Scatterism

I’m a statistics guy, I like keeping track of number of visits, to know how good (or bad) am I doing. Browser percentages, to figure out if IE is still #1 in the market, or is it finally moving from its throne. Referrers, they let me know if somebody was interested in something I wrote and linked to it, otherwise I wouldn’t have ever known that ActiveState has actually linked to my Komodo review. But what I love most is search keywords, words that people searched for and ended up at my site.

Why search keywords?! Well because they can easily turn on the little light-bulb over your head and give you ideas for things to talk about. Right now, I’m using AWStats which makes reviewing statistics a pleasure, if you’re still stuck with Webalizer, I suggest you give it a test drive.

But let’s get back to the subject. Search keywords give you an idea of what people who come to your site are usually looking for; sometimes, you can be amazed. I had no idea that anyone could search for open a dockbook file with open office and end up at my site reading a post on PseudoPOD for UltraEdit.

So from now on, I’m going to select certain keywords I like to post related articles about, hopefully people will end up with something more relevant. Here are a couple of searches I liked and most probably will be talking about later on:

• kwiki customization
• cflags optimizations qt freebsd
• what are PHP’s advantages
• php5 overriding base class functions
• why blogging
• dokuwiki subversion
• using subversion
• install plesk gentoo
• mod_python mod_php comparison

And last but not least, I loved why MSN looks plain, a question that remains unanswered by Google-addicts :)