February 12, 2004
January traffic report

I've gone and reclaimed the old Sitemeter counter I'd used on my Blogspot site. Had to reset it to zero and rebuild all my pages, and I'll be taking a WAG as to my actual February numbers, and so on and etcetera. What can I say, I got what I paid for. Ultimately, I'll probably add an Extreme Tracking and/or Add Free Stats counter just to compare and contrast, but for now I'm too lazy. (Thanks to Alan for the Add Free Stats suggestion.)

I had about 32,000 visits in January, making it slightly less busy than December but pretty decent overall. Jon Matthews and American Idol tryouts continue to be big search enine favorites - these two posts on Matthews have drawn a boatload of comments, mostly asking for updates, and I eventually closed comments on the American Idol post. Lea Fastow was popular last month, but the second most frequent search term and a consistent winner for some time now is "ugly people", presumably because of my Show Business for Ugly People category. Who knew there was such interest?

Top referrers are below the More link. As always, thank you for coming by. I hope I can make a decent guess at February's numbers.

Aggregators, collections, indices, etc ====================================== 298: http://www.bloglines.com 140: http://blo.gs/ 111: http://www.technorati.com/ 73: http://ranchero.com/software/netnewswire/


Weblog referrers
================
1674: Atrios

1410: Daily Kos

656: Calpundit

548: TAPPED

369: Political State Report

198: The Burnt Orange Report

160: Rhetoric & Rhythm

144: Rob Booth

129: The Sideshow

96: A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

91: Slacktivist

90: Coffee Corner

87: The Agonist

83: Matthew Yglesias

81: Greg Wythe

79: Virginia Postrel

77: Liberal Oasis


Top search terms
================

#reqs: search term
-----: -----------
842: lea fastow
818: ugly people
499: american idol tryouts
332: jon matthews
241: william krar
235: andy pettite
226: diane zamora
150: costco
83: prime number algorithm
78: largest rat
72: capturing saddam
64: world's largest rat
54: darlie routier
53: poincare's conjecture
51: tom coleman
50: schlitterbahn galveston
44: marfreless
43: if you love something set it free
42: catholic high school girls in trouble
39: marnie rose

Posted by Charles Kuffner on February 12, 2004 to Traffic Reports | TrackBack
Comments

You're using MT so obviously you're on some host with CGI capability, I don't understand why you don't run your own internal stats software. I use AWStats, it's wonderful. And it's free. I've had great success migrating old AWStats data even to newly reformatted host computers.

Posted by: Charles E on February 12, 2004 10:33 PM

I do use a counter provided by my host - that's the number you see directly above the Blogstreet and Sitemeter logos at the bottom. It gives daily and monthly summaries, which is where I get the info cited in these posts. What it doesn't give is running totals you can check during the day, like Sitemeter does. It also doesn't always give a full link to a referrer, especially when the referrer is on a message board somewhere. In combination with Sitemeter, I get a pretty good overall picture, but I suppose there's always room for improvement. I'll definitely check AWStats this weekend.

Posted by: Charles Kuffner on February 13, 2004 7:06 AM

Do you know how to dynamically capture SiteMeter data, so that you could put it somewhere else in your blog if you felt like it?

Posted by: Douglas on March 18, 2004 11:32 PM

I believe you need a paid version of Sitemeter for that. I know you can get CSVs of your data with the paid version. The free version doesn't have anything like that as far as I know.

Posted by: Charles Kuffner on March 19, 2004 8:57 AM