I've Been Watching You

Growth

A change to my blog that didn't quite fit into my last post is that I started logging access to my website sometime in February. I thought now would be a good time to look at the logs and see what I can learn about my audience.

The first thing that jumps out is there are 28602 total logs! But that doesn't actually correspond to page visits. Every request is logged. Because a visit to any blog post always requests the css and for some pages additionally requests many images, this number overstates my traffic. The next thing I notice is a lot of logs are requesting my robots.txt file. That accounts for 3583 logs. Over 10%! I should probably make a robots.txt file to please all those robots. It's my belief that I don't need one if I'm fine with everyone crawling everything. But maybe the more timid bots are waiting for permission and I'm missing out on some SEO value.

The question "How many people are reading my blog" is somewhat harder to answer. I investigate the related question of how often each blog post is GOTTEN. I made a short python script [1] to search the logs and see how many times each blog was fetched and break down the GETS by day during the week of release and by week after that.

Plotly makes it easy to make some quick graphs and then export them as pngs or just the raw html [2]. You can see my graphs of blog visits during their first week and week by week afterwards below. Note the colors are vaguely correlated to categories, for instance red lines are mtg posts. Also note you can hide a line by clicking it or isolate it by double clicking it. That's fairly useful because the data is dominated by my 2xm review.