As I suspected, I was peaking too soon in January. Three consecutive days of 1,000+ visits earlier in the month have now tailed off to a more sustainable 800-900 per day. What drives the visits I don’t know, but I suspect that there may be an element of rubber-necking at internet roadkill: another three consecutive days of 1,000+ visits occurred again at the end of the month following my third visit from cRu$ty. I’ve discovered that there are sites which actually catalogue the successes of the hackers – not only is there the one that cRu$ty referred me to, but there’s also zataz.com/defaced, where I featured along with cRu$ty’s other victims. That site provided me with a bit of traffic, for the wrong reasons.
Naver is now a regular provider of traffic. My Celebrity Blogwatch page also generates good traffic — Korea Pop Wars was very quick to link to it, while the blogmeisters of the sites I’m syndicating are coming to take a look at what goes on here. Bobsfreestuffforum.co.uk has sent me 18 visitors, and I can’t work out what that site does, so if any visitors from there could let me know how they happened upon this site, that would be most helpful.
What people are reading? The most popular page this month is Rain’s six-pack. Presumably Rain’s world tour is generating interest. What’s getting a little bit annoying is the bandwidth thieves who are hotlinking to some of my images (particularly the one of Rain). I’m going to start blocking some of you soon. By far the greatest offenders live at MySpace. You know who you are.
Lee Sabi is descending the popularity rankings, and instead BoA is now top of the list for searches resulting in visits to this site. Strangely, people are interested in the old news of her Nike contract.
With ARCO going on in Madrid, the art category has had a pretty strong month, but as ever, Celebrities provide the most traffic. Strangely, my unsympathetic review of Kyung-hyun Kim’s impenetrable book on remasculinization has received more than 270 visits this month. It’s not clear whether this is spam commenters or genuine readers, but at least 5 visits to the review were as a result of people googling for the definition of the Korean word “oppa”.
Spam is particularly difficult to manage since I ran up against my memory-per-pageload problem (which occured when I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 and implemented my BlogWatch RSS aggregation plugin), as my Spam Karma page won’t load. The plug-in still diligently filtering out the rubbish though. And it’s the memory problem which is encouraging me to move my site to another webhost. My existing one can’t up my memory, and my new one can. So, by this time next month, I hope I’ll be somewhere else, and I can then turn back on some of the things I had to turn off because they were causing pages not to load. I’ve started playing with some of the tools at my new webhost and they look seriously cool.
What I don’t know is what will happen in the hiatus between my domain name being registered at my old webhost and it pointing to my new webhost. Scope for all sorts of fun, I’m sure. I’ll put up a post when I’m in transit to alert you to that fact that weird things might be going on.
And the usual graphs:
I’m not sure whether there will be continuity in the statistics when I move.
I’ve just discovered some weird statistics on my site over at Technorati / Alexa
- My site is among the top 50,000 sites visited by Romanians. Further, 7.7% of my readers are Romanian. (As it happens, a lot of the sites linked to by comment spammers are Romanian, so this makes sense).
- 3.8% of my readers come from Bahrain
These statistics are highly suspect – and I guess they mean is that, of the 26 visitors to my site for whose IP address they can determine the country, 1 of them is from Bahrain.
Apparently, also based on incomplete data, I’m ranked somewhere around the 259,000th most-linked-to blog. But Technorati don’t seem to include links from Blogspot sites and other sites, but they do include links from completely nonsense sites who create content based on unintelligent search engines. Damn lies.