The past and present in statistical form
What a long, strange trip it’s been. Included for your viewing pleasure is a quick snapshot of our topline web stats from the first of the year through yesterday.
Reading left to right, you see a slow but steady rise in both page views and visits1. The site has been around for awhile and it takes a near ELE2 to make a significant blip on the radar.
See if you can find the blip! Yep, that’s it. Right there before 3/20. Over a three day period, we received links from BoingBoing and Lifehacker, plush some schmuck decided to try a DDoS3 on us. While the latter we could have done without, the first two are good for business. And in reality, we just weren’t ready for it.
But we now are. If I could direct your attention to the right of that major Matterhorn. You’ll notice that the visits (blue) don’t really drop significatnly, but page views (yellow) certainly suffer. And then that suffering becomes sheer pain leading into a medically induced coma near that final dotted line. That’s the couple of days it took us to move things to the new server. Terrible. Sorry.
But… Look at what happens after that. Holy hanna! Visits and page views are both way the heck up. How cool is that? That means that many folks stuck around through the four week pain period and are using the site like never before. Hooray for you people!
Thanks for hanging around. Things are mucho better now. But we still have lots more to do!
1 - Page views and visits are rotten ways to track activity on the site. I get that. But they can show trends over time.
2 - Extinction Level Event. Yes, I have a flair for the dramatic.
3 - Distributed denial of service. Basically tying up the website so no one else can use it.
May 1st, 2007 at 8:20 am
I was holding off recommending Podiobooks during those four weeks, since I knew that was not a typical service level. Now I recommend the site wholeheartedly again, knowing people won’t be disappointed. Looks like I wasn’t the only one.
May 3rd, 2007 at 5:36 am
Of course we waited, the issues were only temporary. This is a great site, keep up the good work!
Bert
(the Netherlands)
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Great stuff, and I’m glad that the site is up in the air and stable again. Great job, people.
But, there is indeed still some work to do.
I, for instance, keep having problems with logging in on the website;
I request a new password and log in using that, and that works fine. But after I change the password, I can’t log in with that password, it keeps the ‘requested’ password instead.
I know that I’ve had that problem before, but I’m not sure if it was fixed (I used the ‘keep me logged in’ option, and that has cost me. I had forgotten the password again)
Also one of the episodes of Prophecy of Swords (chapter 47) refuses to be downloaded
Libsyn says that the file does not exists… whereas the feed says it does. 
May 16th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
My RSS aggregator laughs in the general direction of your site instability. Really, i had no idea. I mean, how do downloads look over the same period?