I Ripped Stats Out Of My Blog
Earlier this summer, I took a shot at installing awstats on my server because I'm always up for a good data explore. It took a little trickery because it relied on wiring a cgi script up via PHP to a perl script to actually run the analysis, but I did eventually get it working.
Last month, I decided to rip it back out.
Turns out, having a stats dashboard made me look at my blog and wonder why more people weren't reading. Why didn't people want to know what I did this week or where I went with kids? Why weren't my posts showing up in search results? Why wasn't I getting more traffic on specific keywords? Why why why?
I didn't like guessing. I don't write for nameless readers. I write because it helps me process things. Sometimes that processing is helpful to someone else, other times, it's got nowhere near the context anyone needs in order to make sense of it. Heck, half the time I go back and look at an old post, I I can't even make sense of it.
Stats are cool and awstats is a very impressive piece of software, but I wasn't able to frame it in a healthy way in my mind to keep around, so away it went.
Anyways, dear reader, if you've made it this far, thanks for sticking around.
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