Metapost

I decided to look at google analytics for my blog today after I finished watching this useful, if unbelievably dry, video about using the "ASP.NET AJAX CascadingDropDown Control Extender." Don't ask. It's my job. Anyway, it nearly fused my synapses. Not because of the complexity, but rather because of the monotone of the delivery... can we have just one wisecrack please? So I needed something to wake up my brain before I could begin creating cascading drop down controls. Yes, somehow, web site usage statistics fit this bill for me. I'm a geek.

Anyway, the majority of my traffic is still dominated by people reading my April 5, 2007 post about removing Spector Pro, a keylogger tool that people generally use to spy on their kids and spouse's computer activities.

Really, though. I have had 1,915 page views in the month of January. 627 of those were the keylogger page. Almost 1/3 of my traffic is for a nearly two-year old post!! There must be a lot of paranoid people out there. I hope I've enabled countless people to surf porn, buy drugs from mexico, or meet "friends" online without fear of being spied on by their spouse or parents. Don't thank me, I'm just a philanthropist by nature.


In this same timeframe in 2007, I had a total of 187 pageviews, 21 of which were the spyware page. Well that ain't bad, a 10-fold increase in traffic in one year. Too bad it's mostly people trying to cheat on their wives. Oh well.

I also now have 16 google reader subscribers, up from about 3 a year ago. Yay! And I think I only know about half of them personally. I feel like that is a tremendous victory.

In January:

• Nearly half (47%) of my traffic came from google.
  
• 13.6% or 198 visits was direct traffic. That is probably some of my luddite friends who don't know about blog readers and therefore just go to a bookmark once in a while to see if I've posted.
  
• 11.68% or 170 visits came from Prince of Petworth, probably because I comment there all the time and he links to me.
  
• 7.14% or 104 visits came from dcblogs.com. I got "noted" once this month.
  
• A paltry 6 visits, or 0.41% came from expressnightout.com! That blows. I mean, you get printed, on actual paper, in the Washington Post Express and a miserable 6 people linked from there? Or maybe some people actually made that impossible paper-to-internet leap of faith and typed in the URL. Let's count them as part of the 13.6% above.
  
• The rest is mostly other people who link to me, or a random blog where I commented, or a random geek forum linking to the spyware post, or some non-google search engine. (Didn't know about those, did you?) The grey wedge is "everything else" even smaller than those little slices.
  

And what the hell does all this mean...

Well, commenting and/or being linked from PoP generates a lot of traffic.

Getting in dcblogs generates a lot of traffic.

Getting in the Express Blog Log is fun, if you find out about it soon enough to grab a copy to put on your fridge, but it's impossible to know whether or not it generates any traffic. I'm guessing not so much. Need to do a covariant analysis of months where I was not in blog log. Does anyone know how to do that...

Finally, and most importantly: I should be selling spyware removal products and services.