- 1/24/2008 10:43:43 PM2nd Week of Any Day NowAs we approach the end of the second week of "any day now", I thought I might spend a moment sharing what I've learned about writing a blog on the internet.
This past week I downloaded a program called "WebLog Expert". This is a desktop application that analyzes your host provider's web server log files. If you're not sure what those are, the short answer is that they are files that record all of the known (or derived) information about the visitors to your web site.
If you examine the image below, you will see that I've opened the log file in Microsoft Excel.
At a first glance, it may look like a bunch of rows that have columns with cryptic names and many meaningless rows of garbage. This is actually the raw data collected from every single visitor to the website for November 22, 2007. Key pieces of information that get recorded are:
- The Date and Time of the visit
- What page or image on the website that was looked at
- The unique Internet Address (or TCP/IP) of the visiting computer
- Which web browser was being used
- What type of Operating System is being used
- and most importantly... how the user "found" what they are looking at
In other words, where were they prior to being here and what led them here
What the WebLog Expert program does is it records all of this data, summarizes it and then joins it against other known data such as:
- Countries
- Cities
- Companies
For example,
the data column that records the visitors internet address... Who assigns that address and how did that person get such an address. From that address alone, I can know the Country and City where that visitor came from and the name of the company that allowed their computer access to the internet.
I can also know,
- Which locations do most of my visitors come from
- When do most of the visits happen
- which pages are the most popular
- What words or phrases were people looking for when they found this site
- While they were visiting the site, What was everything they looked at and in what order
- What was the last thing they were looking at before they left
- Is the site becomming more popular, less popular, or staying about the same
- what kinds of things do I write about that causes all of the things above to change
The image below tells me that when people get referred to the adoption site, they are referred from the following websites, in the following order:
1. Danny Dirt
- This is another blog that I write on
2. Google Images
- Apparently when people look for certain images, they find this site
3. Who-Is
- Used to locate information about this site
4. (NewMB)North East Wisconsin Message Board
- Thanks Gladys!
5. EZ-Net
- This is a local internet provider in my area
6. Adoption Chase
- Thanks Chase Family!
You don't have to be a statistics nut to find this kind of information interesting.
There is definitely a very scary side to all of this. The question that appears to be good is also dangerous. Who is looking at the site?
If you are a regular reader, you may have noticed that most of the previous blog posts have been removed. After careful analysis of the data above, I determined that we may have had some visitors to the site who may (or may not) take offense to what was written. In particular - names, places (or descriptions of places) and images were posted. To date, no one has specifically complained but we are trying to be proactive and not rock the boat while we wait for our appointment to be scheduled.
In the meantime, we continue wait, write, and marvel at what God is doing and how many people are reading about it on this web site.
