Before I start getting into March’s review I want to let everyone know: We’re going to redesign the site again. This time we’re looking at getting a proper header (logo and text), and a really nice web design that looks like it’s professionally done. If anyone out there has a talented hand at art or design, let me know! We need ideas. (Also, a jab in the ribs to the current staff who are ignoring my emails in regards to this)

ON TO THE MEAT!

(I’ll intersperse random factoids and congratulatory messages with the technical charts and graphs throughout the article to keep it interesting for everyone.)

First up, I have to say that March was one of the funniest month’s we’ve had. And not just in articles, either - but in the comments! I hope you, dear readers, have been keeping up to date with the comments sections!

Of our accomplishments this month that don’t really fit into any category (now with prizes!):

• Foley’s comment on finding Beaton a potential husband had me in stitches (he gets a can of pop for this)
• Beaton got me reading graphic novels, for which she wins a cup of coffee
• I didn’t post any main-site articles… (bzzzt no prize) I really do miss writing every week though.
• Foley remixed my posted comics with his own text, twice, which resulted in hilarity (a shot of liquor for the pop as prize)
• Maristar created and posted her first comic, for which she wins a romantic tour of the city via automobile
• Plus we revealed a scandalous plot in which Beaton turns out to be my biological mother. (I am all the prize you need)

Traffic-wise, February was a sad month, but fear not! It appeared to be a temporary slump. We are almost back up to full January-levels of power again!

Yep, we’re still chugging along with just shy of a quarter million hits per month. That’s 10,000 unique visitors, too, not just the same people constantly refreshing. These are huge numbers. To quote a friend of mine, The Fox, “Holy shit dude I’d pay thousands for that kind of traffic.”

In terms of data transferred, we did about 6 gigs this month - that’s the equivalent to shipping out 50 meters of books (as lined up on a shelf). That’s a lot of information!

I’ll break it down day-by-day so you can see exactly what’s going on and when:

According to the above list, here are the top articles:

#1: March 16th: Speaking of Sailors by Beaton
#2: March 30th: The Pope and I by Beaton
#3: March 31st: Listen up, Kids by Foley
#4: March 12th: Maristar makes a Comic by Maristar
#5: March 13th: Holy crap, TMNT is back by Iright Daley

Of course, people visiting on March 16th could have been reading and moreso enjoying all the earlier articles, so it’s not quite an accurate judgement of popularity. In an equally fallable method of measuring, I present the top 5 most commented articles of the month:

#1: 74 comments: Hot Party Comics by Foley
#2: 50 comments: The US vs. Canada, the final showdown by Iright Daley
#3: 26 comments: Oh give me a home by Beaton (tied for third)
#3: 26 comments: Books with Pictures by Beaton (yeah, tied with herself)
#5: 22 comments: The more things change, the more they something something by Pagz

Given that beaton appears on the lists 4 times I think I’ll have to name her EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH. I don’t have a plaque or anything. Congrats to all, all the same!

To sum up the days of the week, we can see that Beaton Fridays comes out on top again! Second month in a row, too.

Now the dreaded Search Terms! Why dreaded? Because they are so random it makes me uncomfortable. Why the hell is Bikemania on Ice so popular?!

Apologies for the lack of in-depth stats. Due to our new filing system the stats don’t report back to me the most popular articles like they used to.  I’ll have to look into fixing that!

Hooray! It’s that time of the month and it’s time for February Statistics! (Actually I’m posting this on March 30th and backdating for March 1st because I’m trying to cover my extreme tardiness)

I’ll keep this short and sweet because a lot of my stats don’t reflect accurately (as March is almost over now). For example, one of our biggest search results is “Captain Highliner” but that post didn’t come until after this date! *insert spooky music here*

As you’ll see above, February saw a massive drop in traffic. This made me sad, but then I realized that it’s still our third busiest month of all time. It’s just sad to see the numbers dip so low. I believe every February is a slow blogging month (at least in my webhosting experience).

Now I’ll move on to our daily traffic rates. Friday comes out ahead of the pack again! Beaton must be doing something right:

And just for curiosity’s sake, hourly traffic:

Now we’ve got a nice list of who’s browsing and with what. Safari is making advances on us and Internet Explorer is taking more and more slices of my pie every month. Damn you! My site used to be 65% FireFox. This news is quite upsetting!

Of course I know at least two authors on our own site that don’t use firefox… *glares*

Finally, some very-low-detail search stats:

And that’s it! It’s all the details I have. March stats will be coming out ON TIME (tomorrow I think? Which is like ONE MONTH FROM NOW WOOOAAAAH) and I promise will be more detailed.

It’s that time again! Well, it’s 11 days after that time again but screw you, I was feeling lazy. This time around I’ve included 80% more charts and graphs as I love charts and graphs.

Around a month ago I posted our December Stats and I was quite suprised - best month ever? Amazing! A lot of folks chalked it up to Craigslist ads (even though I specifically mentioned how it couldn’t be in the last stats post). Will this month do better? Worse? Let’s find out.

Yep, looks like we’re still growing! All the Craigslist ads I have out expired in December, so there is 0 input from there. My maths aren’t so good but that appears to be a 1.1% increase over last month. Interestingly enough, our site requests have gone down but our page requests have gone up. That means we’ve had a significant reduction in bots/spam/otherwise-non-humans yet still retained our traffic levels. Nice!

Here are some details I get each month:

Well, it looks like we’ve gone down in Unique IPs per day… only around 750 this month, from 950 last month. I was really hoping to break 1000, but losing all those bot connections probably was a good thing. :) 9000 visits per day is pretty good though - the average surfer looks at 10 different pages before leaving again.

So what time of the day do we get all this traffic?

10AM still seems to be the favorite! I have no idea why. How about we follow up with some search statistics. Shakira, our monthly top-ranker for everything Blitz, is no longer #1! She doesn’t even appear on the pie chart:

Unfortunately she’s been replaced by something even more bizzarre; Dragonball-Z and Marines. In fact, if you take a look at this list here, you’ll see that Shakira only got 8 search results through us!

You can also see that quite a few of our links are referrals or bookmarks; few people search for our content to find it. :)

ON TO SOME COMPETITION!

Here’s the day-of-the-week popularity charts. There’s no way to for sure tell which author is the most popular, so using this measuring stick we simply look at how many people logged into the site on each day of the week:

#1: Maristar Mondays! Congrats Maristar for being in the top 5 every single goddamn month.
#2: Pagz Wednesdays! I know we all totally love his Star Wars frame-by-frame review, but since he stopped doing those his stats seemed to have gone up. HMMM
#3: Beaton Fridays! Beaton Fridays are starting to get popular because she’s edging in on NSP’s comics.

But then there’s a second way of measuring! The following is a list of how popular each specific day was, getting us a handle on the most popular articles:

#1: Beaton’s Magna Cum Laude! Her first Blitzed foray into the world of comics was, by far, our busiest day of the month. Congrats! (We also had a Blitz technical update that day but I don’t count it as it never showed on the front page)
#2: Maristar’s Dreaming of Better Movies! This was also the launch of BlitzTehc, our nerdalicious subsite… However I’m not contributing those posts to the scoring total because BlitzTehc doesn’t appear on the main page. Three way ties are messy anyway.
#3: Ashblaster’s Robots and Bottle Tokes! The trippy youtube-clippings seem to be popular (and this article was the one with the Robocop music video/montage which was awesome).

Finally, there is a third metric for measuring the most popular articles: direct references. I don’t have a chart or a graph for this one, I have to inspect some complicated log files to get this data out properly. A direct reference is an article that is loaded on it’s lonesome - this doesn’t count main page views or glancing back through the archives, or even search requests. This only counts how many times each page has been specifically looked at. (For example, after you submit a comment you are taken to a page that lists only the article you have commented on; this would count).

Many search engine results will link to specific articles like this, and other websites commenting on a particular post of ours might have linked to a specific article. For these reasons this is my favorite metric for measuring article popularity:

#1: The Original four Shakira articles. Yep, we thought we shook off Shakira but she’s still here, clinging on to life. Damnit! I thought we lost her! Way back in the day (these articles are over a year old now) we used to post 4 articles per day, all on the same subject. Each of these individual 4 articles ranked higher than any other directly-viewed article in January.

Interstingly enough, “Side-Boob” has made an appearance in our logs (both as site referals and search results), and my animated side-boob picture happened to be on this page as well. It looks like our “Shakira” fanatacism my actually just be side-boob fanatacism this month!

#2: Non-Stop-Pop’s Super Blooper comic! This is the hilarious Superman spoof.

#3: Maristar’s Dashing through the Snow bus blog! Bus blogs always make the top-charts every month in some form or another.

Strangely enough, this month each of those top links were NOT from January! They were all older articles. Very strange indeed! I guess The Blitz’s classic stuff is better than the new?

A new stat I’ve just come up with isn’t really an accurate measure of anything; it’s how many times people have clicked on an Author’s name, to pull up their bio/list of their articles:

#1: Beaton! Congrats Beaton, I’m sure your #1 article of the month helped contribute to this.
#2: Weasel! Hooray for me!
#3: Foley. :(

Well, that’s it for this month - be sure to come back in a week or two and I’ll have February’s stats over-analyzed for you. ;)

A lot of people seem to think nobody reads the Blitz anymore, and I can definitely see why. Our commenting level has gone down (no more posts from Fozzie or Gwydion, which used to spark debates), which is what most people use as a measuring stick for their post popularity. Unfortunately, comments can’t be the measuring stick used! It turns out we have a multitude of people lurking in the background…

So I’m going to make publicly available our site stats!

One thing to note during these stats - I have removed all statistical tracking software and Google site submission plug-ins from the site, so there is literally no advertising or search engine submission going on. I have no meta tags or keywords. In other words, I am doing absolutely nothing to promote site growth.

November was our best month ever, following our relatively slow yet still decent September/October (due to site upgrades, design changes, and lazy writing).

For those that are curious, our busiest visiting hour is 7:00 to 8:00 AM, Pacific Time, closely followed by the midnight to 1:00 AM hour (when we publish our new articles). Our slowest hour is 3:00 to 4:00 AM, but the afternoon hours are also pretty slow (2:30-7:00 PM).

I used to publish a “What’s the most popular article?” section, which was quite popular. But due to the new site format, with all the articles on one page, it’s fairly difficult to track this accurately. Using the old method (direct article hits):

Most popular articles for November:
#1: Pag’z Star Wars Dissection. I have no idea why this is number one - it has no fancy pictures, it has no comments - but it was directly viewed twice as much as the below. I have to admit, I don’t really like the Star Wars Dissection personally, but congrats to Pagz I guess!
#2: The chocolate pizza comes in second place, narrowly squeaking ahead of the below article. I gotta say this article was delicious looking.
#3: The Wickerman movie review almost made it to second place! Congratz Maristar!

Like I mentioned, however; the above stats can’t really be trusted because it doesn’t count articles read from the main page, which is where most people will be reading them (especially if they aren’t commenting). So, I’m going to try out a simple… Busiest day = #1, second busiest day = #2, etc.!

Busiest Days of November:
#1: Nov. 20th’s Kittens and Kubes takes the #1 spot! Clearly a crowd favorite what with all those cute pictures of cats. Congratulations Maristar!
#2: Nov. 18th’s Some like it Hot, an excellent Non-Stop-Pop comic draws in the second largest crowd for the month.
#3: Nov. 4th’s The Emperor’s New Clothes is another Non-Stop-Pop comic!

Now the busiest-days method is also a bit inaccurate because people may naturally visit more often Saturdays anyway, but the fact that Monday’s Kitten and Kubes came out on top proves that our readers… Like barfingly cute articles.

Speaking of days of the week, Wednesday is officially the busiest day! Again, no idea why. We have no scheduled authors for Wednesday at this time so it’s just a fill-in spot. =) Saturday is second busiest, followed by a very close 5-way tie with Friday eeking just 8 hits ahead of Monday.

Top 5 search referrals:
#1: “Shakira”, of all things, is our #1 search request.
#2: “Dear Maggie”, though she hasn’t had an article for ages, is #2!
#3: “DragonBall Z” is our third search request for some reason.
#4: “I am bender please insert girder” has been a common sight - every single month this shows up in the top 5 list somewhere.
#5: “Postsecret” (which maristar did an article on) and “Hell pizza condom” are both tied for 5th place. I don’t know what kind of pizza that person got but maybe they could take a picture and mail it to postsecret?

I’ve always been trying to push the “50% Firefox” audience and we’ve always hovered around 60-70%. I haven’t checked in several months but I’m disappointed for November: