Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
8
How Great Are WordPress's Stats?
The world of web stats is, frankly, a mess. It seems obvious what one would want to know—but
you might find, if you try it, that explaining exactly what you want to another person is difficult.
Explaining it to a computer—or, at least, to a web stats package—can be downright impossible.
A typical web stats package is focused on pages that are largely static or regularly updated with
an ongoing stream of new information. Blog posts are uncomfortably, from a statistics point of
view, in-between. There's nothing static about them, but they're not just quickly disappearing tid-
bits either. So WordPress's ability to track and present views for each specific post is not easy to
get elsewhere.
The idea of separate blogs sharing a domain and other resources is a bit beyond most web stats
packages as well. Getting a typical web stats package configured to separately treat two blogs on
a site is not a simple notion.
WordPress even knows enough to exclude your own visits to your blog. This is a source of noise
that can bedevil other stats packages, especially on a slow day, when your own visits might be a
significant part (or all of!) the total.
So enjoy your WordPress stats, and use them. Though you might go on to use other stats pack-
ages as well, you'll probably still return to WordPress's stats again and again for a quick but
detailed understanding of where your blog traffic is coming from and where it's going.
So think carefully about how much time and energy you can commit to your blog—in terms of your
finances, your health, and your offline relationships. The online connections you build up through
blogging are fun and rewarding in their own right, but they're not usually worth risking all your
offline friends and family relationships for.
If your blogging is contributing to your career or to other activities—consulting, writing, and so
on—it can be very much worthwhile. And, of course, a few bloggers have hit it big with book and
even movie deals.
The recent hit movie
Julie & Julia
was based on a cooking blog. The “Julie” of the title spent an
otherwise boring year in a small Paris flat cooking every recipe in a Julia Child cookbook and blog-
ging about it—as well as having various adventures.
Such big hits from blogging are few and far between. Alternatively, if you can keep your blog
within the time and energy commitment that you'd otherwise commit to a hobby, it can be a very
rewarding and worthwhile use of that amount of time and energy.
Also be aware that the blog can have value beyond the number of hits it gets. If it's important to
you to be seen as an expert on purple aphids, having a valuable blog on purple aphids might be
worthwhile just for the occasional visit you get from your aphid-loving peers, even if there aren't
that many of them. (Aphid-loving peers, that is; there are plenty of aphids around.)
Do try to settle on a goal for your site. It doesn't have to be monetary: “to make more people aware
of open source software” might be the goal for the Metaverse blog of one of the authors
(McCallister); “to help people take better care of their cats” might be the goal of a very different
type of blog. Having a goal increases the focus of your blog and makes it more enjoyable for you
and, quite likely, your blog visitors.
