Web Site Traffic

I was looking over the web site log statistics for rocketjam.com earlier this week and there's a definite draw on the site that's generating most of the traffic.

I signed up for Google Analytics a few months ago and have finally got it set up to log all the site's pages. Before this, I would downloaded the raw log files provided by my site's hosting company, then run them through Analog, a log file analyzer. Analog is pretty configurable and you can find out a lot from its reports, but I'm finding Google Analytics gives you more data and gives you a lot of ways of looking at that data too.

A couple of years ago, I was submitting a lot of stories to Slashdot and getting quite a few of them accepted to the front page. I found this to be a good method for getting your web site placed in Google since you can have your website linked to your name as a story submitter. Since Slashdot gets a huge amount of traffic and there are a lot of sites around the internet that mirror their headlines, you end up getting a lot of links to your site scattered around the internet, and the number of sites linking to a particular site is one of the important metrics Google uses in its page ranking algorithm.

But I'm not getting as much page rank and traffic from that as I used to because I'm not submitting stories to Slashdot much these days. The site does get some traffic to the POV Ray pages that I have although my impression is that POV Ray has fallen off a bit in popularity as home computers have become more powerful and more free or low-cost 3D programs have become widely available. It also gets some traffic viewing the couple of stories it has about the tornados that plowed through Moore Oklahoma in 1999 and 2003.

But most traffic these days is coming in to look at and/or download Scaletron!, the scaling calculator application that I wrote and maintain. This also has the side effect of causing more traffic to the site to be from Macintosh computers than Windows machines which is pretty unusual because of the huge marketshare that Windows enjoys.

So, I've been thinking a bit more these days about adding to the software available at rocketjam.com. However there are some issues involved in accomplishing this. More about that later.

Writing Daily

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post here where I stated my intention to begin trying to do some writing every day, primarily on this, my original blog. This is a progress report. So far, I've not done too badly with it. I really didn't expect to get something written every day, because things come up, or, some days there's just a complete lack of inspiration. Not all my writing has been posted to this blog either. A couple of days have seen me posting over on my GNN blog. I've also got a couple of in-progress pieces that I'll hack on some days and hopefully, they'll eventually get finished and posted here or on one of my other blogs.