Where would I have put a link to my blog from – I’m always open to suggestions

@Sam – I was thinking overnight that they might be able to get traffic information from google reader. But I had a huge number of aggregated readers when I was on the emacs planet. Measuring that would be tricky eh? Unless they had another blog on the same planet that did have images that were HTTP got. Maybe your goat entrails suggestion is the right one.

A while ago, I read an article where someone was trying to determine the number of readers to his blog from the apache logs. It was an interesting read and he came up with a range with a level of certainty. I’ll have to try and dig it out.

A [read more] link is probably the more reliable technique, but I’m not so keen on it myself so I stick to the full feed.

@joseph – I’d hope that a local emacs group in a sufficiently large area would be fairly popular due to (currently) zero supply and a little demand. I’d attend one if it was started in my area.

I had a look at the emacs/perl group you mentioned. I don’t know when I’d visit it though. The only cross-over that I would be specifically searching for would be cperl-mode. I’m happy for you to put the link here though – it is relevant to the discussion.

On a different front, I’ve tried creating a discussion group for subjects related to both emacs and perl, but with only limited success:
http://groups.google.com/group/emacs-perl-intersection/

Probably I need to be more obnoxious about promoting it (like, by posting messages like this).

No idea, but maybe google lets you purchase access to anonymised traffic figures for people using their online reader.

That could be a figure to extrapolate from.

There’s a lot of different online news readers, and I’d be very surprised if none of them provided this information.

Traffic figures for websites are a black art at the best of times, with large amounts of behind-the-scenes fudgery, because there’s certain things you simply CANNOT know from logs, but you can sort of make a 90%-right guess.

RSS is one-step removed beyond that, the fetch of the feed shows up in your logs, but that’s it. And the fetch happens repeatedly every 15 minutes/60 minutes/24 hours, however they have their feedreader configured, for as long as their feedreader is open. If they’re using an online feedreader, then that’s 24/7.

If your feed is then aggregated by something like Ironman, then you won’t even see how many people are subscribed, because Ironman will show as a single subscription to your feed, and you’ll never see all the people subscribed to it in your logs – they’ll be showing on the Ironman webserver logs.

So that makes you yet another step removed from the data you need.

I’m no expert on google’s feed reader or the other online offerings, I’ve never used them myself, but I do have several feeds on a devel box that only I subscribe to, and I can say that there’s nothing in the logs but the fetch of the feed itself when using NetNewsWire. (A pretty popular and particularly well-written mac client.)

On my perl blog, I couldn’t say, I mostly hide the main article behind a “read more” so that people visit and show up in the traffic logs. It’s irritating, and I dislike it when other people do it to me, but it does mean that I have some confidence that the people who bothered to click through probably were interested in the article lead-in at the least.

I’ve been following your emacs posts for, I don’t know, a year now, and I did not know you had a Perl blog. I’ve found your emacs tips useful, and though I’m a Perl expert, I’m always open to tips.

But… d’you think you could have provided a LINK to your Perl blog?? C’mon!

Thanks.

So they must be using goat entrails on the keyboard to give you those numbers.

What number would they extrapolate from? And it doesn’t seem to be a consistent multiplier – even my own post has a different factor between different days.

I can’t imagine how they are doing it, but surely it must be slightly more scientific than that. I’m tempted to install a wordpress and an ironman on my box and see if anything gets reflected in the logs when I view through the feed. If I had plenty of spare time, I would do exactly that.

Anyway, great comment. Thanks Sam.

As for tracking feed visitors, the only way they could be sure is by placing a “webbug” or other trick into the feed. Looking at what makes it through to the ironman feed, it doesn’t appear that that is the case.

So they must be using goat entrails on the keyboard to give you those numbers.

(Probably it’s an extrapolation from some other figure they do have, I’d have my doubts about the accuracy of that sort of estimate on a high-volume mainstream topic, let alone a low-volume atypical topic.)

In answer to your question about a HTTP fetch, no, reading the article doesn’t cause a fetch from your site, unless they click through to actually view the article on your site.

I’ve no idea whether wordpress’ stats strip out bot visits, my webhosting ones don’t. (There’s too many and they change too often, not really worth the bother.)

As for writing about development of perl the language, rather than developing IN perl, I’ve no idea whether it’d be more popular. I’d probably read it, but then I fairly obviously already do read it.

Mostly I was just illustrating the slightly different focus, not saying you should do anything about it.

Write whatever you want to write and feel enthused about, one of the strengths of perl is that it’s useful in so many situations, and part of the point of the Ironman Challenge is people being able to see the broad range of ways that people are using it.

You, and others, could write 30 different articles about tasks that I’m never likely to do or be interested in doing… but, even so, I doubt I’m the only person who’d say that I’m interested in the fact that you *are* doing them, with perl, and how you’re doing them.

I have a few ideas for posts on more beginner areas. I’ll try to remember to check the stats to see if they are more or less popular than the more advanced ones.

Thanks

I must have tried to subscribe to the wrong ironman feed then. I only get truncated articles.

But wordpress does estimate the number of aggregated visitors you get. For example, for this post, I have 189 aggregated visitors onsite vs. 101 who read it onsite and today the numbers are 60 and 59 respectively for a total of 409. I was trying to think how they measure the aggregated visitors, originally attributing it to an image load or something similar, but as there aren’t any, I guess it must be loading something else. Google reader, for example, seems to know how many comments there are. Does each rss view trigger an HTTP get from my site? If I had the logs, I’d check them.

I also hope the real visitors outnumber the bots. I’ve outsourced my visitor tracking to wordpress.com but I guess it should be fairly easy to distinguish between them, based on IP address for example.

I’m glad to hear it isn’t my writing. When I read it back to myself it sounds a bit dry and awkward but maybe that is similar to the effect of hearing your own recorded voice.

Interesting point about writing about emacs vs doing stuff within emacs. Do you think there would be more interest in writing about developing perl itself? Not that I would be capable of doing that of course, but I am curious.