Jag och min gode vän ormen har ett forum där vi diskuterar något så löjligt nördigt som onlinespelet Hattrick. Idag lyckades vi med bedriften att passera 2,000 inlägg i forumet sedan starten för 5 månader sen, det måste vara världens mest aktiva forum per capita. Läckert tycker jag och firar det med en bild på ormens nya HT tischa.
Hattrick
The last month in numbers
It’s always interesting looking at the numbers in your Google Analytics account, it really provides you with statistics regarding everything you can possibly imagine. Often, a lot of people keep their eyes on the search statistics. How many referrals are coming from search engines, hence, the use of – and start of SEO efforts and companies solely focusing on SEO.
Anyway, I’ll give you an overview of the last month numbers for both this blog and also HattrickNews.org, as the last one is probably more interesting, having past my blog’s total page views and visits (unique) in only the last month. I always find it fascinating (and somewhat useful) to look at the Map Overlay as well to see where your visitors are actually coming from.
The Blog (9th of June – 9th of July)
HattrickNews.org (9th of June – 9th of July)
There are a couple of noticeable things here. Regarding the blog; a ‘serious’ drop in page views and visits would probably not have happened if I kept updating it as much as I did during the Euro2008. At first there was a lot of traffic coming through referrals but these referrals quite quickly resulted in visitor loyalty, more and more people kept coming through direct hits instead of referrals.
Regarding HT-News it is interesting to see that Italy and Spain are by far the most active countries visiting the site. Spain is the biggest nation in Hattrick and Italy has one of the most active communities, so no real surprises here. It’s pretty sad to see that Sweden does not even make the top 15, the motherland of Hattrick, and especially it’s community is suffering. DogNatural, a guest writer at HT-News wrote a pretty interesting piece regarding this in an article called Election Turnout: A Measure of Community Spirit.
Of course. Anyone would be interested in knowing why there’s a +90% piece of traffic coming from referring sites to HT-News. This is quite easily explained, it also explains the spikes in visits: When Hattrick goes down, it puts up a list of community sites connected to the game, HT-News is the third link in this list and the first external resource – this explains the spikes. A spike is normally equal to Hattrick downtime. The first “super spike” occurred during severe downtime, and was also the first time that HT-News was noticed on that list. Thanks! Oh, and for reference, there are indeed visits outside the spikes, it’s just a bit skewed for you guys.
There’s a bit of unfaithful visitor trends regarding HT-News which is quite worrying. Only ~10% are returning visitors which of course also could be explained by the fact that the site is fairly new – and that awareness is low among the community.
As for traffic to the blog, I don’t really care, as long as there’s mostly visits from Sweden and Australia, I know that my friends are coming by from time to time :) Considering there’s only Rick competing from Australia, I’d say he’s doing a pretty good job compared to the Swedes! Other more general and quick statistics regarding the blog are as follows: There’s a total of 358 posts on the blog with ~120 comments, it recently passed 10 000 visits (unique) and has a bit over 20 000 page views. There has been a total of 6784 spam comments posted (!?), but Akismet is fighting the war good.
When it comes to HT-News it’s always interesting to analyze stats. But, as you can see, maybe it’s time to make some SEO efforts using best practices from the blog …
HattrickNews.org launched
Today I semi-launched HattrickNews.org. It’s not quite ready yet however, still have a couple of bugs to sort out. The login page doesn’t really look the way I want, and the popular posts widget seem to have been messed up in the DB-update. Anyhow, it’s soon.
The Retreat
Was actually a pretty sweet little place to live. I was there yesterday with Philipp, Nadia, Romain, Emine and Mark, one of the german’s called Niko lives there, I kind of liked the apartment, his balcony was HUGE, could easily fit a fussball table, a pool table and a table tennis table, which is actually what his neighbour had done, well, at least the table tennis. So there was really no harm, our pool table still kicks ass among the “student homes” … very important.
Otherwise much the last couple of days has been about the library and the labs. Got a pretty important meeting tomorrow with a representative from Ozone1 and my professor where I will lay down the law with a new “website concept” (pretty much a screen) for one of their sub-brands called OzoneSwim. I’m pretty content about the stuff I did, did some research about some hosting plans as well – so I’m pretty confident they’ll go for the idea, the only thing is that this means that I’ll have maximum a week to do the actual HTML that is needed until next week when all the company’s representatives are going to watch our presentation, oups. Hopefully Greg has found some grants that we can get for the company and Goupta provided a promotional strategy for their PuraAir product, I didn’t run into to them today at uni, so I’m a bit worried. Often when it comes to group things with people you don’t really know or trust it’s always better to do it yourself :)
We’ll probably be going to Byron thursdag-saturday to get away from the library but still work on our Entrepreneurship idea, it’ll be good for the other boys Philipp and Mehmet to get away from all of their finance assignments (which is pretty sick how many they have). Tomorrow we’ll hopefully finish up the MarCom campaign for Foster’s Lager as well, it’s looking good for final weeks, the workload is successfully going down even though I know I will complaining within a couple of days again.
The new Simpsons movie premiers this Thursday which also happens to be my birthday, I knew they’d find a good day to open … I think that movie could make the in-the-money for most money played in, if it plays its’ cards right, it sure will be interesting to see!
Finally, solid 5-1 home victory in the season debut for my DMT!
Exams
Wow, it’s really on at Bond now. Got heaps of assignments that all seem to be due this or next week, of course I’ve saved all of the biggest one for last, it’s just a way of life and the way I am. I never seem to change even though I’ve been saying for 9 semesters that “next semester is going to be different, get all of the major stuff out of the way and just chill before finals” – never happends of course, but it’s still a good philosophy! One I might never live after.
I just had my first final, actually it’s a bit early so the teacher had to call it a quiz, one of my courses is divided into practical and theoretical so we will have to “quizzes” instead of just one final in final week. It’s kind of good, it means that this quiz was worth only 20% and that the next quiz will be in the same region, so you really can’t just fuck up a final totally and lower your grades cause you didn’t have time to study only for that in final week. Anyway, this was the practical part, it consists of doing statistical relationships between variables in SPSS (the worst program ever created by mankind to this date). It’s exactly as fun as it sounds, looking at alpha, Chi-Square and p/f-values is not my future, I’ll tell you that much. It went alright I think, I thought for sure it would be the HD but I’m not so sure anymore since I think I kind of made a fool of myself on the question with the most marks, shiesse. But that question was pretty much the only one I didn’t really understand so it might give me some points and the rest of the exam was pretty much a cruise to the end. Saw a lot of people drawing graphs and shit in Excel, totally unnescessary if you ask the professor which rocks.
New youth system in Hattrick for those interested. Instead of the normal youth pull occuring every sunday, managers are now entitled to choose whether they want the new or old system or both simultaniously. I’m keeping both until all the bugs and some questions have been answered about the new one. The new one consists of each teams getting their own youth team as well, this team is available to play in their own youth league that can be created by users. The team trains and consists of 15-16 year olds that can be rewarded a spot in the senior squad once the turn 17. It’s kind of a cool idea in theory, it will be interesting to see how it works in practise though, I doubt it will make an impact in short term, however over the longer term, with the possibility to train more than one factor each week in the youth team, it might provide some stability to the transfer market which has been crashing for the last year or so.
Just reached the sofas on the fourth floor at Bond, got a Japanese girl next to me sleeping like never before. I’m going to go into dream mode as well before next class I reckon’. Seeya!
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