Tech geek alert! You may want to jump to the second paragraph…
If you noticed the blog loads faster in your browser, you’re not enjoying the benefits of a beefed up Internet architecture (this is the U.S. after all). No, I removed some reporting code from the site. I was toying with both Google Analytics (GA) and Sitemeter (SM) to track site usage. A sort of long term bake-off. Neither product really gave me a full picture of what was up. GA required javascript on your side to collect data, while SM could fall back to using an offsite image if javascript was unavailable. Either way, neither gave me a complete picture and underrepresented actual visits. So, I dumped the code for both this morning and, at least for me, the site loads faster.
End alert, keep reading…
With the usage reports I was using undercounting visitors, reports based on the web servers logs must be in error in the other direction because they’re so much higher. For the last three months, April – June 2008, my web server reported a daily average of 4,483 visitors (4510, 4797, 4142 respectively) who averaged 1.9 page views.
Daily page views can seemingly vary widely. For example, in June 2008, pages per day averaged 8,351 but there was a spike to 14,663 on the 14th (this unspectacular post went up on the 14th).
When asked, I tell people I have somewhere around 1,000 daily readers (my thinking: 300-600 daily visits GA and SM reported + nearly 700 RSS subscribers, knowing there was overlap). Not sure I’ll start saying that I have over 4k daily daily readers though. These numbers just don’t seem right.
Now, back to work…
