July 2008 stats

Is it me, or is 2008 flying by! Only 4 more months till 2009. That’s a bit scary as I’m haven’t even begun to think of Christmas. That’s for another post. July was the best month for xorsyst.com so far! Saying that is beginning to be a habit thanks to all of you!

Now for the juicy stuff.

July saw 400,984 page views. That’s a 118,555 increase over June’s page views. Total uniques were at 237,887. RSS subscribers are up to 530, that’s an increase 120 readers over last month! Also, Google has updated their pagerank, and xorsyst.com now has a pagerank of 4.

Much of the increase in traffic was due to Stumbleupon. A special thanks goes to EscapeTheory and WaferLove for continuing to add the stuff they find interesting from xorsyst.com to Stumbleupon. There were also a lot of new faces adding pages here to Stumbleupon. Thanks to Beakindbud, Rmg12, Contaminationx (website), and ChrisGuant (website). If you use Stumbleupon, add me to your friends list, and I will be glad to stumble your stuff!

Alexa was a bit weird this month. My current Alexa rank is 38,638. If you look at Alexa for July, it shows a dramatic drop in traffic, with the end of July returning higher. However, this was the best month for xorsyst.com so far. Other sites have similar dramatic drops for July. So that means either traffic across the entire Internet slowed in July or Alexa was tinkering with their traffic algorithm (which is more likely)

On the social network side, we have a new Facebook page on their Blog Network. If you’re on Facebook, add xorsyst.com on the Blog Network app! The xorsyst.com Myspace page has exploded too! Since launching it less than a month ago, we already have 132 friends. Be sure to add me on Twitter and FriendFeed too.

The best of July 2008

1. Top 10 Japanese Gravure Idols
2. Nathan’s hot dog eating contest 2008
3. Portable NES inside cartridge
4. Anime Hug Pillows
5. Japanese schoolgirl skirts getting longer
6. GTA Chinatown Wars [E3]
7. Triple Catcher Ice
8. 1up Mushroom Burger
9. New Rock Band 2 Songs [E3]
10. Charity event to help Chinese earthquake region

Most visited posts of July 2008

1. Play Guitar Hero Online (142,038 visitors)
2. Air-Conditioned Bed (26,012 visitors)
3. Italian military fears Samurai Granny (24,372 visitors)
   
4. Top 10 Japanese Gravure Idols (14,050 visitors)
   
5. Online Naruto Games (11,535 visitors)
6. Top Wii games for 2008 (10,089 visitors)
   
7. KeyholeTV: Watch Japanese TV Online (9,431 visitors)
   
8. Grow heart shaped cucumbers (6,831 visitors)
   
9. Free English Doujinshi (5,899 visitors)
   
10. Tokyology: Japanese Pop Culture (4,219visitors)

Top traffic sources for July 2008

1. Google Search (154,857 visitors)
2. Stumbleupon (53,102 visits)
3. Direct (type in/bookmarked) (17,982 visitors)
4. Yahoo Search (6,759 visitors)
5. AOL Search (2,086 visitors)
6. Webcrawler.com (1,416 visitors)
7. Live Search (1,339 visitors)
8. MSN Search (1,014 visitors)
9. Animeblogger.net (951 visitors)
10. Otaku.FM (951 visitors)

I have gotten a few questions/emails about why I use a few stats tracking programs, and not just a server one like AWStats that many people use as a basis for reporting their traffic. The short answer is I want to be honest about the traffic I receive. Looking at my AWStats, if I was to rely on that for page views, it says I have had 1,258,180 page views for July. I know that is false. The reason for such a high number is on the server level, that’s how many page views it sees. What’s not taken into account is to build one page for a visitor to see, especially on a wordpress blog, requires multiple “page views”. So that number is inflated, and cant be relied upon.

I choose to use wordpress stats because it counts every request for a page on my blog as 1 pageview no matter how many page views it takes to build that page. I do use AWStats for my unique visitors count because that number is more realistic. No matter how many page views, it counts that IP as one person.