It’s always dangerous to draw conclusions from bad data, and there’s probably no worse data in the universe than web site statistics. In fact, I am reminded of a concept Douglas Adams described in The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy — recipriversexclusive, which refers to a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. Web stats are a pure form of recipriversexclusivity; “42” hits can be anything other than 42 actual page views.
I think I can safely assume, however, that the data is uniformly bad over time, so I feel comfortable drawing certain conclusions about trends, even though any given number bears no correspondence to reality at any one time.
Readership of “Out of the Mist” is soaring. In January, I averaged about 18 visitors per day; so far in April, I’m getting about 85 — a 472% increase. I don’t even know 85 people (in fact, I’m not sure I know 18 people) so I have to assume that strangers’ eyes are upon me (cue that Rockwell song). Or it might mean that 3 people read my site in January and 14.25 are doing so now, but it’s still an upward trend.
My stats package (awstats) makes a good college try to determine truly unique visitors on any given day. I have blocked all of my own addresses to eliminate instances of me hitting “Reload,” and excluded all known search engine robots. It cannot, however, deal well with phenomena such as proxy servers and NAT’s (especially AOL’s annoying tendency to route every single request through a different proxy). However, in looking at the raw data, the hits from “something-random.proxy.aol.com” are consistently proportional to the overall hits, so, again, I think I can safely conclude that readership is up.
Sorry for the second meta-post in a row; more juicy content goodness coming soon.
