Today marks five years to the day since I launched this site. A year ago I blogged some stats and pictures from prior versions of the site.

Below are the updated versions of the graphs from that post with data collected in the last year, the large drop off in visits in the middle of last year was due to a change in servers and the stats reporting software which filter out bots and other non human source of traffic from the stats.

During the last five years this site has served as an outlet of fun, anger, opinion and pure geekness.

In total over the last 1,826 days of operation there have been 203,869 visitors accessing 670,871 pages. Sure that may not be earth shattering stats compared to many other blogs or websites but as a website I set up as an experiment in my spare time while at university it is stats that are far beyond anything I expected. So today I say thank you to my readers of my random rants.

This morning I made the decision to completely remove my Facebook profile. This was after the forced Facebook Connections changes last week and this indepth article on wired.com into them.

As a result of this decision I think my blogging output it going to increase substantially. At the moment I mainly blog larger more indepth and generalised public posts than Facebook which normally is a feed of links and shorter thoughts – some of which come through twitter others that I just post there.

To distinguish this new cohort of posts I am thinking about creating a new section to my site at the moment called “The Wall” – but I am liking to change this name when I implement the system this afternoon to something a little less of a direct copy.

The first post on “The Wall” if it was created and not just still code in my head would be this video that I am currently watching from a Delirious? DVD. But seeing as “The Wall” is still just “The Thought” at the moment it will have to live on my main blog for the next 12 hours or so.

Despite being incredibly busy during April and having little time to write many posts the number of visitors remained very strong.

Raw Visits: 5993 (down 2% on March)

Raw Page Views: 17642 (up 1.5%)

Google Analytics Visitor Count: 2184 (down 3.5%)

Google Analytics Page Views Count: 2935 (down 11%)

RSS Feed Views: 4009 (up 44%)

Estimated true number of visitors (Google Visitor Count + RSS Feed): 6193 (up 23%)

It is very difficult to extract all the robots polluting my data especially around reading the RSS feed. Looking at the figures my best bet is I am getting around 3,500 true visitors to my site through both directly loading the site and RSS. At the moment close to half my data each month is being spent on identified robots some of which I may start to block if they continue to consume too much data.

Since installing Google Analytics I have been checking my webstats on a near daily basis. However, because of my lack of blogging over the last few weeks I have also been monitoring the stats less. Today I learnt my lesson that maybe I should maintain a daily watch. Over the last few days (yesterday in particular) there has been a dramatic spike in the number of visits to my site despite no new blog posts being added.

Looking at the data in more detail it appears a lot of traffic is being generated out of China by a site called qq829.com

Looking into this some more there is this thread on a lot of traffic appearing from China and on the Google Analytics forum.

Furthermore both HubPages and Symantic have information on the Trojan that is causing the problem.

At this stage it does not appear that my website has been infected with Malware or compromised in anyway, however, please ensure that your antivirus software is up to date as this particular Trojan could be costing you a lot of traffic and could potentially cause other problems.

Furthermore I have now blocked traffic originating from the qq829 website, other people are blocking all of China but at this stage I am not considering it.

If you are facing similar weird problems with bursts of traffic to your site you can block the qq829 website by adding these lines to your .htaccess file.

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^qq829" TOBLOCK=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^cnzz" TOBLOCK=1

<FilesMatch "(.*)">
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=TOBLOCK
</FilesMatch>

deny from 219.232.240.0/20
deny from 203.171.224.0/20

As regular readers of this blog will have noticed the last few weeks have been mostly void of new posts.

At the moment I have a number of things happening in my life which are affecting my ability to find time to blog. Primarily uni during the week and a lot of hiking on the weekends.

I have also not had much time to keep up to date on the news or other blogs so I have had little reason to get in a sarcastic mood which puts me at my best. Google Reader is informing me that I have over 600 blog posts unread in the last two weeks so it is not just my blog posting that is being neglected it is the blog reading as well.

At this stage it may be next weekend (dependent on if I go hiking or not) before a flurry of posts are written.

In the meantime I really hope I can pick this seat when I go to the airport tonight (from xkcd.com)

Over the last month blogging about Tsunamis and Linux has seen my blog stats skyrocket.

The data:
Raw Visitors: 6,114 (note this includes robots, crawlers etc)
Raw Pageviews: 17,374 (note this includes robots, crawlers etc)
Google Analytics Visitors Count: 2,257
Google Analytics Pageview Count: 3,303
RSS Feed Visitors Count: 2,771
Combined RSS + Google Visitors Count:  5,028

This is up a total of 800 visitors from the month before.

Visitor Locations From Google Analytics:
2,257 visits came from 83 countries/territories
2,257 visits came from 652 cities

Most Popular Posts:
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx First Impressions
Word 2007 crashing on Windows 7 or won’t open documents
Getting ATI Radeon HD Drivers to work in Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1

In the past I have completely hated tracking cookies and the way in which ad websites track your browsing habits across multiple pages, sites and visits. However, as the web has developed tracking cookies have become more and more the accepted norm to the point now where I accept most cookies and have even installed them onto my website to track visitor movements in the form of Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool for being able to analyse your visitor numbers and browsing habits. Over the last six months I have been using the data collected to shape my blog posts in such away to attract more visitors but also retain the regular ones I have with things of interest and stop posting about those things that the data suggests people are not interested in. The main change in topic area as a result of this has seen me blog less about politics – leaving that to the heavy weights of Kiwiblog, No Minister, Frogblog and others. In place of these blog subjects I have been focussing more on computers, science, religion and general news related topics. This has seen the number of posts made decrease slightly but an increase in the number of comments made and a steady level of site visitors and a large rise in the number of visitors to the site’s RSS feed.

Below are the main highlights of the Google Analytics data from September to February, please note the visitor numbers are only those hitting the main site (as Google Analytics does not track RSS hits), Google Analytics also filters out bots, spiders and other automatic crawlers and aggregators so this is some of the best data I have on actual true human visitors to the site.

Visitors plotted by week

Breaking down the visitors by city is a really nice way to see how the blog is having a worldwide reach. Sure the vast majority of my visits come from New Zealand, but the data also shows many visits (in order from most visits) from London, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Singapore, Dublin, Perth, New York, Manchester, Los Angeles and more than 1,700 other cities around the world.

The breakdown of visitors by web browser makes for good reading especially as Firefox is beating Internet Explorer.

When you then add in the operating system into the mix Internet Explorer and Windows comes back to the top though.

The search keywords is one of my main sources for determining what topics I should blog on, as you see no politics related searches here:

So that’s it, I use Google Analytics to “spy” on visitors and but will happily share most of the data with you. The only thing I have excluded from this round up is the list of the most popular blog posts – but they are listed in the sidebar anyway (updated monthly). It will be interesting to see in another six months what has changed. In particular if changes in my personal life (moving countries) will affect my blogging and in turn affect my visitor numbers and trending.