London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

June statistics

After a couple of months of strong growth the statistics are now levelling off a bit. Maybe it’s because I haven’t done a post about Super Junior recently, maybe it’s because my site is taken offline for a cooling off period when there’s too much traffic and so people are giving up visiting; maybe it’s because for the current spread of content this is the sustainable level of readers. Who knows?

Popular posts and search terms

Since installing the WordPress statistics gizmo at the end of May I’ve been checking the readership usage data every day because it’s so user-friendly, and it’s provided some interesting insights. While Celebrity BlogWatch continues to be a very popular page, my account of Rowan Pease’s talk at Chatham House in December last year (inter alia she talked about Pucca and of course Super Junior) attracted even more traffic during June.

The trend in search terms remains fairly predicatble. Super Junior, Pororo, Lee Sabi, Mud festivals and Lee Young Ae are tops according to the WordPress statistics, while awstats suggests Lee Sabi is still the most popular. Every now and then there’s a blip where something heavier gets some traffic (occasionally my post on women artists attracts attention, and this month it has been the review of Harold Hakwon Sunoo’s book on three Korean poets).

My general information pages, comfortingly, continue to pull in a steady readership. The pages on food & restaurants, music and film, plus my posts on the magic straight perm and the new one on Korean supermarkets, are the popular ones.

Topical posts which have been popular this month have been by LKL’s newest contributor, Jennifer Barclay. Her lively accounts of the two open-air festivals (one dry, one wet) have made for entertaining reading, and I look forward to more from her. Thanks again, Jennifer.

Referring sites

Increasingly, it seems this site is coming up in Korean-language search engines such as naver and daum, which is nice, and I’m now being linked from someone’s cyworld minihompy. I wish I could find out whose. Other sites directing traffic to me this month are Celebrity Hairstyles (6 hits – Update 5 Jan 2008: alas, the site is now defunct) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (8 hits – though I can’t see where they’re linking from). Weird.

How to cool down

As regular readers will know, since I upgraded my blogwatch service my site has been overheating somewhat. Remediation steps have only been partially successful.

  • Restricting the ability to comment to registered users has cut the number of spam comments by half — so now I’m down to 1,000 a day. How the spambots manage to bypass the registration requirement I’m not sure, but I do know that daeguowl is not the sort of chap who would be encouraging people to visit porn sites 1,000 times a day.
  • Other steps I’ve taken are to prune the number of feeds I’m subscribing to, particularly where the blog isn’t particularly live (for example, Adam Hartzell’s film blog at koreanfilm.org is one that has had to be axed for the moment as it hasn’t been updated in months), and to reduce the feed polling frequency to once every two hours rather than every hour.

Towards the end of June I had a few crash-free days, but looking into July the crashes are back again. I don’t think things are going to get any better as I have plans for more functionality (cascading category menus, google site analytics, an events calendar located at my host rather than at google, and a polling widget in preparation for a project later this year, among other things) which will eat up more cpu still.1.

I hope I’m not going to have to move webhosts for the second time in a year. My current Bluehost package is good (and cheap, too), with lots of bells & whistles, so it would be a shame to have to move on. I hope they have an upgrade option available. And where would I move to? I’ve been speaking to PopSeoul, who are very happy with their blog hosted at WordPress.com (with traffic around six times what I get, according to trafficestimate.com); and others swear by 1and1. But now I’ve moved once, moving again isn’t so scary. And I know not to use EZsitemove.com next time.

And finally

But if I move, costs are going to go up, so I might have to be a bit more aggressive about advertising. Maybe some of my more popular pages (Celebrity BlogWatch or my food & restaurants page) might soon get something a bit more prominent if I can work out how to float an ad within the existing css structure of the page.

Finally, here are the statistics. I don’t pretend to understand why the WordPress statistics tool is showing around 1,000 visits a day while awstats and webalizer are showing around 3 times that much. And trafficestimate says around 1,500. So somewhere in there is the truth.

Visits to June 2007Daily visits to June 2007

Daily page views to June 2007Daily page views to June 2007

Daily hits to June 2007Daily hits to June 2007

  1. I uploaded the polls plugin onto the server this month. Even though I haven’t activated the plugin yet, it’s been accessed more times than Rain’s six-pack already. I’m not quite sure why this should be the case. Maybe it bodes ill in terms of spam once I do activate it []

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