Friday, January 16, 2015

Milestone 20,556

I was going to post a milestone update as soon as I hit 20,000 page views, but the page views jumped suddenly in the past week such that my fourth highest day of all time (388) unexpectedly occurred on January 12.  It was highest daily total since August 5, 2014.  This was inconvenient because this is the type of post I like to write in advance.

I attribute my moderate recent increase in page views to following the advice of two people who post on SaintsWeb under the names Bearsy and eurosaint.  Bearsy advised:
Redslo is good people! I think he should maybe restrict himself to factual matters tho i.e. doing the research and explaining the facts behind things that are dimly understood, like the stuff he did on FFP which was v.excellent. The 30 hours he put in on Football Manager to find out if Jack Cork will sign new contract, perhaps less so. I would like Redslo to review the Laws of the Game like they are Legal Contract using his Lawyer skills and advise whether i.e. Fabregas or Targett should have been prosecuted in the Chelsea match. That is my suggestion for Redslo blogs! Do things bout Rules & Facts & Lawyer Skills!
Editing out the humor, I took this as advice to not go crazy spending huge amounts of time on research projects and to focus on the areas of my expertise.
Eurosaint opined:
I'm sure that you mean well Redslo but I have to confess that after reading about 10% of what you have written I lost the will to live
Perhaps if you were to keep your points a bit more concise they would have more of an impact ?
Anyway, happy new year to you !
I took this as advice to be more concise and to avoid depriving people of the will to live.  (By the way, eurosaint, if you are still reading you might want to stop.  I think the rest of this post will be will to live sapping for you.)
I decided to write more timely and focused posts.  There were several subjects I wanted to post on this past summer and fall, but I kept expanding the scope of the research to where it became unmanageable—my third party ownership piece is the prime example.  I just should have written up something during our pursuit of Rojo.  Instead, I kept reading and taking notes on more and more stuff until it felt like I was writing a master’s thesis.  Since I didn’t want to write a master’s thesis on that subject, I stopped working on it completely.  There are three or four other projects that went the same way.
In line with this new approach, I wrote up and immediately published several recent posts including “Doom and Gloom,” “ European Qualification Rules for Southampton Fans,” “Possible Gaston Ramirez Transfer to Boca Juniors May not be Possible,” and “Southampton Weekly Salaries.”  Two of these posts used my legal skills, one used my willingness to tabulate a moderate number of statistics, and one used my willingness to crib data from Football Manager—always a popular feature of my blog.
In any case, all four of these posts have turned out to be reasonably popular based upon the direct page views which understates the actual viewership because page views of my main page are not counted in the total.  Here are the most popular posts for the past month.

Posts


Entry
Pageviews
Jan 5, 2015
176
Jan 12, 2015
86
Dec 26, 2014
59
Dec 25, 2014
46
Jan 9, 2015
39
Jan 13, 2015
39
Dec 31, 2014, 2 comments
35
Aug 1, 2014
33
Dec 22, 2014
33
Dec 31, 2014
33

My all-time popular posts are dominated by posts from my first few days of blogging when, due to twitter referrals, things went crazy.  However, two of the recent posts are on the top ten list as is my post on how I became a Southampton fan which was not all that popular when it first was published but has been looked at steadily since then.  It was my most popular directly viewed post from mid-October through mid-December.  This is the all-time top ten:

Posts


Entry
Pageviews
Aug 1, 2014
1322
Jul 30, 2014, 1 comment
493
Aug 4, 2014
363
Aug 5, 2014, 1 comment
274
Aug 1, 2014
203
Jan 5, 2015
176
Aug 17, 2014
115
Aug 26, 2014, 2 comments
105
Jan 12, 2015
86
Aug 9, 2014, 2 comments
84

This does not mean that  I will no longer undertake complicated research projects, but I will try to find ways to do the research in smaller chunks to generate a shorter, timely post.  I will only go crazy on rare occasions when the subject seem especially important or interesting (to me).  So thank you Bearsy and eurosaint for the good advice.
If anyone else has any suggestions or comments, I am happy to hear them.  Post them here or on the threads devoted to my blog on Saints Web or The Ugly Inside.
And I have one question:  whenever I post something I almost always immediately get a hit from Mountain View, California, which is just over 200 miles from where I live but only a couple of miles from where I group up.  Do I really have a regular reader there or is that a weird internet thing that makes my own page view checking to see if everything posted properly show up as a hit from Mountain View?  If you read my blog in Mountain View, please let me know.
Finally, I am updating the statistics I published in my last milestone post.
Here is where my page views are coming from:
Entry
Pageviews
United Kingdom
14267
United States
2311
France
521
Australia
470
Spain
188
Sweden
188
Netherlands
147
Malaysia
130
Canada
116
Germany
91

Here is the browser and operating system information:
Pageviews by Browsers

Entry
Pageviews
Safari
8149 (39%)
Chrome
5803 (28%)
Firefox
2211 (10%)
Internet Explorer
2036 (9%)
Mobile Safari
1078 (5%)
Mobile
705 (3%)
CriOS
147 (<1%)
OS;FBSV
143 (<1%)
GSA
62 (<1%)
Opera
62 (<1%)

Pageviews by Operating Systems

Entry
Pageviews
Windows
7124 (34%)
iPhone
4044 (19%)
iPad
3208 (15%)
Android
3151 (15%)
Macintosh
2452 (11%)
Linux
237 (1%)
Other Unix
167 (<1%)
iPod
36 (<1%)
BlackBerry
19 (<1%)
iPod touch
19 (<1%)

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