Blog

The more observant amongst you may have noticed a small change on the frontpage recently. Since D.org.uk moved to it's current domain back in January 2002 I have been using a 'Tracker' to collect visitor statistics. A small icon used to appear in the bottom left corner of the site's frontpage which allowed the tracker to gather stats about the number of people who visit the site, plus a whole host of other interesting things. I say 'used' to, because I've decided to use a different method for stats now.

Working out how many people visit a website is something that is fraught with difficulties. Some people count 'hits', which means every time a page is loaded they count that as a 'hit'. The tracker I used was a bit more clever than that, and counted unique visitors in a specified time period. Basically, if the same computer visited the same page 3 times in the space of say, 30minutes, that only counts as 1 'visitor', but would have counted as 3 'hits'. Anyway, the problem with the tracker is that it only counted stats for the frontpage of the site. Many people who visit the site arrive from a search enginge, and that means that they navigate straight to the page that has the piece of information that interests them, not necessarily the frontpage. So the figures produced by the tracker are not really all that accurate.

I'm now relying on stats captured in the server logs which are then automatically analysed by the excellent Webalizer software. This gives a complete picture of the number of people who visit delirious.org.uk. It also shows which pages are viewed the most. Interestingly it seems that most people who visit the site just want the lyrics to a d: song, with I Could Sing being the most popular (fairly predictable). According to the stats, the d:forum is another of the most visited parts of the site.

The server log stats show that on average Delirious.org.uk gets about 1000 'visits' per day (around 30,000 per month), where a 'Visit' is defined as an individual computer (IP address) viewing the website in one 30 minute session. For example, if the person views 10 different pages within 30minutes, that still counts as one visit. If they come back an hour later, that counts as a second visit. Each month the pages are viewed 115,000 times (on average), or to put it another way, 115,000 'page hits' per month. The biggest month to date was March 2004, where the site received nearly 150,000 page views, and in general the number of page views is up by about 40% from this time last year.

So it's good to know that people visit the site, it makes it worthwhile. To be honest I'd still run this website even if nobody viewed it, just because it's my hobby and I enjoy doing it. But there's certainly added motivation knowing that somebody somewhere is going to read what I write.