Statistics Changes
Today we finally put the finishing touches on integrating the aggregated statistics data that I droned on about endlessly in the previous entry. I will spare you a lengthy discussion of what was changed and how neat the changes are. (But only for the moment, there are some important changes that need to be explained. So stay tuned.)
So, I'll conclude with a recommendation that you check your statistics out and notice that the Referrers Report and Most Popular Entries are flush with figures again. You might also catch that everything's speedier now. Big thanks go out to our team's DBA, Peter, for his help in getting this working smoothly!
Under statistics we are informed of how many people subscribe to our blog. Is it possible to know the email addresses of these subscribers?
Not at present. We covered this fairly extensively in a previous entry, but there's no update on that front since that entry was written.
Thanks, Bill
Why is it that the number of prints drops on a constant basis. It is like some of our print stats fall off... One day on our blogs it will show the total prints for one particular blog is 14 then the next day it drops to 10. Our prints #'s are very important to us but are never accurate.
The print statistics have been affected recently by our aggregation of data older than 30 days. Certain reports, like operating system and browsers for instance, will only show the last 30 days worth of day so you may have seen some counts decrease as the data was purged. Other statistics, like referrers and most popular entries, are based on aggregated counts going back to 12/2005 when we debuted.
The print articles report has access to that data going back that far, but we haven't completed its integration yet. Our priorities were the most popular entries and referrers because those are more important. We really didn't think the print articles report was being used by anyone for anything because the article views and most popular entries reports are much more accurate at tracking interest.
(Print Articles is based on someone or something clicking on the printer icon on the entry page. It is generally visited by bots, who automatically request all pages linked to from a particular page, and only occasionally by actual humans who are actually trying to print the article. If you're looking for interest in an entry, your best bet is the most popular entries or article views report.)
Thanks for your question, Bill
I have a request that I hope is an easy fix, and I'm surprised it's not already a feature.
We need to be able to change the title of a page to something that is not always the blog's overall name.
When do you see this being a feature?
I don't think we'd expose a way to let the customer choose the title for a particular page. There's too many pages in each blog and while being able to individually craft the names of pages would be nice, the UI clutter that such a feature would add makes it highly unlikely that we'd offer it. Of course, never say never.
But you make a good point. The titles, even if they're not customizable by the customer, should definitely be more descriptive. I could have sworn that that was done already, but it's possible that something broke it in a release. I will look into it and make sure that that is fixed for the next release.
Thanks for bringing it to our attention! Bill
I would like even more detailed stats like showing every referrer, and every IP address.
Also, why is that when I make a Custom Text for the sidebar and ad my own Google Adsense code, my main pages entries disappear?
I use the current Google Ads widget, but there's no way to change the size of ads.
The good news is that all that data is available and referrers are aggregated so we can show you every referrer for your blog. (IP addresses are only kept for 30-60 days.) While we have the data, you'll notice that we don't display it all. That will change in the future. As for your Google Ads problem, there's no reason why that should be happening from the app's perspective. Can you send us the code you're trying to insert and we can figure out where things are going awry?
Thanks, Bill
I know I'm responding to a really old comment, so hopefully someone notices it.
You seem to say that in the future we will have the ability to see all the referrers.
However I haven't noticed this ability, yet.
Please advise!
Also, is there any way to exclude a certain IP (such as our own) from being included in statistics? I know that I, for one, am constantly reviewing to ensure things look correctly, but I don't want to pad my stats when doing so.
Greetings,
It's ok we notice all comments not matter how old. You are correct to point out that is still missing from the stats view at this time so other than the top 20 or so referrers we're not displaying them. It's an oversight that's been rectified in the new version that we're working towards presently. I'm afraid we don't have the ability within the program to not count certain visitors , at least those defined by the blog owner. It's a reasonable idea and I'll see if it it can be accommodated in the stats revision.
Regards
John
QBC team.
what timezone is used for the statistics by article views? it seems to be recorded in the pacific time zone, but i can't correlate article views by time. my blob is set up for EDT, but the article views seem to be recorded on Pacific Time. Also, are the stats recorded and updated in real time or is there a periodic sweep to add up the hits?
Greetings,
The Timezone user is AZ GMT -7 though the views for all of our options are meant to match up with your chosen settings. Stats are currently updated in real time though bandwidth usage/ space is taken care of on a nightly basis. We'll take a look at your issue with the timezone meanwhile.
Regards
John
Quick Blog team.
I tried again, it worked this time.
I really think QuickBlog needs to have access to change HTML's title and meta tags in the head section.
I would also like 3-column template option.
Dear Hung,
Thanks for letting us know ways in which we could further improve Quick Blog. We certainly have an interest in allowing this kind of control of the page title / ability to enter Metatags within a future version of Quick Blog and have already been laying the groundwork to make this kind of feature, as well as a three column template possible.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
If I wanted to have multiple blogs on my domain, this is not possible right now. Am I correct?
Some basic SEO integreated into QuickBlog would be great. Like page tagging.
A customizable category page. I don't see this feature in any other blog features.
Dear Hung,
Multi blogs on a single domain are indeed possible with our paid version of the blog where you can set up sub domains on the main domain. If you go to the dropdown on the top left and select it you will see "add new blog" and you can create away. SEO Is a topic that keeps coming up and we have lot of ideas on how best to implement those. We already have many pages based on the categories and I'd need further information with regards to what you are looking for. Presently we display all the categories in the sidebar , should the user desire, but clicking on any of them produces a single page with articles fitting that category in. It's likely something more advanced that you are looking for so please get back to me and I'll see if we already do this , or could accommodate it in a future release.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team.
I see SEO as really the biggest weakness. I know html title variation might be in a forthcoming release, but a description meta tag would be useful as well (it could be set from excerpt). In terms of the page rendering order, I'm also confused, as it seems the new CSS layouts render the blog entry last? This means to a robot/spider, it keeps seeing pages all start with the same stuff (i.e. the top graphic and then all of the side-bar). I might be wrong, but this is what it seems to me. Then, basically all my pages get indexed with the same title, and the same descriptions (as there is nothing unique anywhere close enough to the body tag). This means every page is going into the supplemental index (boo!). To be honest, with the current release I feel it's a lost cause trying to dig these back into google's main index. I'd really love to hear some good news on the SEO front, and whether there are any tips about using templates to force the page rendering order, such that the blog entry itself is rendered before the sidebar. I think it used to do this with the old-style, and is one reason I switched to a right hand side - side bar.
Greetings,
As mentioned in other replies it's certainly something we're going to do and that it was necessary to make this transition on the templates prior to adding those in an future update including the title change. I"m not yet convinced that rendering order us an issue but will look further into it to see if there's any practical improvement we get from doing that.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team.
This has also been at the top of my list. Very, very important to many of us.
My blog settings are set for U.S. Eastern Time, but it looks like my statistics are recording on Hawaiian Time (-6 hrs from Eastern U.S. Time). What time are statistics recorded at?
Greetings,
The stats should reflect your local timezone and if they are not then we will have to look into it so it more accurately reflects your usage. Regardless of our using MST it should remain irrelavant to the local experience of the user.
It's not likely your showing ESTinstead of EDT but I don't have the state you're in readily available and that would account only for one hour.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
I'm in Florida on Eastern Time, and my blog settings are for Eastern Time, but I've tested viewing the blog articles and the recorded statistics, and the counts are in the -6 hr timeslot.
Any ideas on why this might be occuring?
Jim,
Greetings, Firstly the stats should reflect the user's local time set in their blog for when the views occurred but they currently do not. It's an issue that I'm planning to address in a future release.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
Is there any way to tell how many people have visited the main blog page per day? It looks like an "Article View" isn't logged for every person who looks at the main page, since different articles on the same page have different numbers of views.
thanks,
Matt
Greetings Matt,
Great question, and one which I am embarrassed to say can't be answered by directing you to an easy way to gather this information , I even tried to think of a reliable way to manually aggregate them but alas it looks like this was omitted.
I've put this on my feature list for consideration in a future version.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team.
Another thing which had occured to me in the past was if there was any way to discount visits / article reads by robots / spiders. Are the article views currently just all hits including humans and robots? Stats are more interesting if you can separate these.
What would also be neat would be a 'how many people viewing now' counter for the home page. Maybe it's not practical, but I see forums with this and they can count guests, so maybe it is possible in a blog with no logins.
Looking forward to hearing what was in the release that went on overnight...
Greetings,
The overnight release was, incorrectly billed as exciting, oh for us it was -very- exciting but in terms of new features or visible changes for the user, not so much. It laid the groundwork for a future release that contains the part that we will be proud to label "exciting" It's really not practical to do real time stats and for most people it's depressing to see a 0 occasionally flicker to 1
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
is this a live blog?
Greetings,
Yes it is. Of late I"ve not been responding with our usual speediness for reasons that we're hoping is going to make you all rather happy.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
You guys did an awesome job with the new CSS template options - very nice! One thing, on some of the templates, Culinary, for example, the code is doing some weird stuff. It's not spacing the field where the excerpt shows and the “more” link to view the whole entry. You can manually add a few spaces, but that messes up Auto Excepting. Then when you do go to the full entry, there is no break between the header (dated, print link, author name) and the beginning of the full body of text. Again, I can manually put a break in, but it’s a pain.
Greetings,
Firstly thank you for kind words on the templates. The good news it that these were just the beginning of a process to cede more control to the user and I hope you'll enjoy the changes in that area when they arrive. Meanwhile any issues like these I'll wander by our template designers and suggest that we get a little more space. If you see anything else that's ripe for change please let me know and we'll take a look.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
Could you explain what new features are now available following this week's upgrades/maintenance?
Thanks
Jeff,
Currently there's no visible features from last weeks maintenance which was prepartion for an upcoming release which will contain the new features.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
The last 2 posts I made were never sent to myself or my subscribers. Is this the way it is going to be or is there a bug that needs to be fixed?
Greetings,
There was a temporary issue, ok a bug, with mail delivery which we resolved at 1400 today. Mail delivery should now by caught up and future mails should be delivered in a more timely manner.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast.