jducoeur

As part of yelling at Hostcentric today (since they seem to have broken our site's FTP upload this time), I happened to wander into my site statistics. Some tidbits from the August statistics:

We're clearly getting persistently attacked by wikispam bots. The top User Agent is something called "Yahoo Slurp", and the vast majority of our hits (about 17,000 hits in August) are for the entry pages for our various wikis, presumably by bots that want to corrupt them. Knock on wood, all of them seem to be wasting their time; this makes me happier than I can express.

It's always amusing to see where we get high Google ranking. As expected, many of the hits are from Google searches in some permutation of "medieval and renaissance games". But we also turn out to have the top Google hit for "Apple Cinnamon Bread" (a recipe I invented many years ago), the number two hit for "Tuscan Tomato Soup" (one of my father's). number two for "Rhode Island Calamari" (my notes on a distinctly unsuccessful attempt at the dish), number two for "fish marsala" (another of my inventions), and the number two for "Geisterdamen" (significantly above girlgenius.com). In general, we got about 3700 hits from Google, and another 600 from Yahoo -- not bad, considering that we don't try to play the rank-manipulation game. Far as I can tell, we benefit from simply having simple and sensible file names and titles.

Our transcript of the Boke of Cookrye is getting a fair amount of traffic, which is nice to see. More surprisingly, my "Historie of Bees" got a full 90 hits, and a bunch of our other transcriptions got 50+. Lovely to see the work being worthwhile. (I also note that my copy of ladysprite's translation of Il Ballarino is getting a fair amount of traffic, with a couple of hundred visits; I need to dig out the URL for her official copy, and change mine to just point to hers.)

The SCA Questions FAQ got about 200 hits. Given that we don't get anywhere near that many questions on the mailing list, I can only assume that the FAQ is doing its job. (I will admit that it's gotten a tad quiet on the list, moreso than I'd expected.)

IE 7 penetration still sucks. This long after 7 was released, and quite a while after they started pushing it moderately hard, IE 6 hits still run about 20% higher than IE 7. And despite our getting 20 times as much traffic from Google as from MSN, the MSN bot is hitting the site about 4 times as much as Google's. (5000 hits in August -- surely a bit excessive.) Not Microsoft's finest showings...