Building a more accurate picture

Hey, remember when I said I’d finally gotten around to tracking my site traffic? Well, it turns out that I apparently did a really half-assed job.

Personally, I blame Textpattern – or to be more accurate, I blame my complete and consistent misunderstanding of how the damned thing actually works. It’s a wonderfully flexible content management system, but I haven’t yet taken the time to learn the ins and outs of it. And when you don’t take the time to do that, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself when you inevitably blow the coding.

To make a long story short and hopefully a little less nerdy, Google Analytics tracks your overall site traffic based on a few lines of code that you’re supposed to add to all of the pages on your website. And Textpattern, like any good CMS, is driven by templates that define the look and feel of every page on one’s site. I added the code to one template, but not to a couple of others, which resulted in some really low site traffic figures.

The way I’d set it up meant that individual articles weren’t being tracked. Basically, the people who showed up at my site looking for nothing in particular were being counted, but the people who had showed up in search of a specific post weren’t. And because the web is built on a bunch of “check out this particular post” and not a whole lot of “check out this site in general,” the numbers and statistics I’ve been getting haven’t been telling much of the whole story.

Anyway, I think I’ve fixed it. The numbers are already climbing, and that’s a good sign. I’ll be sure to keep an eye on things, and report back with more thrilling news about web traffic statistics. Or better yet, maybe I won’t.

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