Top 12 all-time most "hit" pages on my web site

[yesthattom]

Today I was watching the logs on my web server and noticed that people coming to my site without going to the index (i.e. were coming from a web search engine) quite often were going to an article that I serve about how to give the best fellatio, which I didn’t write. I simply copied it off a mailing list.

Since I keep logs of what pages get hit since the beginning of the server (July 2000) I was able to generate some interesting statistics:

1. 19106 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/data/fellatio.txt -- ”How To Suck Cock - A 14 Lesson Tutorial”
2. 16206 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/ -- My homepage
3. 10763 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/dnssoa.html -- ”tal explains DNS SOA records”
4. 4566 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/resumetips.html -- ”Tom’s Resume Writing Tips”
5. 3769 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/ip-theft.html -- ”Preventing people from stealing IP addresses”
6. 3719 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/starting-ntp.html -- ”Getting Started with NTP”
7. 3563 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/photos/2001-08-25-Jersey-City-Pride/ -- ”2001 Jersey Pride Pictures”
8. 3029 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/data/ -- ”Index of interesting articles”
9. 2951 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/abouttom.html -- ”About Tom Limoncelli”
10. 2616 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/credit-reports.html -- My advice about getting your credit reports
11. 2430 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/dimsum.html -- Polyamory and Dim Sum
12. 2335 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/data/cheeseweasel.txt -- Cheese Weasel Day

Interestingly enough, by looking at the logs I can tell what search keywords were used at Google that brought them to my site (Google includes them in the “referer” URL. That plus some other statistics helped me realize:

• People go to the “fellatio” page nearly twice as much as any other page, 50% more than the main page itself.
• Web search engines direct people to my outdated “resume tips” article, which has been replaced by this newer edition.
• A huge number of people need help with starting to use NTP, and and figuring out what DNS SOA records are about
• You know all those adverts for “free credit reports”? Well, it turns out that people search for that too, and often find my advice. (Now I know why there are so many people advertising on that topic!)
• If you are looking for a good place in New Jersey to get Dim Sum, and search for “Dim Sum New Jersey” on Google, your best link is to my article on Polyamory and Dim Sum, which doesn’t help you find restaurants at all. In fact, it only mentions New Jersey by accident.
• A lot of people search Google Images for “leather men” and get a link to my page about Jersey City Pride in 2001, since I captioned a photo “Sexy leather men!”

Amazing!

Comments

[nooks.livejournal.com]

Sounds like somebody needs to set up Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/).

[ckd]

A minor glitch in the SOA article:

If they don't do any zone transfers (due to errors, problems, whatever) in the next "experiation period" seconds, then all that zone data will be considered invalid and queries about that data will result in a "no such record" result code.

(Oh, and a typo in "expiration".)

Once a zone is transferred, if the master's SOA is the same when it's checked after refresh seconds, that resets the slave's expire counter. It doesn't have to transfer the zone again if it hasn't changed. I have zones that don't change often at all, and have in fact not changed for longer than their expire period....

Perhaps something like the following?

• To get its initial copy of the data, a slave has to do a zone transfer from a master.
  
• If the transfer happens and the data are all good, the slave will load the zone and start answering queries for that zone.
  
• Once it has that copy, of course, it has to be updated when the master changes. So, every "refresh" seconds, it checks the master's SOA serial number to see if it's HIGHER than the copy the slave has. (See above for the reasons why it's HIGHER and not just DIFFERENT.)
  
• If it is higher, the slave does another zone transfer; go back to the start.
  
• If it's the same (or lower), the slave marks its data internally as "still good as of now".
  
• If the slave can't check the master's serial number, it tries again every "retry" seconds until it can, or until the "expiration period" runs out since the last time it could successfully check (and transfer the zone, if necessary).
  
• If the"expiration period" runs out, then all that zone data will be considered invalid and queries about that data will result in a "no such record" result code. Essentially, it acts as if the zone is deleted. Therefore, the "expires period" should be long... like a month long. The reason to have an expiry period at all is that, eventually, old data is so old that it's preferable to give no answer than to give a probably-wrong answer.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I've updated the page.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

1. 19106 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/data/fellatio.txt -- ”How To Suck Cock - A 14 Lesson Tutorial”
2. 16206 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/ -- My homepage

and

* People go to the “fellatio” page nearly twice as much as any other page, 50% more than the main page itself.

???

Are the numbers copied wrong, or is it really only aout 18% more, or am I missing something?

referrers in the web log

[cos]

I keep a tail -f running on my web server log, in a "window" on my regular screen session, full time. I flip to it occasionally during the day, when waiting for something, or on a brief mental break from whatever I'm doing. I actually filter the tail -f through a perl script I wrote that prettifies the output and shows it in nice columns, and one of the things it does is specifically look for the q= parameter in google URLs in the referrer field, and munge the referrer in those cases so that instead of a long ugly URL, I see something like "google:q=foo+bar"

I've known since about 1994 that the majority of hits to my site don't come through the front page first. I find some amusing and interesting things in the referrer log every week. For example, today I found this Portuguese blogger writing about underground Helsinki, and using one of my photos (I posted a comment linking to the rest of my photos of the Helsinki tunnels - I hope his readers know English :).

[dieppe.livejournal.com]

This should lead you to one conclusion: Name your next book "Fellatio for System Administrators"...


;)