14.11.12

(Disappointing) Review of My Blog’s Traffic

Posted in News, Random Thoughts, Tech at 7:09 pm by Liv

A while back I’ve boasted on this very blog about the amount of traffic it has reached — based on stats that I have pulled up from the Wassup WordPress Plugin. I have decided recently to have a closer look at the traffic — any blogger who’s taking himself seriously checks now and then on his audience! — and part of this I have decided to look in the server access logs myself and see how much they tally up with Wassup, as well as looking for a trustworthy 3rd party to quantify some figures for me too on this so I can have 3 reference points in this comparison.

For the purpose of this exercise, I have decided to use QuantCast as my 3rd party provider of analytics — they are a well established name and provide interesting analytics not just on page views, visits etc but on unique users, audience breakdown and so on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink Comments

Disclaimer

25.09.12

8,000+ Page Views a Month!

Posted in Blogroll, Fun Time, News, Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 7:53 am by Liv

Back in February/2012, I’ve hit 3,000+ page views a month — big milestone for a small blog like this, I’m sure you’ll all agree! It appears traffic has been on the way up though, as my latest look at the Wassup stats reveals over 8,000 page views for the last month! And that is, as per usual, taking the spiders, the spammers and all that noise out of the game:

Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink Comments

Disclaimer

11.07.12

WP-Syntax Gotcha for Dealing with Less Than and Greater Than Signs

Posted in Blogroll, News, Tech at 7:47 pm by Liv

I’ve been digging for a while now into how to fix this annoying issue that I’m having with WP-Syntax plugin when writing code which contains less than (<) or greater than (>) — which, let’s face it, if you have an if / while / for in the code is bound to happen! The trouble is that WordPress automatically escapes these (and a few other characters) when pasting code in the visual editor — and since you need to use the <pre> tag with WP-Syntax, from there on these don’t get interpreted by the browser back as HTML entities and you will left with code “decorated” with &lt; and &gt; — needless to point out that makes code unreadable! This has been annoying me for a while now because it means every time I go back to edit code in a previous article, if the code contains < or > I end up screwing up the whole formatting if I switch (by mistake or not) to the visual editor. (As a side note, I love the visual editor, I prefer using it wherever possible — that’s what it’s there in WordPress for: to make lives easier, right?)

Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink 1 Comment

Disclaimer

03.02.12

3,000+ Page Views a Month!

Posted in Blogroll, News, Photos, Random Thoughts at 12:22 am by Liv

In case you haven’t guessed it, yup, I’m talking about this very blog hitting a new milestone and hitting over 3,000 page views a month! I know this doesn’t sound like much for a “serious” website, but for something like this blog it IS a lot! Even more so as a lot more of the traffic nowadays seems to hit my technical articles — though, granted, there’s still quite a bit of traffic from people (my mates I guess?) looking at my pictures from what I can see…

This statistic was pulled from my beloved WassUp WordPress plugin — which this morning (PST) showed me this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink 1 Comment

Disclaimer

07.10.11

WassUp for WordPress

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 2:18 pm by Liv

It’s not often I big up WordPress plugins or extensions, but this one caught my eye: WassUp. I’ve just installed it on my blog a couple of days ago and I am utterly impressed with what this little thing can do! I have got access to my website stats aggregated via awstats and webalizer, however, since for the purpose of my blog I’m not interested in that much level of details, I think WassUp is THE stats plugin for WordPress! I just want to find out quickly for instance if there are any pages 404-ing, what are users searching for to reach my pages (for once, if certain keywords direct users wrongly to my blog, I need to tweak those pages such that they don’t appear in the results on the likes of Google, Microsoft etc — I am happy to have less readers on my blog, but ensure all of those are “qualified” users, rather than increasing my number of hits on the blog but have a huuuuge bounce rate).  I want to know what are the top performing pages — and I want to be able to exclude spiders, spammers etc when I pull these stats. And look at this, it does just that — it even signals things like the user has tried to leave comments (and failed! ) so it’s probably a spammer:

Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink Comments

Disclaimer