Category Archives: BLog Technicalities

Information about the creation and maintenance of this site.

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.

E-Mail Subscribers

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A report on the subscription count here.

This morning, I took a peek at the Feedburner e-mail subscription count for this site. This service, which works with my RSS feed, automatically generates a daily e-mail message that summarizes the articles posted to the site in the previous day. If there were no articles in a day, there’s no e-mail. If there were 1 or more articles in a day, 1 e-mail message is generated and sent. The message includes links to the full article content. So a subscriber can skim through a new content message, decide he wants to read an article, click the link to the article, and jump right to the article’s page. Easy and an effective way to keep track of what’s new without having to manually browse the site each day.

E-Mail Subscription ConfirmationThe service, which is full automated, works with the E-Mail Notification form that appears on the site’s Home page. A person who wants to subscribe enters his e-mail address and clicks Subscribe. A window opens with a form that prompts him to enter characters in a box. When he clicks Complete Subscription Request, Feedburner generates a confirmation e-mail message and sends it to his e-mail address. That prevents people from subscribing others to this service when they might not want it. He must click the link in that message when he receives it (normally within about a minute) to start the subscription. If he doesn’t click the link, the subscription does not start.

Although this site gets a lot of visitors and many of them are repeat visitors, it only has 12 e-mail subscribers. I think it’s because people are worried that they’ll get a lot of junk mail.

But here’s the truth: subscribers only get the messages as described here. There’s no junk. I know this because I’m a subscriber — I signed on to monitor how this feature works and make sure it doesn’t spam my subscribers. I’m very pleased with the results and highly recommend it to anyone interested in keeping track of content. It’s especially good for people who don’t subscribe to or monitor RSS feeds, which offer another way to keep track of what’s going on here without manually visiting. (I don’t follow RSS feeds because they’re simply not a part of my normal daily routine. E-mail, however, is.)

Anyway, if you’re a regular visitor, I urge you to give this feature a try. I think you’ll like it. And if you don’t, that’s okay. You can always unsubscribe.

Reader Engagement Site Improvements

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I add a few “engagement” features to this site.

Blogging is more than just using blogging software to create and edit posts. After all, if someone shouts in an empty room, does her voice make a sound? An important part of blogging is to attract and retain readers. That’s where content, SEO, and site design come into play.

I’m a strong believer that once you get a visitor to your site, the site’s overall design can help keep them there, at least for longer than the average 30 seconds. (Read Jakob Nielsen’s books for the sad truth about site/page visit lengths.) You can do this by making sure the site is legible and by including navigation features that make it easy to find interesting content.

I read an excellent article on Connected Internet today: “Best WordPress Engagement Plugins: Make Users Read More Posts“. The author lists several plugins — some of which I already use or have tried in the past — that’ll help keep site visitors on your site, reading more content. I added two of them today.

Readers Posts

Readers Posts is a plugin that offers three features:

  • Within The Loop, indicate how many readers have read a post before you.
  • List the most recently viewed posts.
  • List the most viewed (i.e., popular) posts.

I installed the second of these three options in the sidebar of aneclecticmind.com. It began working immediately, drawing information from the WordPress database to list the ten most recently viewed posts. Refresh the page after a few minutes and the list changes. This site has, on average about 5 visitors online at any time and they don’t always come to the site’s Home page. That, of course, is the drawback of any plugin that lists recently read posts — it only lists the posts that have been read on their own page — not on the Home page or archive page. In a way, that’s a good thing. It means the person reading a post is reading it because he found it via a search engine or used a link on the site to read it. He’s reading it because he wants to read it (or thinks he does; as we all know, search engines don’t always display desired results). That’s more meaningful than Home page reads, which could include lots of articles that the visitor just isn’t interested in at all.

The benefit of this: site visitors are shown a list of articles that other visitors have found interesting. I love this feature because it shows me what people are coming to the site to read and it helps me write more content of interest to visitors.

If you try this plugin, don’t be alarmed when you click the link above and arrive at a German-language site. Scroll down on that page and you’ll find an English-language translation. Although it isn’t perfect grammar (what is?), it’s certainly good enough to understand the installation and configuration process.

Landing Sites

Landing Sites is a very cool plugin that does a bunch of things, when installed correctly:

  1. It checks to see if the visitor was referred to the page from one of several popular search engines. It the visitor has not, it stops working.
  2. It displays a message with the name of the search engine and the search word(s) or phrase used to find the page.
  3. It displays a list of links to posts on your site that also match the search criteria.

What I like about this plugin is that it only displays content if a visitor has arrived at the site by clicking a link in a popular search engine’s results list. I put it at the top of the sidebar, where visitors are most likely to see it when they arrive at the page.

Installing the plugin isn’t difficult, although you really do need to follow the instructions on the page you download it from. If you copy and paste the code right from that page, you’ll need to modify all the single and double quote characters so they’re straight quotes when pasted into your template file. (I didn’t notice this at first and got PHP errors. It was an easy enough fix.) The result is what you see if you happened to arrive at a page on my site via popular search engine results link. You can try searching for Hermosa Ranch Insanity (the test link I used) and clicking the link to content on my site to see what I mean.

The benefit of this, of course, is that if the article the visitor came to read isn’t enough for him, he’s given other possible articles to try. He may or may not follow the links, but at least they’re there for him. You could keep him on the site longer.

Conclusion

Read the Connected Internet article. It tells you more about these two plugins, as well as others I currently use or have tried in the past. You might find overlap among features; pick the plugin you like best. Give them a try and see how they affect your visitor stats.

aneclecticmind.com Has Moved

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Didn’t notice, did you? Good!

As stated somewhere in Murphy’s Law, “A Web server will run smoothly every day, for days on end — until the Webmaster takes a few days off.”

Well, I got a little tired of my office-based Web server going down when I went away for a few days and decided to do something about it. I’ve begun moving my Web sites and the other sites I host off my Web server and onto a Deluxe Hosting account on GoDaddy.com.

GoDaddy.com is a domain registration/hosting company that is either loved or hated by everyone who knows of it. I happen to be on the love side. The rates are incredibly low, all account/server maintenance can be done remotely without contacting a GoDaddy representative, and online help and technical support are reasonably good (although I admit far from perfect).

I’ve been hosting theflyingm.com on GoDaddy for years now. I don’t use it as a Web site. I use it for reliable e-mail and to host the podcast files for Maria Speaks and KBSZ-AM.

The Economy hosting plan, which should be good enough for 95% of Web publishers, offers 5 GB of hard disk space and 250 GB of bandwidth per month. theflyingm.com was using up about two thirds of the disk space and maybe a quarter of the bandwidth. (Remember, I’m hosting podcasts, not high-def movies.) That cost $3.99/month, but you can get a 10% discount if you sign up for a year at a time. The Economy plan also includes subdomains (for example, maria.theflyingm.com) mapped to their own folders on the server (I didn’t use this feature) and 5 mySQL databases. There’s some other stuff, too, but I don’t use it.

The Deluxe hosting plan offers 100 GB of hard disk space and 1000 GB of bandwidth per month. I think I’m paying $6.99 for that each month. The same discount applies and there are higher discounts for longer renewal periods. This plan supports subdomains as well as multiple domain hosting. So although my account is set up for theflyingm.com, it can also host aneclecticmind.com, wickenburg-az.com, etc. It also supports up to 15 (I think) mySQL databases, making it easy for me to keep individual databases for all of my WordPress-based sites. I can set up all of my sites on one account, so I can shut down my pesky server without spending an arm and a leg for hosting.

And, as Miraz told me the other day, if you use the coupon code DIGG when checking out, you can save another 10% on the purchase. Unfortunately, I got that message too late to use it. (Next time.)

You can learn more about GoDaddy’s hosting plans and features on their Web site.

So now I’m in the process of moving my sites to the new setup at GoDaddy.com. aneclecticmind.com and MacCowboys.com are both done. wickenburg-az.com is next.

I will be writing a detailed article about making the move as a how-to article for our WordPress VQS book companion Web site (which will also be moving soon). It’s a relatively tricky process, but not difficult if you know what to do.

Now if you’d like to comment about your experiences with GoDaddy.com, please use the comments link for this post. If you’re a hater, try to keep your temper in check and explain why you don’t like GoDaddy.com. If you’re a lover, tell us what you like best. If you’re sitting on the fence or have questions, don’t be shy about speaking up.