I have been too busy to obsess over it much, but I was quite disappointed with the web site traffic I’d been receiving this year. Last year I rang up 3.2 million page views, and my goal for this year was to increase that to 4 million. Things were not looking good — thorough April I was barely keeping pace with last year’s traffic. What was going on?
Then it hit me — you idiot, I said to myself, you’re leaving about a third of your page views uncounted.
See, I had reorganized most of my web sites last year, but forgot to update my configuration file in Analog to track those changes. I spent about an hour starting over from scratch with a new configuration file, going down the list of all accessed files to make sure I was properly including all HTML pages and excluding everything else.
And what do you know, when I don’t automatically toss 1/3 of the page views, the traffic starts to look impressive. April 2002, for example, was the first month in the six years I’ve been maintaining my web site in which page views passed the 400,000 mark. based on current trends, 4 million page views should be easily attainable.
The really good news is seeing how the work on my animal rights site has paid off. This month, it had almost 100,000 page views, and is just barely behind my Overpopulation.Com site in popularity.