Google Analytics

As this blog nears its first birthday, I thought I'd share some of the Google Analytics statistics from the last 12 months. Although Google Analytics is far from perfect, as it misses all the RSS readers, and anyone like me who runs NoScript, it does provide a pretty graphical view of traffic.

The visitor overview below shows that throughout the year we're averaging about 10 visitors a day, with the obvious spike in interest after Rosalie's birth in July.




The dashboard view below for the last month bears this out with some interesting stats on Pages/Visit, average time on site etc. Of course, the accuracy of these figures are limited by the manner in which they are gathered - for example a single visit may be read for a while, but will always be recorded as 0 seconds if the next page is off-site, but these are standard deficiencies in web analytics.




One graph I always like to check out is the Map Overlay, below the city view is shown. This blog has been viewed on all continents, and from 52 countries. A warm welcome to all readers in Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Chile, United Arab Emirates and Senegal. Just why there was a visit from Quantico, Virginia, USA is still a mystery to me - what interest could the FBI, Marine Corps or the Drug Enforcement Administration have in me? Surely not my harsh stance on copy protection mechanisms for Digital Media :-)




On a lighter note, it's fun to see what browsers visitors to this site are using. Internet Exploder remains the top weapon of mass distraction, but at just over 33%, Firefox is gaining ground.




BTW, it's not depicted here but the OS split is 94%, 5% and 1% for Windows, Mac and Linux respectively. There's still some work to do for Linux on the desktop ;-)

The Psychic Skeptic

Australian skeptic Karen Stollznow has a fascinating account of her application to become a phone line psychic. The company claimed to have a very thorough testing regime, in order to ensure that only those with real psychic gifts could qualify. They even went so far as to say that less than 5% of applicants would be deemed acceptable by their high standards.

The bulk of the article describes Karen's progress through the tests, using only the skills of pop psychology and occasional bullshitting. To find out how far these skills can get you in the world of Psychic make-believe, read the story here.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Posting from ScribeFire

As the tag at the bottom of this post indicates, I'm experimenting with ScribeFire, a Firefox extension which allows you to create and publish posts in the bottom segment of the browser. This is actually pretty handy, as for the most part when I post, I'm checking some sot of online information source anyway. Now this is in the top half of the window, while I type in the bottom half. Recommended.

Powered by ScribeFire.

New Year's Resolution - Maintain this Site

Now that www.macartan.de is changed over from static HTML to a weblog, I'd like to explain the scope and purpose of the new site. Maybe purpose first - let all of you out there know what myself, Heike and Liam are up to. This will have to do as the mission statement for now :-)

The title of this post also hints at my motivation, namely a New Year's resolution to keep the blog current and maintained. We'll see if it lasts...

The scope of the posts will I hope be pretty varied. Cute pictures of Liam are easy wins with grandparents, so the rest of you will have to accept that staple. As Technology is my career and hobby, expect some comment also on new gadgets and trends. Reviews of books, music, movies, podcasts, etc. will be in there too. Another NYR is to do more climbing in 2007, so I'll hopefully be able to report on some crags. Holidays too. The odd political comment such as "US out of Iraq" might be thrown in, although this is arguably such a no-brainer as to be a platitude.

A word on the blog language - it's English. This although I use predominantly German in my daily life. Maybe I'll post now and again in German if it's a topic of no interest to English speakers, we'll see. In general though, I'll save German eyeballs from my Hibernian grammer stuctures, for as Hans Bix said:

"Ich gebe zu , daß mein Verhältnis zur deutschen Sprache
wie mein Verhältnis zu meiner Frau ist:
Ich liebe sie, ich bewundere
sie, ich verstehe sie meistens,
aber ich beherrsche sie nicht."

And what do I expect from you, the reader? Please use the feedback button if you like or dislike any post - ambivalence is the only excuse for silence. A suggestion for your comfort is to paste the feed URL http://www.macartan.de/rss.xml in your favourite RSS reader, that way you don't have to come looking for updates (who knows how frequent they'll be?).

A word on timing, I'm planning to send a link to this post today 20th January to a select group of people, and ask you to beta test the site for a week or so, and send me your feedback. Then by the end of the month I'll send out links to everyone I think might be interested. Feel free to forward the link to anyone you think might be interested.

After all that blabbing, finally a bit of news. For those that don't know, Heike is expecting a sibling for Liam, the date we're aiming for is 21st July 2007. We're thrilled and looking forward to this, expect updates in the coming months :-)