Interesting Developments

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Written by johnleemk on 11:28:46 am Aug 28, 2006.

First of all, greetings to first time visitors of this website/blog. It's not really that decent, and I've figured out that the interface isn't that intuitive, so I must apologise - improvements are in the pipeline. I might even get around to documenting some of the more confusing aspects of the website, but till then, this will do.

Now, I've been incessantly monitoring visitor statistics over the past few days, to see the effect of a little viral marketing campaign I've launched. I attempted larger-scale campaigns last year with very similar tactics, but I didn't do much to track them. This time I've been monitoring almost every visitor to this website during my waking hours - yes, I know exactly what pages you've read! I know that most people have been following this article on separation of mosque and state, but that most have not really looked beyond it; it's a popular "exit page". People tend to explore more if they first stumbled on this article on the social contract.

Oh, and I have gotten 295 visits from this page on Malaysia Today alone. Thanks, Raja Petra! Blog comments are such good viral marketing tools. As a sidenote, friends' blogs have contributed about 40 visits, cumulatively. It's decent, I suppose. Oh, and Wikipedia is contributing to downloads of a particularly infamous Parliamentary video hosted here. It's eating up my bandwidth, but then again, I'm nowhere near my limit, so I guess it's not a priority.

Oh, sorry, I digressed. Yes, tracking visitors. From my observations, I soon noticed that the "Most Read Recent Articles" box on the main index was directing people to more pertinent articles than the...crap we have on the forums. However, since it wasn't on every page, like the recent forum posts box is, only those arriving on the main page were noticing it. I then readjusted things to accomodate this. Likewise, I noticed that people were wondering why there isn't a comments section on the blog, so I added a box prominently linking to the forum for comments at the bottom of every article.

Now, I'm taking things to the next level. An article about me (and probably my blog) is coming out in the September edition of Off the Edge, the youth magazine of the Malaysian business magazine The Edge, which means more visitors. I've thus installed Google Analytics, a really handy tool for stalking visitors. Yes, that's right. I know where each and every one of you buggers are coming from now.

To that visitor from Kampung Bukit Lanjan, hello - I know you only visited two pages before leaving. To those people in Norcross, Georgia (the American state, not the former Soviet republic) - greetings! Harvard students, I'm flattered that you consider me extremist and stupid enough to be worthy of your attention. Jordanville, Queensland, I don't know what you're doing here, but hello to you too. Oh, and Kampong Abu Bakar, what are you doing, visiting as many as twelve pages on this website? And last but not least, I'd like to wave to the "ROYAL MALAYSIA POLICE" - I hope you find your stay entertaining.

So, yes, with the power of Google, nothing is impossible! I'm looking into possible interface improvements now thanks to feedback from various visitors and my analytical tools. Some people apparently don't know that there's more than brief summaries awaiting them on the main index of the blog - this is going to be fixed soon, I hope. I presume there are a lot of other issues I've overlooked which need addressing. The forums aren't very inviting as a form of discussion, actually, but I don't think an interface change can fix that.

As for where this website is headed, I am planning to drive it in a more user-oriented direction. I don't like being the guy writing everything here. Having a monopoly on the front page makes me a bit uneasy. I'd rather have a more open monopoly, where instead of writing everything, I let others write for me and then separate the wheat from the chaff - so as Adlai Stevenson said, I can live up to the true tradition of "An editor ... someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff."

The plan is to utilise the forum as an input - where people discuss issues, and then I pick salient pieces of prose to highlight on the front page. For this to work, of course, I'll need something of better quality than the tripe we currently have. But to attract quality, you need to have quality first. Sigh...so if you're still reading, please - register and post something. It doesn't have to be witty, enlightening, or even rational. It just has to be something passably understandable. Even if we don't gain anything out of it, it's still cathartic for you to write something and express your feelings. And who knows? It could be the start of something bigger.

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Infernal Ramblings is a Malaysian website focusing on current events and sociopolitical issues. Its articles run the gamut from economics to society to education.

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Related comments from forum thread "Some statistics (yes, they're interesting)":
johnleemk Infernally Rambling Thoughtless Mind Head Administrator Posts: 948 IP Logged	Posted at 12:47:14 pm Oct 15, 2005 http://www.iroatm.cjb.net/bleh/analog.htm http://www.iroatm.cjb.net/bleh/webalizer.htm (ignore the lack of pictures) What, you're lazy to read them? Fine then. Here are some interesting statistics... In the month of October, the average amount of hits (page loads) a day is 983. Since the month began, there have been a total of 13762 hits. The most common ISP used by our visitors is TM Net, followed by Jaring. (Let's ignore all the bots of search engines, shall we?) People from 19 different countries have visited in October alone, ranging from Canada to Malaysia to the US to Singapore to Oman to Japan to Hungary. The most common sites to refer people to this site since it began were malaysia-today.net, haloscan.com (the comments site for limkitsiang.blogspot.com), jeffooi.com, malaysiakini.com and google.com.my. The top three browsers used to access this site were (in order of most pages accessed) Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. The three most popular forum topics were (in reverse order) this, this and this.
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johnleemk Infernally Rambling Thoughtless Mind Head Administrator Posts: 948 IP Logged	Posted at 4:57:55 am Dec 1, 2005 http://www.iroatm.cjb.net/bleh/awstatsnov05.html http://www.iroatm.cjb.net/bleh/webalizer_200511.html In the month of November, the average amount of hits per day was 1101. We had a total of 33040 hits. The most common browsers are now Firefox, IE and Opera (in that order). We had a total of 521 unique visitors. I'm lazy to elaborate on anything else.
johnleemk Infernally Rambling Thoughtless Mind Head Administrator Posts: 948 IP Logged	Posted at 9:38:01 am Mar 5, 2006 Okay, finally updating again. I'm adverse to uploading the stats pages again, so I'll just copy and paste relevant stuff for last month. We got 9212 hits, of which 162 were unique visitors (excluding search engine bots, etc.). Our busiest day by far was 11 Feb 2006, where we got 1351 hits. (I wonder who linked to us, or if all the search engines just started updating their indexes on that day.) For countries, my bean counters seem to have some disagreement. One claims most traffic is coming from Malaysia, with the rest mostly being from search engines, the UK, Singapore, or US education institutions. Some other countries listed by this fellow include South Africa, Japan, Italy, Canada, and India. The other one puts the bulk of traffic as coming from the US and Australia, with Malaysia far behind (ostensibly with 600 hits, as opposed to 2000 each for the US and Australia). This one also lists the same countries I mentioned, but also has the European Union, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. I have some interesting stats on visit duration. Supposedly 47% of all visitors stop reading after 30 seconds at the most, but 8.8% spend more than an hour on the site (I know I can't be that 8.8%). Another 8.3% spent between 30 minutes and an hour on the site. The most popular browser of our visitors is Firefox, with Internet Explorer close behind. Opera is a distant third. Some guy with a Mac out there is using Safari, too. Interestingly, 93% of all visitors directly entered the URL into their browser, or used a bookmark/favorites entry. (This means a lot of people are returning visitors.) 5.5% followed a link from somewhere else (mostly my Blogspot profile, Malaysia Today, my Wikipedia profile, and Vamp's blog. I'm also still getting hits from Malaysiakini, where a letter wrote once linked to here). Of the 1.2% from search engines, the bulk are from Yahoo!, with Google a distant second (Yahoo! has 2/3rds, Google has most of the remainder). Interestingly, there are a couple of hits from AOL France. Strange. Now, what you're all waiting for...the search keywords people used: iroatm 6 14.2 % literature in malaysian schools 3 7.1 % what do u think malays 2 4.7 % method of teaching reading in malaysian schools 1 2.3 % patriotic national song-malaysia 1 2.3 % the qualities of a best malaysian 1 2.3 % social contract between malay and chinese 1 2.3 % what do the malays celebrate? 1 2.3 % why do we teach literature in malaysian school 1 2.3 % history of malaysian schools 1 2.3 % pornografi malaysia 1 2.3 % lee ming keong 1 2.3 % http //iroatm.cjb.net 1 2.3 % statistics reports on malaysian school spm 1 2.3 % http //www.iroatm.cjb.net/index.php 1 2.3 % moral values taught in malaysian schools 1 2.3 % patriotic song at malaysia 1 2.3 % essays for malaysian schools 1 2.3 % school sucks 1 2.3 % malaysian students don t read book 1 2.3 % the reason for students weak in speaking in malaysian students 1 2.3 % malay lazy 1 2.3 % leaving school for moral contributing 1 2.3 % social contract in malaysia 1 2.3 % safety in malaysian schools 1 2.3 % http://www.jeffooi.com/archives/2005/08 1 2.3 % http //www.iroatm.cjb.net/forums/index.php?fid=7 1 2.3 % articles on literature in malaysian schools 1 2.3 % why it is very important for malaysian educational? 1 2.3 % malaysian curriculum change 1 2.3 % parliment speaker speech malaysia 1 2.3 % pornografi of chinese 1 2.3 % lazy malays 1 2.3 % johnleemk 1 2.3 %
johnleemk Infernally Rambling Thoughtless Mind Head Administrator Posts: 948 IP Logged	Posted at 5:57:16 am Feb 2, 2007 A quick summary of the month of January: We had about 6000 visits to the site; the daily average was about 200 visits The busiest hour is 11PM, Malaysian time (GMT+8) The most popular article was The Death of Malaysia, closely followed by this dreary thing about proxies. The next best performer, Pak Lah: To Resign or Not Resign barely had half the pageviews of the proxy article. The three most-used keywords to find this site on search engines were all names of people; the first was "johnleemk", the second was "siti nurhaliza" (I blame this article), and the third was "nur amalina che bakri" (who I only wrote about once, here). About 60% of pageloads came from people who either bookmarked the site or subscribe to one of the feeds; the rest came from either links or search engines.

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