At work I have some involvement with web archiving. Our program is selective in certain subjects as compared to the work done by the Internet Archive, which seems to try to take in as much of what is on the Internet as it can. (There doesn't appear to be a better way of defining the scope of the Internet Archives efforts, but it is clear that they don't harvest everything. For one thing, they respect robots.txt so if a site uses that to prevent indexing or crawling of the site, then IA won't harvest it.
This blog has existed since July 2010 and now has over 500 posts. It isn't clear to me if IA now attempts to harvest all of the blogs in Blogger or has some mechanism for choosing (such as size, or frequency of posting, or popularity, or ?? - whatever it is, IA has been archiving this blog since January 27 2012 a few times a year.
Calendar of captures (harvests) of my blog by the Internet Archive
Each year for which there are captures has a calendar of the months with dates circled when the site was harvested. In 2012 a harvest was made of the blog as it was on January 27 2012, the not again until September 22 (which resulted in the capture shown below). After that it was harvested more frequently but not on what looks like a regular schedule.
IA capture of this blog from September 22, 2012
Looking at the archived version of my site reveals that I haven't changed its formatting since 2012. The only obvious different in fact between now and then is that the ranking of "popular posts" has changed - in September 2012, a post about a Soviet time trial bike was the most read, but now it is a post about the book "Bicycling for Ladies" - this is the result of some outside sites linking to the "Bicycling for Ladies" post, I think. It seems clear that for this not-that-much-read blog, the "popular posts" remain at the top by virtue of readers seeing them there and clicking on them, for the most part.
If one looks at a (far) more famous bicycle blog, Bike Snob NYC as captured by the Internet Archive, it is clear that they have been capturing some Blogger blogs for a long time - the captures for Bike Snob go back to July 7, 2007 for a blog that had only started in June 2007! Perhaps it was the frequency of posting that caused this. In this case, the comparison of the then-blog and the today-blog is more revealing - Bike Snob has zero advertising in July 2007. And the subtitle for the blog was "Finally--a catty, gossipy, nasty, and critical blog for bicycles!" rather than the present "Systematically and mercilessly disassembling, flushing, greasing, and re-packing the cycling culture." (At some point during the next year Bike Snob changed the subtitle to what it is now, according to the versions in the Internet Archive.)
What is the significance of this? Particularly in terms of cycling? Probably none. Except that even pretty obscure stuff that may disappear from the Internet, including stuff about bicycles and cycling, may be stored away in the Internet Archive.
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
End of Year Look at Blog Stats
Overview - 90,001 all-time pageviews (click image to enlarge)
No, I still don't get what happened when pageviews was shooting up and then went south for a while, and now sort of zigs and zags.
Posts
The top four posts are the four that are featured at the right as "popular posts" - once ensconced there they seem hard to displace. They have, however, changed in rank relative to one another over time.
The blog post that has the most page views that comes next is Kickstarter Reflector Sticker = Success - I don't understand at all why this continues regularly to come up. It is (from my point of view, writing it) the least substantive post I did about Kickstarter proposals. There is little predicting which posts will get lots of views.
I do like that several posts related to my 1982 Bridgestone Sirius are popular. (Another one is here.
Traffic Sources
The traffic mostly comes from Google searches, not reading of current blog posts (I think). The VampireStat spam numbers are fairly low, all things considered. Good.
Audience(s)
Not surprisingly most traffic is from English speaking countries. And an assortment of others.
Saturday, August 24, 2013
75,000 Pageviews
This is for 433 published blog posts starting in May 2007.
When I started this blog, my main interest was in acquiring some firsthand experience using Blogger and Flickr to present interesting (hopefully) historical information I would find related to cycling in the 1890s in online digitized collections at the Library of Congress and similar institutions, sometimes making comparisons to present day cycling. As it has worked out, I have sometimes blogged about present day cycling with no reference to historical aspects of cycling and have also blogged about periods other than the 1890s. But other than this (and one other) 'meta' blog post that is about blogging (but blogging that is about cycling) my posts are all about cycling, at least.
As of this morning, this blog has had 75,000 pageviews (says Blogger)
I don't really understand my traffic over time. My pageview numbers were increasing fairly steadily until early 2011, and then the growth stopped and in fact the numbers fell off quite a bit. On some level of course it doesn't matter - I don't have any advertising. But I was still pleased that more people were looking at the stuff I had assembled. (The numbers were not and have never been influenced for this blog by "referer spam" overall - from time to time one of those sites will appear briefly in my stats, then disappear after a few days. The falloff can't be attributed to that.)
This blog is a little different than most because on a typical day I get most of the traffic from Google searches - that was true at the pageview high point and is true now. People are mostly not visiting because the are regular visitors of this blog but because they did a Google search on "Conan Doyle bicycle" and came to the blog post I did on his statement about the benefits of cycling. (My main contribution is that I extracted from the Scientific American article everything he said and not just the line usually quoted plus I show you the page as published.)
For a while I would try to be clever and come up with blog posts that I thought would be appealing for some other "bike bloggers" who are vastly more popular to link to - as a result, the Washcycle blog appears in my "all time" stats - but the decrease in the traffic can't be (much) attributed to my not doing that any more, either.
I find it hard to believe that the amount of searching for bicycle related topics that brought traffic to this blog has fallen off - my observation would be that the appearance of certain search terms in my "stats" has been remarkably consistent - so I have to wonder if my not taking up the many (insistent, pesky) offers from Blogger to use Google Plus to support my blog has a negative effect in that those bloggers who do use it get a higher page rank in Google search. I suppose I could have been aggressive about trying to connect with people through Google Plus but it seemed pointless for a blog that relies on search.
In the end, I can't know what the reasons are for this. I still blog at least once a week and I still find things to blog about that seem to attract enough pageviews over time to motivate me to keep at it. I still learn about cycling history and about the resources available on the Internet. And I continue to be pleased to see a fair amount of traffic from many other countries.
Cheers.
When I started this blog, my main interest was in acquiring some firsthand experience using Blogger and Flickr to present interesting (hopefully) historical information I would find related to cycling in the 1890s in online digitized collections at the Library of Congress and similar institutions, sometimes making comparisons to present day cycling. As it has worked out, I have sometimes blogged about present day cycling with no reference to historical aspects of cycling and have also blogged about periods other than the 1890s. But other than this (and one other) 'meta' blog post that is about blogging (but blogging that is about cycling) my posts are all about cycling, at least.
As of this morning, this blog has had 75,000 pageviews (says Blogger)
I don't really understand my traffic over time. My pageview numbers were increasing fairly steadily until early 2011, and then the growth stopped and in fact the numbers fell off quite a bit. On some level of course it doesn't matter - I don't have any advertising. But I was still pleased that more people were looking at the stuff I had assembled. (The numbers were not and have never been influenced for this blog by "referer spam" overall - from time to time one of those sites will appear briefly in my stats, then disappear after a few days. The falloff can't be attributed to that.)
This blog is a little different than most because on a typical day I get most of the traffic from Google searches - that was true at the pageview high point and is true now. People are mostly not visiting because the are regular visitors of this blog but because they did a Google search on "Conan Doyle bicycle" and came to the blog post I did on his statement about the benefits of cycling. (My main contribution is that I extracted from the Scientific American article everything he said and not just the line usually quoted plus I show you the page as published.)
For a while I would try to be clever and come up with blog posts that I thought would be appealing for some other "bike bloggers" who are vastly more popular to link to - as a result, the Washcycle blog appears in my "all time" stats - but the decrease in the traffic can't be (much) attributed to my not doing that any more, either.
I find it hard to believe that the amount of searching for bicycle related topics that brought traffic to this blog has fallen off - my observation would be that the appearance of certain search terms in my "stats" has been remarkably consistent - so I have to wonder if my not taking up the many (insistent, pesky) offers from Blogger to use Google Plus to support my blog has a negative effect in that those bloggers who do use it get a higher page rank in Google search. I suppose I could have been aggressive about trying to connect with people through Google Plus but it seemed pointless for a blog that relies on search.
In the end, I can't know what the reasons are for this. I still blog at least once a week and I still find things to blog about that seem to attract enough pageviews over time to motivate me to keep at it. I still learn about cycling history and about the resources available on the Internet. And I continue to be pleased to see a fair amount of traffic from many other countries.
Cheers.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Comparing Cycling in the U.S. and the Netherlands - Valid?
I am reading In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist" that turns out to be more of a history of this subject and less of a memoir than I was expecting. I will write a review of it when I am finished.
As someone who reads and thinks about how cycling could be better supported in the U.S., the Netherlands comes up as a model often, although I have to wonder about its validity as such. In some cases, people make comparisons or talk about aspects of cycling in the Netherlands and it isn't clear if they are holding the Netherlands approach up as a model or simply an example of how it can be different than it is here. The later seems more useful to me since the likelihood of our ending up with anything vaguely like what the Netherlands has to support urban (and interurban) cycling absent their 100+ history in this area along (not to mention all the other factors) seems rather low.
With that in mind, however, it can be interesting to look at examples of this "conversation."
Cycling in the US from a Dutch perspective from this blogger
The above video provides a quick understanding of how at least one Dutch cyclist views the American approach to cycling. I don't disagree with any of this analysis as such but in a short overview like this he presumably includes those points that he considers most significant and leaves others out. In my own experience, it has been difficult to transition from an automobile-centered way of thinking to actually using bicycles for more routine day-to-day transportation needs. I have several bikes that I use for commuting the 20 miles round trip (~34 km) to and from work, but these bikes have pedals requiring special shoes and as road bikes are not very good for riding a mile to the grocery store or library for those kinds of errands. So for many years I have ridden a bike consistently to and from work over a fairly long distance, with special clothing and appearing to be in a great hurry (since this doubles as my exercise program) but then I drive very short distances to do things where I would want to arrive wearing street clothes. Kind of strange.
Recently I have started using another bike that is a much more upright one, with a three speed hub shift (and therefore incapable of speedsterish activity), to ride back and forth to places a mile or less away to do errands, without changing into some special cycling clothes. I have been surprised and I suppose a little amused at how enjoyable this is.
Capital Bikeshare arrives in my extendedneighborhood, but closer to my typical destination for short rides-still, nice to have it around
In a roundabout way of thinking, I feel that bikeshare programs, such as the Capital Bikeshare program here in the Washington DC area, are very helpful with modeling and enabling this kind of cycling.
"Infamous" video of bicycle commuters at an intersection in Ultrecht (not Amsterdam) illustrating the level of cycling in an urban setting in the Netherlands
This video serves as a counterpoint to the first video looking at cycling in the U.S., illustrating the significant differences in the scale of cycling as an activity. While I don't think the Netherlands can be our "model" for where we want cycling in the U.S. to end up, it certainly illustrates that cycling on a scale that rivals and even exceeds use of motor vehicles is possible and that specialized infrastructure (or as the video's narrator says, "infra") can be created to support that level of activity. (It's noteworthy that the Dutch observer in his video takes the benefits of specialized infrastructure to support cycling as a given - no "vehicular cycling" for him.)
It's also interesting to see how the Dutch cyclists comply with their traffic signals in this video, for the most part. At a few points there are riders who ignore the light, but the vast majority comply.
This syncs with a recent report that in Portland stoplight cameras studied showed that there was 94 percent compliance with stop lights by cyclists. What?? Really?? Yes. Of course the obvious reason for why this could be true in Portland (and not quite what I observe around here) is that they have a larger number of cyclists and that as a community they act to informally enforce or support good (or anyway legal) behavior while in situations that I see often here of one or two cyclists and a zillion cars, it is much more tempting or attractive not to.
As someone who reads and thinks about how cycling could be better supported in the U.S., the Netherlands comes up as a model often, although I have to wonder about its validity as such. In some cases, people make comparisons or talk about aspects of cycling in the Netherlands and it isn't clear if they are holding the Netherlands approach up as a model or simply an example of how it can be different than it is here. The later seems more useful to me since the likelihood of our ending up with anything vaguely like what the Netherlands has to support urban (and interurban) cycling absent their 100+ history in this area along (not to mention all the other factors) seems rather low.
With that in mind, however, it can be interesting to look at examples of this "conversation."
Cycling in the US from a Dutch perspective from this blogger
The above video provides a quick understanding of how at least one Dutch cyclist views the American approach to cycling. I don't disagree with any of this analysis as such but in a short overview like this he presumably includes those points that he considers most significant and leaves others out. In my own experience, it has been difficult to transition from an automobile-centered way of thinking to actually using bicycles for more routine day-to-day transportation needs. I have several bikes that I use for commuting the 20 miles round trip (~34 km) to and from work, but these bikes have pedals requiring special shoes and as road bikes are not very good for riding a mile to the grocery store or library for those kinds of errands. So for many years I have ridden a bike consistently to and from work over a fairly long distance, with special clothing and appearing to be in a great hurry (since this doubles as my exercise program) but then I drive very short distances to do things where I would want to arrive wearing street clothes. Kind of strange.
Recently I have started using another bike that is a much more upright one, with a three speed hub shift (and therefore incapable of speedsterish activity), to ride back and forth to places a mile or less away to do errands, without changing into some special cycling clothes. I have been surprised and I suppose a little amused at how enjoyable this is.
Capital Bikeshare arrives in my extendedneighborhood, but closer to my typical destination for short rides-still, nice to have it around
In a roundabout way of thinking, I feel that bikeshare programs, such as the Capital Bikeshare program here in the Washington DC area, are very helpful with modeling and enabling this kind of cycling.
"Infamous" video of bicycle commuters at an intersection in Ultrecht (not Amsterdam) illustrating the level of cycling in an urban setting in the Netherlands
This video serves as a counterpoint to the first video looking at cycling in the U.S., illustrating the significant differences in the scale of cycling as an activity. While I don't think the Netherlands can be our "model" for where we want cycling in the U.S. to end up, it certainly illustrates that cycling on a scale that rivals and even exceeds use of motor vehicles is possible and that specialized infrastructure (or as the video's narrator says, "infra") can be created to support that level of activity. (It's noteworthy that the Dutch observer in his video takes the benefits of specialized infrastructure to support cycling as a given - no "vehicular cycling" for him.)
It's also interesting to see how the Dutch cyclists comply with their traffic signals in this video, for the most part. At a few points there are riders who ignore the light, but the vast majority comply.
This syncs with a recent report that in Portland stoplight cameras studied showed that there was 94 percent compliance with stop lights by cyclists. What?? Really?? Yes. Of course the obvious reason for why this could be true in Portland (and not quite what I observe around here) is that they have a larger number of cyclists and that as a community they act to informally enforce or support good (or anyway legal) behavior while in situations that I see often here of one or two cyclists and a zillion cars, it is much more tempting or attractive not to.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Blog Stats - December 2012
I took up this blog for various reasons - one was that I kept bumping into "factoids" about cycling history that I felt others would find interesting; also, I thought it might teach me a few things about using certain web-based resources (that otherwise I imagined I understood but didn't have hands on experience with).
From the Blogger stats for wheelbike.blogspot.com as of 12/31/2012
I started the blog in May 2009. Some time during the past six months or so, there was a day when I went into Blogger and my blog posts had mostly disappeared. Given how much time I have put into creating them and that I don't have them backed up locally in any way, I remained remarkably calm - anyway, later the same day the posts reappeared, however it now appears that the dates were somehow screwed up. Blogger's cumulative page views now thinks I started getting page views in 2008 when the blog only started in May of 2009. (I hadn't noticed this until now.) Conversely now none of the blog posts themselves are dated before July 31 2010 - during the first bunch of posts (as dated now), there are many instances of multiple posts on one day, which I don't think I was doing. So somehow the dates assigned to the posts got messed up. Since all the posts still seem to be there, I guess that's not a big deal, but it's . . . weird.
I had a blog post in June 2011 when I talked about having blogged for two years with some statistics - this earlier post confirmed I wasn't losing my mind.
Blogger stats from March 2012, when the blog had a lot of growth
Since April 2012 I have had a significant drop in average daily page views - it was around 150 per day and now it is more like 90-100. Most of my page views are driven by Google searches, so I can't imagine what change occurred that drove the page views down. I have only added "content" that can be the target of searches . . .
Pages with highest number of page views
One change I made in 2012 was to add the "widget" on the right with "popular posts" that drives traffic to those pages from any blog entry that someone comes upon from searching. The Soviet time trial blog entry is by far the most viewed because (apparently) it attracts interest from visitors who came to look at something else but I also see it as a search target (see below).
Highest number of fixed search arguments that brought in users
Of course there are many variants that I see of these search arguments. ("Bicycle patents" or "old bike patents" and so on and not just "bike patents.")
Mostly North American users but a fair number from elsewhere
From the Blogger stats for wheelbike.blogspot.com as of 12/31/2012
I started the blog in May 2009. Some time during the past six months or so, there was a day when I went into Blogger and my blog posts had mostly disappeared. Given how much time I have put into creating them and that I don't have them backed up locally in any way, I remained remarkably calm - anyway, later the same day the posts reappeared, however it now appears that the dates were somehow screwed up. Blogger's cumulative page views now thinks I started getting page views in 2008 when the blog only started in May of 2009. (I hadn't noticed this until now.) Conversely now none of the blog posts themselves are dated before July 31 2010 - during the first bunch of posts (as dated now), there are many instances of multiple posts on one day, which I don't think I was doing. So somehow the dates assigned to the posts got messed up. Since all the posts still seem to be there, I guess that's not a big deal, but it's . . . weird.
I had a blog post in June 2011 when I talked about having blogged for two years with some statistics - this earlier post confirmed I wasn't losing my mind.
Blogger stats from March 2012, when the blog had a lot of growth
Since April 2012 I have had a significant drop in average daily page views - it was around 150 per day and now it is more like 90-100. Most of my page views are driven by Google searches, so I can't imagine what change occurred that drove the page views down. I have only added "content" that can be the target of searches . . .
Pages with highest number of page views
One change I made in 2012 was to add the "widget" on the right with "popular posts" that drives traffic to those pages from any blog entry that someone comes upon from searching. The Soviet time trial blog entry is by far the most viewed because (apparently) it attracts interest from visitors who came to look at something else but I also see it as a search target (see below).
Highest number of fixed search arguments that brought in users
Of course there are many variants that I see of these search arguments. ("Bicycle patents" or "old bike patents" and so on and not just "bike patents.")
Mostly North American users but a fair number from elsewhere
Monday, September 5, 2011
The Wheel-Spam Comment Game
Example of a "comment" linking to a commercial tire site from Prolix
Apparently because bicycles have tires, Prolix (and some other identities that I think are the same person) regularly post "comments" that feature links to several different automotive tire sales sites. Because this blog is pretty low-traffic (900-1,000 page views per month, most from Google searches) it seems an utter waste of time for this person (or bot?) to be doing this, but we're only talking about my removing 2-3 comments per week, typically.
Does someone get paid for this? Presumably not on the basis of how many links are placed but rather according to how much traffic it creates. How boring.
Here the syntax is OK and the comment more or less makes sense (although this is the fourth or fifth time I've read "my very first comment on your site" from Prolix) but given the wording of some of the others, I'm doubtful the person doing this has English as his or her first language. Not that it matters, but it seems that much more crazy that somewhere in the world some person is searching for tire-related blogs in a foreign language to place phoney-baloney comments for car tires in Florida in order to make a living.
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