Category Archives: Websites

2006 Traffic Statistics

Blogging, Websites

At the end of 2008, I mentioned that I was going to publish some of this sites web statistics. It took a little longer to find the energy and time to put it together and without further ado, my web statistics for 2006.

Web site visitor statistics for www.lattimore.id.au in 2006

I only installed Google Analytics on the site half way through July 2006. I was  happy to see my traffic going up at that point, until I found out the hard way that being popular online has a cost associated to it. Over the roughly half year reporting period, 95010 visitors came to the site which resulted in 139687 pageviews.

The breakdown of the different traffic sources to the site over that window paints quite a scary picture of the search engine competitiveness, even back in 2006:

Web site traffic sources for www.lattimore.id.au in 2006

As you can see, the first non-Google search engine comes in at position 11 and they are delivering about 3% of the traffic of Google web search. If I include all Google sources, such as Google Image Search – the Google network of sites is providing a whopping 89% of all traffic to the site.

The most popular posts for the year were:

  1. Select Option Disabled & The JavaScript Solution
  2. Disable Options In A Select Dropdown Element
  3. Tinfoil Computer
  4. ASP Error ‘ASP 0104: 80004005?
  5. The Uplate Game Show With Hotdogs
What do your web statistics look like?

Web Statistics

Blogging, Websites

Matt Cutts, a prominent Google engineer has been posting an overview of the web statistics that his blog receives for the last few years. I certainly can’t compete with the staggering amount of traffic his site takes, however I thought it might interest a few people. In the next day or two, I’ll be writing three short posts highlighting this sites web statistics since 2006 in a yearly format.

Housekeeping, Part 1

Websites

Friday evening I mentioned that I was going to perform some housekeeping on my site which was well overdue.

I had expected that it would only take an hour or two, however I significantly underestimated the number of posts and the time required per post to remove the unneeded categories and tag them appropriately. In the end, it took so long that I couldn’t complete it all on Friday night and I’ve had several smaller sessions over the course of the weekend to complete it.

While a little time consuming, the results are quite promising – I’ve gone from 50 categories down to 27 and I may whittle that down further yet.

Housekeeping

Websites

When I upgraded WordPress in February, I mentioned that I’d do a little housekeeping. The housekeeping in this instance was related to the original category functionality and the newly added tagging feature.

It took a little longer than expected for that to happen, so I’ve set aside an hour or two tonight to work on it. I think in the first pass through, I’m going to focus on collapsing down the current category list and in a second pass add in tags describing the content more richly.

Multiple Personalities

Blogging, Life, Websites

I’ve been blogging on this domain since 2004 on various topics ranging from technical to personal and everything in between. For quite some time now, I’ve been thinking that I’m not really meeting anyones reading needs, as the content on the site flip flops between technical and personal so often; such that people that only want technical are forced to filter out the personal fluff and visa versa.

To solve that problem, I had a couple of different options available:

  • separate the current site in halves using a category, such as personal and technical
  • move the technical content onto a subdomain, such as http://technical.lattimore.id.au
  • move the technical content onto a completely different domain

I currently make fairly extensive use of categories within the site to organise my posts. I could have gone through and uncategorised the current posts and placed each post back into one of the two new categories or sections. To help with searching or stepping through the site, tagging all of the existing posts would have aided in that area. While it would have worked, it didn’t feel right to inject ‘useless’ categories into the mix to solve the problem.

Option number two would require multiple WordPress installations. There is nothing wrong with that and it’ll obviously work just fine on a technical level but without a little bit of upfront work, seemed as though it’d end in tears some point down the road.

In the end, I chose door number three and set about finding a new domain name that fit the bill. I wanted something that had a clearly technical inclination and after using a handy domain utility, couldn’t believe my luck when I found that ifdebug.com was available.

At the moment, I’m undecided as to what I’ll do with the existing content on the site. I’m inclined to just leave it here as it’s the simplest option, however there are benefits to moving it over to if debug; we’ll see how it pans out.

In the meantime, expect a steady stream of personal content to be published through this site and the technical goodies to land on ifdebug.com.