Monday, November 28, 2005
Google Analytics
When Google Analytics was first announced, I set it up on TekNews and promptly forgot about it.
Well, I logged into my account today to take a look. The results are pretty surprising. Since its launch, TekNews has had pretty stable traffic of about 800 to 1200 pageviews per day. It's been like that for over a year. I didn't really know who was viewing the site, or where from.
Turns out that most users are in the US, followed closely by Germany. And the city with the most users by far is Flemington, Australia. Second place goes to Madrid (Spain). It looks like overall most users are in Europe. I also seem to have all continents covered except Africa. And obviously Antarctica.
I'm still somewhat surprised that the number of users of TekNews hasn't really changed. I haven't really put any development into it for many months, save a quick new feature allowing independent selection of RSS refresh times when Slashdot put a 15 minute limit on their RSS feed. Despite this, people keep using it. I guess that is because the site runs itself; all of its RSS sources are still valid, and it just keeps pulling them and updating itself.
There isn't much that could use changing/fixing anyhow (Though of course there is always extra stuff you could add to a site). About the only thing that comes to mind is better detection of duplicate articles. Currently it assumes an article is the same if it has the same title, OR the same blurb, but not both. This is imperfect since sometimes they update both the title and blurb of an article and TekNews picks up a default. They're not that frequent though, only happening every few days, so I haven't really bothered.
Speaking of updating itself, TekNews has managed to gather 1,628 articles from its RSS sources, along with 21,172 news posts. All searchable, which was part of the original intention.
Well, I logged into my account today to take a look. The results are pretty surprising. Since its launch, TekNews has had pretty stable traffic of about 800 to 1200 pageviews per day. It's been like that for over a year. I didn't really know who was viewing the site, or where from.
Turns out that most users are in the US, followed closely by Germany. And the city with the most users by far is Flemington, Australia. Second place goes to Madrid (Spain). It looks like overall most users are in Europe. I also seem to have all continents covered except Africa. And obviously Antarctica.
I'm still somewhat surprised that the number of users of TekNews hasn't really changed. I haven't really put any development into it for many months, save a quick new feature allowing independent selection of RSS refresh times when Slashdot put a 15 minute limit on their RSS feed. Despite this, people keep using it. I guess that is because the site runs itself; all of its RSS sources are still valid, and it just keeps pulling them and updating itself.
There isn't much that could use changing/fixing anyhow (Though of course there is always extra stuff you could add to a site). About the only thing that comes to mind is better detection of duplicate articles. Currently it assumes an article is the same if it has the same title, OR the same blurb, but not both. This is imperfect since sometimes they update both the title and blurb of an article and TekNews picks up a default. They're not that frequent though, only happening every few days, so I haven't really bothered.
Speaking of updating itself, TekNews has managed to gather 1,628 articles from its RSS sources, along with 21,172 news posts. All searchable, which was part of the original intention.
