The power of referrals

[jducoeur]

Having taken a little time to get the Perl code working for our website again, I decided to poke around and see what tools are currently available to me. One is good traffic logging.

For the most part, there weren't big surprises in there -- our site averages about a hit a minute, fairly consistently. But I was quite struck by one strange anomaly: traffic surged enormously a week ago Friday, on the 19th. Which was kind of strange, since so many of the people who would be likely to go to it were still at Pennsic. I initially feared some sort of attack, but then remembered what was pointed out to me last week: my Period Games Homepage got featured as the site of the day on User Friendly. And it looks like I got an extra 6000 hits out of it for the day. (Looks like about 1400 people came to my page from there, and presumably some of them looked around.)

Pretty neat, and slightly disconcerting -- intellectually I knew what a link like that could do, but I don't think it's ever happened on our site before.

It's also fun to go digging around and see the oddities. Why did 125 people download our recipe for Buttercream Frosting? (Which is right off the Domino sugar box.) And where did they get the link from? It looks like all of them entered the site directly to that recipe, which means that somebody is linking to it, but Google is not revealing whom. Moreover, why did 250 people download digest #50 of the Grand Council minutes? And ouch -- almost 800 people tried to get to the Rolls, and I know they all failed because it wasn't working...

Comments

[ripresa.livejournal.com]

Why were you linked at userfriendly?

Can you imagine if you get /.-ed?

[jducoeur]

Apparently one aspect of the User Friendly site is a link of the day feature. Seems to be pretty random, and it isn't exactly front-and-center -- I hadn't even known about it before. But it clearly gets at least some looks, based on my results. It actually got a surprisingly good writeup, the longest of the past couple of weeks.

Truth to tell, I haven't reliably followed the strip, so I would have had no idea about it, except that baron_elric mentioned it in email to us. Kinda neat, although I do slightly wish the site had mentioned to me that they were planning it.

As for getting slashdotted -- *shudder*. Good for the ego, but I pay for my bandwidth, and that would be an expensive experience...

Referer

[metageek.livejournal.com]

And where did they get the link from?

Doesn't your log include the HTTP Referer: URL?

Re: Referer

[jducoeur]

Hmm. Yes -- if I can figure out where the log is. They've rearranged everything, and I'm not certain where the raw data is any more. (The summary data is all nicely tabulated on their new control-page page.)

Good question, though...

Re: Referer

[laurion]

Random aside; who do you host with?

Re: Referer

[jducoeur]

Hostcentric. This used to be the relatively small but very competent Web2010; after they got bought, service declined somewhat. Lately I'm cranky at them because they've gone extremely mass-market. They're heavily optimized for the "normal" cases, but they've made several mistakes from my POV lately, especially during and after their recent shift to all-new systems. (They moved all the directories around without warning, and broke SSH access for well over a month. And their SSH-enabling mechanisms apparently involve breaking CGI access for some hours in the middle, which is just plain mysterious.)

I keep waffling about switching. Hostcentric isn't *bad*, they're just not as good as they used to be, and by current standards they're pretty expensive. But switching ISPs is a bit of a hassle. Ponder, ponder...

Re: Referer

[laurion]

Ah es, a corporate buyout. That explains some of the unfortunate changes to the quality of service. One can hope that they'll get back on track, and things will be hunkey-dorey again.

On the flip side, if the camel's back breaks, I've been very happy with DreamHost. They're basic plan is inexpensive and suits most of my needs, including niceties like IMAP mail. I've also been happy with their customer support, especially that they've been willing to accomodate the fact that I use a third party for DNS.