Still going after all these years.
Eric Olsen at Blogcritics reports on Wilco’s celebration of the one-year anniversary of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s release with the streaming audio release of an Australian EP featuring alternate versions of YHF material and new songs. Cool, if you can get through.
And if that isn’t enough, another BlogCritic reports that you can get all of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and some of Fight Test via stream here.
I have three sources of statistics about the readership of my weblog. One is the built in statistics in Manila, which tells me about referrers and page views in the last 24 hours, and the most read messages since I started the weblog. But it doesn’t tell me anything about the readers doing the page views—browser, IP, source country, anything. Also, it doesn’t report on pages served by my static site, which is where I try to point most of my readers these days.
Another is Site Meter, the seemingly ubiquitous tracking device that shows up on everyone’s blogs. My Site Meter reports give me a few more things, such as showing what the most popular entry and exit pages are, who the most popular browsers are, and so forth. But no ranking of messages by popularity, no reports of 404s, etc. Plus, um, it is a potential privacy violation. (What do they do with that data?)
The third, which I finally was able to access last week, is the actual Apache logs for the static site. And I discovered something about Site Meter: it filters out quite a few things from its Browser report. Like robots. Site Meter claims that most of my visitors run Internet Explorer. Actually, twice as many—over 10,000 visits, or almost 25% of my static site’s traffic—are done by GoogleBot. Which is fine, but another 9% are apparently done by Slurp. And there are lots of other visitors who are running evil bots, like the cunningly named EvilBot.
Which makes me grateful for the new Spam-Free Email feature in Manila. Used to be that if you left a comment, visitors saw your email address. Now they see the name you used to register, and clicking on that takes you to a form that allows you to submit email, but not see their address. Which means that the spambots crawling my site looking for email addresses won’t find any.
A great start. But there are more limitations:
Ah, for a unified stats solution. In the meantime, two new projects start today on the weblog:
Sez here (interview by Karlin Lillington, to be on Wired this afternoon sometime) that William Gibson is giving up blogging, as he fears it will damage his creative process for his next novel. While I grieve his loss as a blogger, I commend his motives. Great quotes:
Somehow the ecology of writing novels wouldn’t be able to exist if I’m in daily contact. The watched pot never boils… Writing novels is pretty solitary, and blogging is very social.…If I were really a novelist of ideas in the way some novelists are, it might well work [to keep blogging] – if I needed to work through political and philosophical ideas. But that’s not how I think I work.…If I expose things that interest or obsess me as I go along, there’d be no need to write the book. The sinews of narrative would never grow. So, I think I’m going to say goodbye to whoever’s been following it. Though it’s very tempting not to stop. Stop me now!
I think we’ve all been there. I hope that blogging—and meeting his fans and reading their comments about his work—has given him some good grist for the next one.