[Stats] Blog Stats

I've had a few posts by an commenter bringing some of my stats into question, so I thought I'd lay out how I measure my traffic.

I use AWStats to track visitors to this site. The stats update about once every 12 hours. I use AWStats because it shows me not only who is visiting and when, but how they enter the site, where they come from, what they were searching for, etc.

I average between 4,000 and 5,000 unique visitors per month. Of these, ~600 are aggregators...people who only subscribe to the Atom feed.

I get about 2,700-3,000 links from Google and other various search engines per month. So far this month, the top queries have been:

1. 8004022a
2. whatip
3. michael russell
4. handcuff
5. t teen
6. blg
7. windows media center
8. sharpziplib
9. quake4 font
10. ffdshow

The top 10 pages on my site this month have been:

1. The main page of the blog;
2. A post about the different types of "Quality Bars;"
3. A semi-humorous post about Yoko Ono killing my Zen PMC; (Side note on this one...most of the backlinks seem to be from an accidental link from an Asian porn company)
4. A post on how to fix Windows Media Player 10 error 8004022a;
5. A comment about the .NET Framework on the Xbox 360;
6. My October '05 archive page;
7. The WhatIP? web service interface;
8. A diatribe about how the gaming community's single-minded focus on Jack Thompson could be hurting their cause;
9. A tutorial on how to do a clean installation of Windows XP Media Center Edition on an HP Media Center PC; and
10. The human-usable version of WhatIP.

The remainder are from a variety of sources. To be honest, most people tend to refer to me in other people's comments.

I don't include traffic from people hotlinking to my images, although there is some of that going on. I don't include traffic from spiders, or from aggregation services.

Do I get a lot of comments? No. I average about 5 new comments on the blog a day. I generally get three legitimate comments, one troll, and one piece of blog spam. I delete the blog spam, but I leave the rest. After all, if a person thinks strongly enough about me to take time out of his or her busy schedule to insult me, that's generally a sign that either something I'm doing needs to be addressed or that someone has issues with me personally. Either way, it's better to have it out in the open.