2. Statistics

The count of page reads by article, week and locale are available.

When a site visitor is viewing an article for more than 30 seconds (at least a few paragraphs), the site is notified, and the date-time, article identifier and locale are recorded. This only occurs if the visitor has JavaScript enabled, which most do. This page shows the total reads by article, week and locale, if more than one is read.

Waiting 30 seconds should ignore visits by search engine web crawlers and other bots, while a person should have read at least some of the page during that time, otherwise they would have already moved on. No personal data, such as IP address or location, are recorded by Smallsite Design during site statistics gathering.

These statistics focus on only one metric, pages read, ignoring everything else. This is the one statistic that really matters as it indicates which topics were actually of interest enough to visitors for them to read more than just the first paragraph, whereas page-views don't. Other statistics are available from Awstats or another of the several supplied with cPanel, if enabled, which include breakdowns by a single parameter, like country, time-of-day or session duration, but they do not further break those down by article counts, nor do they exclude non-article pages like management.

The statistics cover from when they were enabled, but are not gathered while disabled. Statistics for a week can be deleted if they are not of interest. Statistics are available within an hour, whereas other statistics packages wait until the current 24 hour period has ended before examining the site logs to extract their data. That is a long time to wait to find out how quickly a response was to an article link posted elsewhere.

Read numbers do not include management views, nor articles opened by the View link in the Article body page or the Stage|Phase column of the History page. However, they do not distinguish between whether articles have been viewed by managers, writers or site visitors, so there may be a lot of reads generated while viewing edited articles that will swamp the statistics for those articles if the site has not had many visitors. Basically, ignore statistics until the total number starts getting into at least several hundred.

Articles read numbers show what topics are of interest, and so may indicate what areas to provide more coverage of. The weekly reads show the trendline of interest in the site. The locale reads are useful to show whether there is enough interest in having translations of more of the site. In general, the read statistics are useful as indicators of how the site audience is evolving, but don't let them be the main criteria of what content to create, otherwise the site might lose its integrated focus.

The statistics are kept in a summary file that is only updated when pages are read. For a sparsely visited site, that may mean this page will not see up to date statistics, except by viewing a page for 30 seconds beforehand. Conversely, while updating will normally be prevented for an hour to keep processing overhead low, a really busy site may be updated more often so that there are never too many temporary files hanging around.