall. It’ll be interesting to look at this chart when I have a whole year’s worth of data. My personal site’s activity (in the bottom illustration) has been growing quite steadily, but has peaks and troughs from week to week. For a long time, its weekly hits exceeded those for wickenburg-az.com, but now that the high season is upon us in the Sonoran desert, people are more interested in the town than me. I can live with that.

What’s interesting to me — and what prompted me to write this piece — is that both sites have approximately the same level of activity, hovering around 2500 page hits per week this time of year. I find that interesting primarily because of the differences in content and appeal. wickenburg-az.com is a local Web site with information and commentary about Wickenburg, AZ. aneclecticmind.com is a combination blog and support site that offers everything from general commentary to highly technical how-to instructions for using certain software. Yet they’re equally popular. Don’t you find that odd?

In any case, I’ll be playing around a bit more with W3Counter to see what other oddities I can find.

And if you’re a Webmaster or blogger and are looking for a nice statistics solution that’s easy to set up and use, I recommend W3Counter. Many thanks to Dan from that company for suggesting it.

R44 Pilot Finds Missing Family

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Another example of how private helicopter pilots can help their communities.

A friend of mine e-mailed me this story from the San Francisco Chronicle last night: “PILOT HAD HUNCH: It led him to wife, kids.”

The short version: James Kim and his wife and two children went missing in the mountains. John Rachor, a private helicopter pilot and owner of an R44 helicopter (like mine), decided to follow up on a hunch he had about where they may have made a wrong turn. He found the wife and kids alive and safe. Sadly the husband was later found dead, having died while trying to walk for help.

Wickenburg is lucky to have not one but three privately owned helicopters. The three pilots — Ray, Dave, and I — know the immediate area better than 95% of Wickenburg’s population. We know about canyons and trails and hidden ruins that most people couldn’t imagine. Certainly better than the APS or Sheriff’s office helicopter pilots — after all, we fly around here all the time.

Although I hope we’re never needed to help out with a search, I also hope that the local authorities wouldn’t hesitate to ask us to help out if they needed a few more eyes in the sky. After all, since we can each take four pairs, that’s twelve more people that can help save a life.

National Do Not Call Registry

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Get your phone numbers off their lists!

Are you sick and tired of telemarketers ruining your dinner hour? Do unwanted phone calls from strangers bother you while you’re watching Boston Legal? Are your cell phone minutes being used up by auto glass repair company representatives and insurance salesmen?

If so, you really need to get your phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. It’s quick and easy to do and, after 31 days, if you still get unwanted marketing calls, you can register a complaint that’ll get the marketer in hot water with the FCC.

Start by going to https://www.donotcall.gov/. Click the Register Now button and use the form that appears to enter up to three telephone numbers and your e-mail address:

Do Not Call Registry

Click Submit. Then check your e-mail In box. You should get one e-mail message per phone number you entered. Click the link in the e-mail message to complete the registration.

It takes 31 days for your number(s) to be fully registered. After that, you should not receive any marketing calls, although you may still receive calls for charity fund raising, political campaigns, and surveys.

If you do get a marketing call after the 31-day period has elapsed, go back to the Do Not Call Registry home page and follow the links to file a complaint. You’ll need to provide the marketer’s company or phone number, so be sure to get that information when the call comes.

Your phone number will stay in the Registry for five years.

What are you waiting for? Do it now!

Three More Movies

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And three more movie reviews.

Over the past week or so, Mike and I have seen three movies: one in theaters and two on DVD.

Casino Royale

Casino Royale Movie PosterWell, it’s about time. Finally, a James Bond who is believable. I’m not just talking about the actor, I’m talking about the characterization. This bond is not perfect in almost every way. He’s vulnerable and makes more than a few mistakes.

Unlike all other Bond films, this one seems dark and real, a more accurate (but still probably quite far from truly realistic) dramatization of the spy business. It wasn’t a fun movie, like all the others are. It was a spy thriller with plenty of twists and turns.

I had a little trouble believing the love interest part of the story — too much emotion, too fast — but I believe it was included to develop the character. After all, Casino Royale was the first Bond adventure, the one that takes place right after he gets his “double-0” rank. One can argue that the events of this story are what make the character what he is in later stories.

I have never read Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, but would like to. It would be interesting to see how closely this movie follows the book.

WordPlay

WordPlay Movie PosterIf you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I’m particularly fond of words. It probably has a lot to do with writing for a living. The way I see it, words are my tools and the more tools I’m comfortable using, the better I can get my job done.

That said, I’ve been wanting to see WordPlay, the documentary about the annual crossword puzzle championship, since it was released to theaters. It didn’t come to Wickenburg — I didn’t really expect it to — so I waited until it was available on Netflix and moved it to the top of my queue.

The movie was relatively entertaining and provided lots of insight into the creation and solving of crossword puzzles. I used to do crossword puzzles daily when I worked for the New York City Comptroller’s Office. In those days, there was so little work to do, I had to do something to stay awake. So I did the puzzles in Newsday, the New York Times, and the Daily News every single day. I got pretty good at it, but not anywhere near as good as the competitors in WordPlay. These are people who can finish the New York Times crossword puzzle in less than 5 minutes with no errors. Egads!

The movie included interviews with puzzle creators and solvers, as well as with Will Shortz, the New York Times Puzzlemaster. Some of the solvers are people we all know: Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart, and Ken Burns, to name a few. It was interesting to get their insight.

My husband watched the movie with me and didn’t seem terribly interested throughout. I think his take on the puzzle solvers in the competition was that they were a bunch of geeks who needed to get lives. In some cases, I think that may be true. But it was interesting to see that some people have taken this skill to such extremes.

The Ladykillers

The Ladykillers Movie PosterThis is a 2004 remake of the 1955 movie of the same name starring Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers (among others). This newer version starred Tom Hanks. Like the Da Vinci Code, this was a complete waste of Mr. Hanks’s acting talent. But in this case, the acting wasn’t the problem — he did quite a job acting out the character of a rather wacky and over-educated caper mastermind. The problem was the movie. It was so bad that it wasn’t worth his efforts. In fact, his acting was probably the best thing about it.

In the story, the Hanks character rents a room at an elderly woman’s house. He and his henchmen then proceed to tunnel their way into a nearby casino’s cash counting room from the woman’s root cellar. Their cover story is flimsy — as it was in the first movie, which I also saw — and the whole thing is so far-fetched that the movie makers can’t possibly expect the audience to believe any of it. But rather than allow it to play out as a farce, it’s taken a bit seriously, so there’s really no fun in it. And the frequent use of the f-word in all of its forms (including the all-to-popular mother-f-er) makes it a movie that might make it uncomfortable to view with kids — or your parents.

My advice: avoid this one. It isn’t worth the rental fee.