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top 5 analytics tips

Published January 25, 2008 by lievenlb

Google analytics is collecting data on this site for over a month now. Perhaps it is time to share a few lessons Ive learned over this period.

UPDATE : I have de-activated all google analytics plugins on this site. I may re-activate them for short periods later but ONLY to detect problems or to check on plugin performance. I will announce this in the sidebar with a ‘this site contains google analytics script code’-sticker. I encourage people using google analytics stalking code to do the same.

1. Aim at the generic visitor, not the specific

Analytics offers an amazing amount of data, in debatable detail. For example, via the map-overlay one can zoom in to specific towns and communities. When combined with other data, such as new/returning visitors etc., this quickly becomes borderline stalking. So, repress that urge to check-out whether someone you know is reading your blog, and how often, and how long, and how deep, and … Use analytics only to get an idea of what the generic visitor does with your site.

2. There is a world outside your blog

Don’t get obsessed by analytics-data and, certainly, do not feel that you have to react to it, all the time! For example, below the evolution of the number of visitors coming here over the last month

The dramatic fall in attendance from last friday until this monday might have worried me (when obsessed). However, a quick check gave a similar drop for the number of new visitors and the number of search-engine referrals. Probably, people were, at that time, more interested in the stock-market-crisis than in this blog… Besides, most people visiting here come from the US and I learned that they had a Luther King vacation day, so perhaps lots of them enjoyed a prolonged week-end, away from their computer.

3. Detect & correct major, lasting changes

So, forget about temporary blips. However, when a certain trend has every indication of becoming permanent, it might be the moment to check out what is going on. Below the bounce rate-evolution over the last month

This is what you might call a lasting drop! Fortunately this time I knew what was going on, because of the actions described in the bounce rate post. But, when you detect a similar drop in certain stats it is time to figure out the causes. Perhaps you de-activated by mistake a certain plugin (see below), or something is wrong with your server, or…

4. Check-out plugin performance

There are tons of WordPress plugins, some useful, some less. So it is best to check whether activating a plugin has the desired effect. For example, you should be able to detect installation of an SEO-plugin (for, Search Engine Optimalization) in the Traffic Sources/Search Engines graph, installing and using a tagging-plugin should give you more referrals from Technorati and look-a-likes, etc.

5. Don’t take it too seriously

You can use analytics data just for fun! For example, do a quiz, show visitor-data and ask for global events explaining the graph (as above). Or notice quirks in your data. For example, here the time-on-site graph over the last month

My generic visitor seems to have a cyclic attention-span…

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yahoo pipes on iTouch

Published January 24, 2008 by lievenlb

The next thing on my tech-to-do-list : learn all about Yahoo Pipes :

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs. Here are a few popular ways the service can be used:
– create your ultimate custom feed by combining many feeds into one, then sorting, filtering and translating them.
– geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
– remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application.
– build custom vertical search pages that are impossible with ordinary search engines.
– power widgets/badges on your web site.
– consume the output of any Pipe in RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

I’ve posted before on setting up your own lifestream, or your own planet, or scraping feeds, or subscribing to my brain, or … whatever. The good news is : all these ideas are now superseded by Pipes!

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. You make a Pipe by dragging pre-configured modules onto a canvas and wiring them together in the Pipes Editor. Once you’ve built a Pipe, you’ll be able save it on our server and then call it like you would any other feed. Pipes offers output in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), JSON and Atom formats for maximum flexibility. You can also choose to publish your Pipe and share it with the world, allowing other users to clone it, add their own improvements, or use it as a subcomponent in their own creations.

This is the essential message to get : yahoo-pipes allows you to remix the web, filtering out all noise! And the good news is

  1. There are plenty of public pipes around to get you going, and
  2. Pipes has an iTouch-friendly interface (see above left). All you have to do is to Safari to iphone.pipes.yahoo.com and use them.

Here are a few public-pipes you can use out of the box!

  • iPhone / iPod Touch: The Most Comprehensive Feed Ever!, doing what it promises : giving you the best iTouch-posts without having to roam for them.
  • JSON Geocoder, returning lat/lon/address info from the the given address.
  • Uber Blog Search, Search all the blogosphere with one query. Hits Google, Ask, Technorati, and icerocket then returns the unique results. Below the web-interface giving the results for ‘noncommutative’…

and finally, one of my favorites, implementing to some extend the Lifestream-idea (iTouch-interface above left)

  • lifefeed – virable, Easily Aggregate your social whereabouts great for blogs profiles and more! Aggregates Your Feeds From: -Digg -Last.fm -Twitter -Flickr -Del.icio.us and your very own blog Adopt and Improve, enjoy!

I’ll promise to spend some time soon to set up my very own pipes and make them available…

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return of the cat ceilidh

Published January 24, 2008 by lievenlb

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was watching an episode of numb3rs, ‘undercurrents’ to be precise, and there it was, circled in the middle of the blackboard, CEILIDH, together with some of the key-exchange maps around it…

Only, the plot doesn’t involve any tori-crypto… okay, there is an I-Ching-coded-tattoo which turns out to be a telephone number, but that’s all. Still, this couldn’t just be a coincidence. Googling for ‘ceilidh+numbers‘ gives as top hit the pdf-file of an article Alice in NUMB3Rland written by … Alice Silverberg (of the Rubin-Silverberg paper starting tori-cryptography). Alice turns out to be one of the unpaid consultants to the series. The 2-page article gives some insight into how ‘some math’ gets into the script

Typically, Andy emails a draft of the
script to the consultants. The FBI plot
is already in place, and the writers want
mathematics to go with it. The placeholder “math” in the draft is often nonsense or
jargon; the sort of things people with no
mathematical background might find by
Googling, and think was real math. Since
there’s often no mathematics that makes
sense in those parts of the script, the best
the consultants can do is replace jargon
that makes us cringe a lot with jargon that
makes us cringe a little.

From then on, it’s the Telephone Game.
The consultants email Andy our suggestions (“replace ‘our discrete universes’
with ‘our disjoint universes'”; “replace
the nonsensical ‘we’ve tried everything
-a full frequency analysis, a Vignere
deconstruction- we even checked for
a Lucas sequence’ with the slightly less
nonsensical ‘It’s much too short to try
any cryptanalysis on. If it were longer
we could try frequency analyses, or try
to guess what kind of cryptosystem it is
and use a specialized technique. For example, if it were a long enough Vigenere
cipher we could try a Kasiski test or an
index-of-coincidence analysis’). Andy
chooses about a quarter of my sugges-
tions and forwards his interpretation
of them to the writers and producers.
The script gets changed, and then the
actors ad lib something completely dif-
ferent (‘disjointed universes’: cute, but
loses the mathematical allusion; ‘Kasiski
exam’ : I didn’t mean that kind of ‘test’).

She ends her article with :

I have mixed feelings about NUMB3RS. I still have concerns about the violence, the depiction of women, and the pretense
that the math is accurate. However, if NUMB3RS could interest people in the power of mathematics enough for society
to greater value and support mathematics teaching, learning, and research, and
motivate more students to learnthat would be a positive step.

Further, there is a whole blog dedicated to some of the maths featuring in NUMB3RS, the numb3rs blog. And it was the first time I had to take a screenshot of a DVD, something usually off limits to the grab.app, but there is a simple hack to do it…

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