2 Years

So as a follow up to the 1 Year stats post, here are a bunch of stats to celebrate 2 years of efaller.com. These are the stats from the last year of web visitors to the site (which does not include RSS readers).

Daily Pageviews

There were an average of 225 pageviews per day, a 12.5% growth YOY but still not enough to make money with AdSense :(.

Browser/OS Combinations

This year IE/Windows increased its share from 54% to 57%, Firefox/Windows increased from 30% to 31%, and Firefox/Mac increased from 4.1% to 4.8%. The biggest loser was Safari/Mac which fell from 7.3% to 3.4%. Linux (all browsers) stayed pretty constant at 0.87%.

Search Engine Keyword Hits

In this year's search engine results I was finally able to overcome the end of false religion is near with searches for my name. The results also reveal growing interest in the zeitgeist with iPhones, GTI iPods, and broken Rock Band drum pedals.

Bugs, cereal bugs and bugs in cereal also made a big showing, and if combined would beat out searches for me.

Another interesting hit is 8bf3a13b - people are still searching for this, and I'm surprised that the answer hasn't been widely posted on the web yet.

Referrers

In the referring sites competition Google dominated all comers, but Simon made a strong second place showing:

1 Year

One year ago I created this web site with the goals of creating something that might be interesting enough to read and to take over the #1 Google search result for my name. I'm not unbiased enough to comment on the first goal, but I can gauge the success of the second:

• #1 in Google search results - Check
• #1 in Yahoo search results - Check
• #1 in Live.com search results - Check

In fact, as an added bonus due to some blog posts and a magazine article I wrote for work, now 9 out of the top 10 and 43 out of the top 50 Google search results for my name are related to me. Sweet. I don't think I have to worry that somebody searching for me will find the wrong person any more.

It's also interesting to check out the Analytics stats for the past year (which, somewhat significantly, do not include RSS readers):

Daily pageviews:

Thoughts:

• 200 pageviews per day? Not enough for AdSense 🙁 (not that I would anyway)

Hits by Browser/OS combination:

Thoughts:

• Since 90% of the hits to my site are referred by random Google Image Search (images.google.com) queries, this mix of hits might actually partially represent a statistically random sample, combined with the people who know me.
• One wonders, who are those 53% of people who still use IE?
• Mac OS X at 11.5% is a pretty strong showing.
• So much for Linux on the desktop. (0.85%?)

Search engine keyword hits:

Thoughts:

• It's nice to see that Jehovah's Witness propaganda is still 2x more popular than me (and, alas, the end of false religion still has not come).

Spam comments

My WordPress spam filter has caught 384 spam comments as of today.

Am I weird because I saw that and immediately thought "Ooh, 384 is a nice round number: 256 + 128!"? (110000000 binary)

Google Analytics

I've been trying out Google Analytics, and so far it's pretty cool.  It's geared toward webmasters who are trying to increase their AdWords/AdSense revenue, so there is a lot of stuff that doesn't apply to a small personal web site, but there are still some things I find useful.  Currently it's a free service, and it's not even marked 'Beta' (I guess Google expects that the increased AdSense revenue will cause it to pay for itself).

You just have to stick a small tag of javascript in your page template, and you get all kinds of cool stats about your pages.  It tracks the basic things like visits & pageviews, but also does more advanced things like plotting the search engine keywords people use to find your site, or their locations on a map of the earth. Here are a couple of screenshots after it had been running on this site for a couple of days:

Search keywords

Visitor location map

One downside (at least for a blog) is that it can't track visitors who read your site using RSS readers, since the RSS content doesn't contain the Analytics tracker tag and RSS readers usually don't run embedded javascript anyway.  So I mostly find it useful for seeing which Google keywords people are using to find my site.

Google stats

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my goals for this web site was to be the #1 Google result for a search for my name. As of yesterday (June 26th 2006), this site had been around for little under a month and I had captured the #3 spot, even beating out the other Eric Faller who owns http://www.ericfaller.com/. The #1 and #2 spots were still being held by the GameDev club at the University of Colorado. Ironically, I created those pages while back in college and now I can't get rid of them (grr).

Yesterday Microsoft posted a Scoble video of my coworker Savraj and me explaining what we work on all day. Within one day, that page shot to the #1 spot on Google for a search for my name (#2 for Savraj). Less than 1 day for the #1 spot! I was very surprised. Unfortunately that page already seems to have been linked by a lot of other bloggers, so it will probably be very difficult for me to beat it any time soon.

The video isn't that bad, but unfortunately I had a very bad haircut when it was shot, and I and do a poor job of speaking clearly to the camera. I also manage to screw up one demo 4 times in a row, after I had just said something like "Oh yeah, I do this all the time" :). If you are interested in checking out my office and seeing what I do all day, check out the video. (Yes I realize that if I link to it too, that will only make it worse)

Google results as of June 27th 2006

Welcome

Hello, and welcome to this blog. Introductory posts are always a bit awkward, so as an attempt to take the easy way out I decided to structure this one as a FAQ.

Who are you?

I’m a computer programmer living in the Seattle area.

Why did you create this blog?

For a couple of reasons:

1. I was dissatisfied with the current Google results if you search for my name.
2. I figured I would be able to post some stuff that people might find interesting.

As for reason #1, here’s a link so you can track my progress: Google results for ‘Eric Faller’. As of the date this was written (May 2006), the results include a mishmash of random things:

• The horribly out-of-date homepage for a club I used to run while in college.

• An old friend’s web site for a computer game we used to work on.

• Various other web pages dealing with old school projects.

• The web site of a French dude with the same name as mine (rapidly gaining on the #1 spot).

Fortunately none of the results contain anything too embarrassing, so I’m currently more or less OK. But, I’m fully aware that the first thing that modern people do when meeting (or dating) somebody new is Google them. So, obviously it can’t hurt to have some sort of positive influence over the results. Plus, I have found that reading the archived posts of somebody’s blog is a good way to quickly learn a lot about the person and avoid potentially dangerous conversation topics (“ooh, well when I made that comment about people from the East Coast, I meant everybody except people from New York, you see...”).

As for reason #2, it will be up to you to decide if my posts are actually interesting. I’ve read a good number of blogs so I hope I know what to do. I’ll try to avoid posting boring stuff (“Today I ate cheerios for breakfast, went to work, came home and went to bed”), cryptic stuff (“Here’s a picture of the back of Joe’s head,” (no explanation of who Joe is)), pompous stuff (“Obviously the opening brace goes on its own line – anybody who thinks otherwise is an idiot”), and lazy stuff (“Does anybody know what the website for the IRS is? Post a comment if you know”). My goal is to post more-or-less regularly on a variety of topics, while keeping the content interesting (so far I have learned that pictures = good, and spell checking = good). We’ll see how it goes. If you see a post that sucks, write a comment that says “This post sucks” and I’ll get on it (obviously, more constructive feedback helps as well).

So basically this is all about you and your ego, isn’t it?

Yep, pretty much. Isn’t that the whole idea behind blogging? 🙂

It looks like this blog is running on WordPress?

I looked at a variety of blog hosts/software packages and ultimately chose this one for a couple of reasons:

• It’s free, and there are no ads (always good).

• The provider can easily be switched - don’t have to worry about it getting bought out by some megacorp.

• It’s totally customizable: I can set the style to whatever I want, get rid of any annoying “Powered by Blah Inc” thingies, and if I wanted to it’s easy to write a little PHP widget for the sidebar that shows the weather in Turkey (for example).

You know, Real Programmers write their own blog software by hand. In frickin’ assembly.

Yeah, I know. I started out by mocking up something in ASP.NET, but as I was attempting to write an RSS library by hand, I thought to myself, “NIH syndrome!” and gave up. It probably would have taken a few weeks or months (of my spare time) to implement half the features that every other software package already has, and I realized that all that time could be better spent doing something fun. So that’s the story: basically, I’m lazy.

What's that picture at the top?

That's a picture of my desk. I couldn't think of anything better. Plus, it's a pretty hot-looking desk.

I had some other questions too, but I forgot what they were since you talk so much.

Sorry about that. If you have any questions or suggestions for posts, feel free to leave comments!

- Eric