The Ramblings of Guise Dugal

I have a confession to make, I am a stalker and I have been keeping a sly eye over your statistics for some time now. It started off as a casual interest, but slowly became a matter of some deep interest within me. I was intrigued by your figure and couldn’t help but return to staring at it during slow parts of the day.

Wait, I don’t mean your own measurements, heck, even if I was told I can never work out what those numbers really mean. I know what I very much like, but those numbers are just ramblings of bingo numbers. No, no, I’m talking visitor statistics on this blog.

You see, as standard WordPress offers a dashboard for account holders that lets them see some basic visitor figures and trends, and this can be ported to self-hosted blogs through a plugin. For a while, this served me quite well, as I’ve always taken an interest in how people find my rambling thoughts and inane ideas.

The way WordPress statistics work is that for every view from non-logged in readers it makes a note of how they got there that time (whether a referring site or search engine), a truncated version of what they searched for to find it, the top pages and posts of the period, and a graphical representation of views over days, weeks and months.

I’m sure you can spot a few of the problems I was finding using the WordPress standard statistics. The main one that made me want to search around for better statistics was the truncation of search terms, because I like to play a game of “Guess the Entry” to see if I can work out where they ended up.

As a result, I ended up at Google Analytics, which also has a plugin for WordPress to take the hassle out of putting the code in.

Now, Analytics goes in to much more depth and detail than WordPress, but the stats themselves can get confusing. Examples of this include: 

• Not everything refers to Unique Visitors but to individual visits to the site;
• The Unique Visitors tally adds up Unique Visitors per day, even if they were returning from a previous day
• The “number of visits” rarely ever tallies up

However, it doesn’t truncate search queries and it counts visits from logged in visitors.

It also features a very nifty, yet completely technically redundant, visitor map. This is something that struck me as quite ridiculous, that not only does it not allow the visitor map to match to an IP address or some other piece of identifier (instead choosing to base number on criteria such as number of page views or general visits), but it doesn’t recognise that your actual provider may be nowhere near you. An example, I show as being some 95 miles away from where I am because of where my ISP is located, and if your ISP has numerous geographical locations from which it connects then they are factored in seperately.

Just in case anyone is wondering, my top five locations at the moment (25 February – 25 March 2008): West Hartford (119 visits), East Hartford (118 visits), Commerce City (83 visits), San Jose (64 visits), Hilton Head Island (55 visits). Though San Jose and Lathrop tended to visit the most pages per visit on average.

It’s an addiction though, I like watching my pretty graphs grow, even though like the human figure, I have no idea what all those numbers mean – if they indeed mean anything at all. All those numbers are are a very vague form of quantifiable data, just a false representation of standardised size and positioning, with no actual quality or descriptive element – and the same goes for the web stats.

However, I can still rely on the main reason I used Google Analytics, which was to find out how people who aren’t regular victim-unteers get here. What sort of path leads them to venture in to the path of my thought processes. Some of my favourites recently:

• guise dugal old man stubbyfingers (36) / guise old man stubbyfingers (1) / stubbyfingers (1) – I can only guess that someone doesn’t bookmark much. (DJ D, perhaps?)
• guise dugal old man (3) – that hurts, that hurts so bad
• finger my flower (1) – well, if you insist…
• exosuits homemade (1)
• facts on squirpions (1) / facts about squirpions (1) / squirpions (1) / three types of squirpion (1) – I really hope that it was some uneducated fool who can’t spell “scorpions”
•  youtube squirrel sex (1) - The Erotic Adventures of Nutbucking Nikki
• +”pugsley addams” fatter (1) – that also hurts, not only am I large but I’m large to the degree of being an extra Addams offspring fatter
• easter bunny nailed to the cross (1)

So, I’m going to try my darnedest to avoid the creepy stalker tool of stats and all it’s pretty graphs. Though, I may still try to get to grips with vital statistics. I’d very much like to come to grips with vital statistics.