Web Traffic Analysis from my googlepages site

So I have a site over at http://andrew.harvey4.googlepages.com/ which I used to deliver my HSC notes to the public. Some time after I put it up I added Google’s Analytics bug to the page to track the number of visitors. Almost two years on from that I can now present the results of the experiment. I have found no reason to hide this data and its not a business here so I have nothing to hide. The site (which is really just one page) got (over the period 17 Feb 2008 to 21 Nov 2009) 9,614 visits, 12,918 pageviews and 6,605 visitors according to Google Analytics.

Visits (not pageviews) for 2009 and 2008 in comparison.

The most notable thing is that you see a spike on the day before the physics HSC exam (and then drops off as expected), there is also a gradual increase from Jul till whenever the exams are on.

As for traffic sources well search took time to increase and certainly has. In the beginning you wouldn’t find my site in the top 10 results of common queries but now I’m getting traffic from queries (and these are the top 5, but only make up 45% of all queries) like “andrew harvey”, “andrew harvey hsc”, “andrew harvey physics notes”, “andrew harvey chemisty”, and “andrew harvey physics”. The main traffic sources are 40% referer from community.boredofstudies.org, 30% direct, and 23% from Google. All referring sites actually made up 47% which was made up of this blog, various webmail services, various high school web sites, facebook.com…

(From top to bottom) Direct, Referring and Search Engine Traffic Sources.

96% of visitors were listed as coming from Australian IPs.

Of course I don’t think any of these numbers are 100% accurate, for instance because the analytics is coming from the JavaScript code and not from the web server I’m not sure if people who block Google’s IP’s, or JavaScript analytics code are counted. Nor am I sure about people who were referred to be my another site, but choose not to tell me this in their HTTP GET header.

Unfortunately because I don’t run a site on a server I own (gosh I wish I could, but the cost is off putting), I don’t know the numbers of the PDF file downloads.

The Cause of Slow Loading WordPress Pages Over https

For as long as I could remember, loading pages in my wordpress.com blog dashboard was really slow. I should have realised what was happening sooner but I never took the time to investigate. Whether I went to the edit posts page (/wp-admin/edit.php), new post (/wp-admin/post-new.php) there seemed to be numerous connections back to wordpress.com once parts of the page were loaded. These requests were to s-ssl.wordpress.com. Taking a look at the source, all the css and js files linked to from the html of the page were over the https protocol, and rightly so because I always go over the https protocol. What I didn’t realise is that Firefox will not cache files from https by default. So if I go to about:config and change browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl to true then these static css and js files will be cached. I restart my browers and all of a sudden pages load much faster and much more tolerable. The only problem is that its not just css and js files transfered over https that are cached but html files as well. I’m not sure how to get Firefox just to cache css and js files from https, but I have to leave that for another day.

Micrsoft flags its own email as spam

I just checked the junk mail box of my hotmail email account, inside I find an email with subject “Imagine Cup – Thank you for registering.‏” from “admin@imaginecup.com”. So I go to imaginecup.com and it turns out that the web site comes under the Microsoft umbrella, that same Microsoft that Hotmail falls under. I find it quite odd that Microsoft flags its own email as spam. I should note that I did acutally register for this email, so it was not quite spam. Althought I do realise (although I’m just guessing) that the spam tag that this email was assigned was probably automatically generated from other users marking it as spam.