wendy house

Whenever Raymond cites :: The Wendy House :: in his blog my visit statistics soar to  approximately 1000 in a day from their normal baseline of approximately 100 per day.   See dashboard graph below.

Looking at the dashboard,   initially,  I  was extremely pleased that the average visit time is nearly 10 minutes.   Then I looked at the distribution of visit times on another graph.   The distribution was bi-modal with 75% of visitors spending less than 10 sec on :: The Wendy House ::   The good thing is that 75% of visitors can assess that this blog does not provide what they want within 10 sec.      

The second mode is for visits that last  between 1 and 10 minutes. Which seems a reasonable time to read a couple of posts and take a couple of swigs from your freshly brewed  cup of tea.  

 Squint to see Raymonds peaks:

My results  from a couple of quizzes on a website called blogthings tells us that:

quiz link: How Cluttered is Your Mind?

quiz link: Are you a Feminist?

quiz link: The Sesame Street Personality Quiz

Does that help us to:

• understand and share that which is  Wendy?    
• enhance the quality of ::The Wendy House::?  

Things about blogthings.com that I found interesting are:

1. the engagingness of the quizzes irrespective of  their construction quality.   I liked  doing  them.
2. lack of opportunity to compare my results to some form of position on a norm of all the people that completed the quiz so far.   For example,   if most people who completed the quiz  have a 10% cluttered mind then my 25% is relatively high mind-clutter for an online person who likes doing blog postable quizzes.   Who are the other Sesame street characters I could have been?   Do bloggers normally think they are Earnies rather than Berts or Big Birds?    If I start eating  a lot will I have a high metabolism or grow to be a big bird?
3. the topics of not-provided quizzes.   For example.   Should the US pull out of Iraq?    Can you make an excellent cup of tea?   Is there one God with multiple identities or a multi God system?
4. representations of the quiz setter’s  cultural values.    For example,   this  question  from  a quizz to assess whether a person is ‘hot stuff’ or not  is based on the assumption that the person completing the quiz is a girl.   I learned that   the quizz author and editors believe that hot stuff is a self-referent for females:      

A guy with a girlfriend is:

• A fling
• A challenge
• Off limits

Regular readers are familiar with my many, varied, reckless  punctuation crimes.   Respite may be coming your way.     I am looking into these educational resources:

• Apostrophe abuse:   http://apostrophe-abuse.blogspot.com/
• Quotation mark:    http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

Feel free to direct me to further useful resources…

Blog statistics below courtesy of Google Analytics.   Google Analytics’ glossary defines visitors as:

A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website. There is of course no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the website’s perspective, but a good visitor-tracking system can come close to the actual number. The most accurate visitor-tracking systems generally employ cookies to maintain tallies of distinct visitors.

The method, heuristic, that Google Analytic employs to identify visitors is not detailed.  The Google Analytics graph of :: Wendy House ::  visitors  below covers a ‘normal’ calendar month and suggests that between April and May 23rd:

• 600-ish visitors  were sent by  search engines.
• 60-ish visitors return* several times per month.    Many friends and family are in this group.
• 40-ish visitors return on a daily basis.   If this is ‘people’ what troopers you are!
• 10-ish visitors, and me,  return twice a day.   Given that I regularly post only once per day 2 visits is a tad perplexing.
• no-one visits between 101-200 times per calendar month,   how odd is that?   As odd as a snake wearing a beanie in a wheelbarrow race,   that’s how odd.
• 100-ish visitors return over 200 times in one calendar month.   Super Snoopers!    Now thats just SILLY.   I don’t believe it.      I wonder what this number really suggests…

*return = becomes active after more than 30 minutes inactivity in the Wendy House.

One year of subscribing to a web service,   developing the Wendy House blog….

The Daily Telegraph reports that an:

“English secretary is bringing a test case under French labour law after allegedly being sacked for bringing her employers into disrepute by writing a…       …blog describing her everyday life…

…Her blog postings…  …do not reveal her own name….   …..and have never identified her employers*…. …..she made herself and therefore the firm identifiable by including her own photograph** on the weblog“

ce n’est pas de ja vu

• *my employer is the absolute dogs bollocks.  
• **any similarity to me  in photographs on, or linked  from,  this blog  is purely coincidental.

Paranoid?   Moi?   Non!    I normally walk this way due to  an old injury sustained by falling off a bar-stool during a fit of impudently unanounced giggles and several pints of pre-planned  Marston’s Pedigree.

How the Wendy House got deflowered:

I took a small star provided within  famfamfam’s free  mini icon set, then used Microsoft’s Digital Image suite to

• make the star’s white background transparent.   fiddly  
• obliterate the flowers in  Ghyslain’s  awesome ’rounded blue’ blog template.   Bye-bye flowers…
• liberally sprinkle the blog template image with stars

Then, while  playfully browsing the WordPress codex ‘plug-ins’,  I discovered    favatars, comvatars, and gravatars.  

…..ooo00OOO00oooo…    

The rest of the fun-filled friday night was spent  foisting a favatar on you.   A favatar is the little picture that shows up next to a website name in the browser’s faviourites list and before the http bit in the browsers address line.    To commit this dastardly crime  I used:

• Matthew Mullenweg’s guidance  on how to create a ‘favicon’,  
• Microsoft’s Digital Image for editing,
• installed and activated a wordpress favatar plug-in,

Cat-discombobulating-bouncing ensued when  the little star revealed itself  in my IE7.0 address bar and Tab.   Before Friday I knew  the experience of a  favicon but not what it was called or how to set-one up for my site.  

Sometimes I even suprise myself by how easily I am pleased

Hoorah!

Visitor loyalty,   fabulous idea!

The bar-chart below from Google Analytics shows that between 24th and 30th of January:

• 8 visitors (probably unique IP addresses?) visited between 7 and 14 times
• 11 visited 15-25 times, and a further
• 11 visited 26-50 times

I’m probably one person who visited 50 times

This means that I may have 29 readers (unique IP addresses)  that return frequently enough for me to guess-timate that its probably on a daily basis.   I hope this isn’t really because their browser keeps crashing when they try to open the blog….    

Of those 29 I can make a good guess about who  9 of them are… …based on both verbal and blog comments, people I’ve met…   Based on this sample of  9 people I’ll develop a “Robin the Regular Reader” persona.     I’m not assuming that these loyal visitors are the same visitors who stay for more than 10 mins when they get here.   That’s a very rash assumption.   The kind of rash that could go all red after a   good scratching…

In this second post of a sporadic  series on blog quality I hypothesize a classification of current blog visitors using some of the  Google Analytics  statistics for :: The Wendy House::   This is my first step in developing an intended user  ’Persona’,   Alan Cooper style, that will be used to improve your experience.   Hoorah!  

One of the many fancy displays provided by Google Analytics shows the average length of a ‘visit’ (a ‘session’):

By default in Analytics, a session is defined as the period of time during which visitors are interacting with your site and there has been inactivity for less than 30 minutes. After 30 minutes of inactivity, any further page views will be treated as a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session

I’m hypothesising that the data in the graph below from 24hrs in  :: The Wendy House ::  shows 4 types of visitor*.     I’ll call them:

1. Pat  promptly leaves:    149 visits are less than 10 seconds.
2. Sam the speedy  scanner:   18 visitors stayed between 10 seconds and one minute.
3. Charlie checks content: 24 people stayed between 1 and 10 minutes.   I suspect these people acutally read enough of the Blog to make a reasonably well informed estimation about the relevance of its content to them.
4. Robin the reader:   13 visitors stay at the Wendy house for half an hour (10) or more (3)

*one person can appear in these statistics more than once,   by re-visiting.   Approximately 10% of the total site visits are return visits.

Google analytcis provides a web site statistics service that is free to websites that receive less than an obscenely large amount of clicks.   I set it up for the Wendy house and dropped by to look at the reports 24 hours later.  

It told me all sorts of things with graphs,  pie-charts, percentages. maps  and tables.More pretty data representations than you can shake a stick at.   The data can  even  be exported to Excel.    What does a peak at this data for Yesterday tell you?:

For the week starting Monday December:

• 4th: joint honours to the cultfigurine for pointing out that a team of professional experts would be  freakin’  at the challenge of  transforming a woman into a magazine approved good-looker  and HardwareJunkie for recognising the intrinsic evilness that is a concrete column.
• 11th:  Tim for  introducing “sure thing short bus” into my vocabularly.
• 18th: Mark for questioning how Cosmopolitan’s current marketing aligns with Helen Gurley Brown‘s perspective.
• 25th:  Betty  Cracker for promoting fashion industry  subversion.

With your dedicated  help I may eventually be effectively socialised into the wacky culture that is NW US…

Below I’ve copied the top of a web page, not in Excel,   from the Wendy House statistics.   It lists the top 22 URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, or URI’s, Uniform Resource Indicators?) that have requested pages from the Wendy House during November 2006.        

Speculative interpretation of the data above:

1. The vast majority,   79% (26799/33828), of all  web-site references come from people who are already here  exploring the Wendy House  by clicking categories or  blog-referencing links within the posts.   I like this
2. At less than 1% (327/33828) Google provides the second main source of people clicking on the Wendy House.   Adding all the google numbers together (http://images.google.com/,  http://www.google.com/, http://64.233.161.104, http://64.233.179.104/)  gives a cumulative total of 327.   A substantial proportion of these references were  people looking for images.    A quick look at the search queries that bought people to this website shows they were interested in  the text and photograph in my  ”High Spirited” post.    
3. MySpace is the only Social Network that sends noticable traffic to this Blog.   4 profiles predominantly send traffic here.   2/4 profiles do this because a teenager commented on their profile including a URL to my Wendy House server stored  photograph of the High Spirited  beverage.  
   • 60 references from a 17 yr old boy in Utah.  
   • 58 references from a highly offensive-to-me female objectification for male jacking-off profile. I’ve reported it to the MySpace team  as offensive and inappropriate.      
   • 57 references from Annie, a 17yr Rhode Island  girl’s ‘private’ profile.
   • 40 references from Kate, a 17yr San Antonio girl.
4. The remainder look like websites promoting loans, gambling and drugs that I suspect remain from when I used to allow trackbacks  (now turned-off).

this weekend’s assignment is directly copied from a 7th grade in-class exercise:

“Your science teacher Wendy  has invented a time machine. You have been selected to take the first trip. Explain in a multi-paragraph letter comment to your teacher Wendy where you will go and why.”

For the week starting Monday:

• 30th Oct: Seamus for building an outdoor coyote-proof cat enclosure using re-cycled wood.
• 6th Nov:   AF Harrold’s mention of ‘the Goons’. Any reference to Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan,   Harry Secomb, or Michael  Bentine,  direct or indirect is pleasing. Altogether is simply outstanding.
• 13th Nov: Katy  for mentioning the Pooh
• 20th Nov: The Cultfigurine for asking  ”is your anti-spam-bot psyhcic?‘  The word ‘bot’ is particularly appealing.
• 27th Nov: LaCroix for detailing the push:me-pull:you Seattle:snow car experience including the pulling:person’s  inspection of the  underside of  the car.   Reality stranger than fiction!

you guy’s made my day with your cheery little published thoughts

For the week starting Monday:

• 2nd: The Cultfigurine for pointing out, with much aplomb, my misunderstanding of ‘knock you up’ may have been  due to a deliberate wind-up because it is original  US slang.
• 9th: AF Harrold for pointing out that some days are more difficult to get the hang or than others.
• 16th: Andy for pointing out that some US people have an innovative approach to tea making that by-passes the need for an electric kettle and a teapot,   they microwave water in a cup then place a teabag in  it.   Ingenious!
• 23rd: Mr. Fancypants for his invaluable knowledge of screwdriver wielding techniques.

thanks to everyone who commented,   you made this post possible…..  feel the luuuurrfffffff.

My ::The Wendy House:: statistics provide lists of the phrases that were typed into the snoop boxy.   They also list  the search phrases typed into real search engines that bought people to ::The Wendy House::   There is virtually no overlap between the searches that bought people here and the within-blog snoop boxy search since July 2006:

BOOTS really did need to be in all capital letters didn’t it?   for all 38 searches…

BIG BOOTS

Do I suspect all 38 snoops were from one  snooper?   Yes I do!    I certainly wasn’t one of them.    

Which really means:

8 reasons why Wendy didn’t read a blog

together, these reasons  have prevented me  reading blogs that may have outstanding content… …but I’ll never know:

1. poor publicity:   I don’t know that the blog exists,   its contents  never show up in any of my internet searches,   there are no links to it in other stuff that I read, none of my friends told me about it.
2. foriegn language:   I know it exists but I can’t read it because the language is too foriegn.  For example,  German,   Instant Message or phone-text message  style  abbreviations like “u shud cuz u r kewl“.  
3. personally irrelevant: I know it exists, I can read the language, but the blog content does not provide anything clearly relevant to my life.  For example,   a blog on standard poodles.
4. offensive message:     I know it exists, I can read the language, the content is relevant to my life but the message is  fundamentally offensive.  
5. squinting required:    either the text is so small that I have to squint to read, there is a low  contrast between the text and the background,   the spacing between the text lines is so small it’s difficult to visually follow one line.   I can’t read it without changing my preferred browser text-size that works for most other web pages.
6. witless: If a blog lacks wit, I stop reading it. I like to learn something or laugh,   ideally both at the same time.   Double whammy!
7. lacking illustrative pictures:   Too much text can make my head spin,   then I fall over.  Breaking the stream of text,  regularly, with  pictures that illustrate the message helps prevent  me falling over.   It’s not essential,   but it helps.
8. scrolling required*:   I’m too attentionally challenged to regularly  read blog posts that  are long enough to require scrolling the window,   especially if  they don’t include pictures.   Again,   not essential,   but it helps keep my reading  regular..

Apart from including an illustrative picture,  what have I missed that  is important to you?

*  I write  scrollable blog posts.  My excuse is that I’m  endearingly waffly rather  than perfectly precise.      

a quick peek at the Wendy Home blog statistics suggests that my readership levels are higher on Wednesday than any other day.    Could it be that you

• all want to know why I think that I’m single?  
• like the predictability of a series?
• appreciate  regularity?

Certainly the ‘Cheesey dreams’ series and Player characteristics series, though irregular, proved popular.    I will introduce a Thursday series called “Thursday Tiffin“.   This  series will focus on the cultural experience of ceromonies around tiffin starting by focusing on tea,   it will then delve down into specific brews and beyond tea.    I’m hoping this series will remove the Thursday page-request  ’dip’ shown on the graph below.

Quite by accident, while browsing, I came upon your photographs

touched by the self expression and creativity,  a  joyous experience,

I fell in love with you and Eric

phrases taken from a longer  email received through flick-r 2006.   The  shortened phrases convey the gist of the original message.   You’ll be glad to know that I also received an invitation to stop by if ever I’m in Minnesota again.   Mechanics and  emails from Minnesota suggest that  there are some very friendly people in the Mid West.

Today the Wendy House received 80 non-sensical spamacious comments within 2 hrs; well  above the ‘normal’ average of one per month.   WordPress supplies 42 (my age and the meaning of the life, the universe, and everything) anti-spam ‘plug-in’s.   They appear to be based on either

• ‘verify it’s really a fabulous person’, or  
• ‘exculde these comment characteristics’   (e.g. words, IP source).  

Option 42.   We chose each other in a flurry of mutual recognition, respect and thigh rubbing.

Let me know what you think of my shiny new fabulous-person-verification system….

on the wendy house since May 30th.   Excluding information from RSS feed-readers.

Top  5 navigated to posts

1. Device drivers to distration
2. Commenting on US  commentators
3. Cargo pants parade
4. Charlotte chat
5. Portugal vs England World Cup Quarter Final

Top  5 navigated to categories

1. in the WILD
2. Kitchen drawer
3. Everyday Teccy
4. Eat it!
5. Being Wendy

Received more than 3 comments:

1. Commenting on US  commentators
2. England vs Sweden.   Its personal
3. return of ‘in a state’
4. a walk on the wrong side
5. naughty word:   TOILET
6. Excel told me to do it
7. High spirits

This information will be used to  blast-out-of-existence  unpopular Wendyhome blog categories  and focus my ramblings on things readers like to comment on (alcohol,  toilets, excel, traffic directions,   soccer etc)  or read (geeky teccy and footbally stuff)  …      

(categories updates,   this post updated to remove broken links 28 Oct 2006)

the top 20 search queries registered by my web-service provider for the last month are:

Can you see the themes?   With the exceptions of searches # 16 and #17 I suspect these searchers actually found something relevant to their search,   even if that relevancy was just another link!   I wonder what answer #17 found.

a careful inspection of the chart below reveals some spectacular truths.   For example:

1. Jenn (Piehole) is on  track to become like Raymond (oldnewthing).   They both have very shiny black hair and tanned complections.   I’d never realised this similarity until Excel pointed it out to me,    but its undeniably true.  
2. I am going to have to turn into Jen (quarterlife crisis) before I can make headway on being as popular as Jenn.   Jen and I both have fair skin and wear jeans.   It’s striking how Excel can spot these similarities and show you the way.

I’m planning to keep consulting with Excel to improve my general popularity level,   eventually becoming like Raymond.   My next move is to get a good tan and maybe some contact lenses to make my eye’s brown.

note: edited to adjust the number of n’s in Jen because I got it COMPLETELY wrong

Peak page request times:

• Big: 8-9pm (PDT); 4-5am (GMT)
• Small:     8-9am (PDT); 4-5pm (GMT)

Trough ((posted in a big trough @ 3am PDT using a well hidden WordPress ‘automatic-post-at-this-time’ feature)) page request times:

• Big: 2-3am (PDT); 10-11am (GMT)
• Small: 4-5pm (PDT); Midnight-1am (GMT)

Graph below produced by my web service provider (not Excel).   Does the 3-dimensional nature of the graph make it more difficult to read the page-reqest values?   Does the top or bottom of the thick line represent the data values?   Looks like it’s about 700 page hits thick and 2  hours deep.  

Pretty

Morning rituals blogged:

• Meegan:   Rituals
• Geeky:    Ritualistic, inspired by Meegan’s entry
• Anne:   Routine, inspired by Geeky’s entry
• LaCroix:   Compulsive, inspired by Anne and Geeky’s  entry

As a committed conformist here’s my outstandingly pedestrian morning inspired by all the above entries:

• alarm, wake,  fluff-ball love-fest, get out of bed (15mins)
• shower & dry (15mins).   Homage to Lush.
• fluff-ball love fest  @ top then foot of staircase (5mins)
• make & drink TEA while checking other people’s blogs (20mins)
• Leave for  work in a chuggy little LooSea.

chain-letters…   …chain blog-entries… …if I tell you about my morning does that mean it exists?   If no-one see’s my mornings (apart from the fluff-balls) does that mean they don’t exist?   Should I waffle about a tree falling in a forest or just go to bed?  

I bet you can’t wait to find out ‘what are the top twenty search phrases‘ that bought new seekers to this site.   These people were here,   with you!

Other statistics provided by the web service provider include:

• “Distinct hosts” (computers?) “served in the last 7 days” – 262.   If we guess that my 7 friends use 3 computers in a week that still leaves 241 computers.   Maybe 1/3rd,   80 of those are  searchers and  80 are blog-summarising computers.   That still leaves about 80 computers  with strangers-to-me accessing this blog.
• “Successful requests for pages in last 7 days” – 2,859.    That’s an average of approximately 408 per day.    If we deduct the 200 times per day that I  read my blog that still leaves 208 page loads.   If my 7 friends read my blog once per day that still leaves 201 page load unaccounted for…   …wow,   for me that’s BIG!   I have no idea how blog readers influence this statistic.   I’m confident they do.

I hope the computer users with successful page loads  were happy readers  

some searchers came to the wendy house looking for creatively spelt words:

• “arabic key bored“
• “thangs that make electricity“
• “miss spelt search“
• “peeps“
• “frendy“

innaccuracy has a gravitational-style force.

Version 1.0 of :: ŦĦ £ ώëñð ¥ Ħõů$€ :: is discovered by searchers from South Africa Saudi Arabia, Norway, China and of course the UK!    These web-addresses took people to V1.0  within 24 hrs:

* search

::W:: intern-national-woman-of-miss-tarry

Meeting real people as a by-product of blogging!  

Jenn and LaCroix blog on our evening out with regular ‘commenters’ Drew and Mr.Fancypants:

• Piehole
• Ordinary: tales of a librarian

I’ve met more, more like-able, people through blogging than through subscribing to an internet dating service. Who would have guessed that it seems more ‘natural’?!  

The ’70s dive bar music was outstanding.   The beer was sadly all bottled and lager oriented.

I can’t be doing with maintaining two blogs.  

This is now my main blog:   http://wendyhome.com/  

This is now an archive:   http://thewendyhouse.spaces.live.com