Serendipity35

Blogging software generates statistics --loads and loads of statistics-- and stuffs them into webserver, database and system logfiles. Over the past 12 months, Serendipity35 has been stuffing more of those statistics into those files than Ken or I could ever have imagined.

On April 30th, the devel2 server at NJIT on which Serendipity35 lives, recorded its one millionth monthly hit (1,004,955 was April's final tally). One million of anything is, obviously, a big number, but in the Bizarro World of internet statistics, what does that actually mean? What actually is a "hit?" According to Webalizer, one of the statistic engines Serendipity35 uses:

Hits represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given time period (month, day, hour etc..).

That really only means that some person, script, search engine or spam-bot selected some internet conduit or link that requested Serendipity35's main page, once. That's not a very meaningful indication of anything except that in the 26 months that Serendipity has been around --adulthood in the virtual world, little pieces of our content have been scattered throughout popular search engines. Any search for a term contained in our posts generates a single contact back to our main page. Like major league baseball pitcher Jim Kaat's 283 lifetime wins in 25 major league seasons: alone, the number indicates longevity, not dominance.

So, are our million hits in April entirely meaningless? Not really: like contract law and advertising, the devil is in the details that lie beneath. To determine what those devils are, we use the statistical categories Visits and Files:

Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non-page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.

Files represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages thatare already in the browsers cache.

In April we logged 63, 833 individual visits and 8.3 gigabytes of file transfers. By comparison, in June, 2007, we logged 50,632 visits but only 1.65 gigabytes in file transfers. That means that within the last year while our recorded visits have increased by about 16%, our downloaded pages and files have increased about fivefold. Drilling down a little further into those devilish details (and filtering out the statistics exclusively generated by Wiki35 (AKA media158 wiki), it turns out that Serendipity35 articles (new and old) are being read in real-time over 1000 times a day on average, and that the articles and files are being downloaded at a 500 megabyte clip each day.

So who are all the people who read and download Serendipity35? We don't know your names, but we do have some idea of where you are from. About half of the readers are from higher-ed institutions (you are reading from .edu domains) and about 1-in-10 are not from the United States. More than two-thirds of the readers are repeat customers, and of the one-third that vist for the first time, about half come back in succeeding months.

Serendipity35 doesn't have the readership that some of the large blogs and websites boast, but when I think back to the day in 2006 when my friend and colleague, Ken, told me I had been volunteered to participate in an NJIT conference on podcasting, blogs and wikis (so I had better get busy and build some examples), I'm astonished at the number of people who read our content every month (and that's, really, a testament to Ken's writing talent and sheer productivity).

Unexpected as it was to go any further than our presentation at the conference at NJIT --as it turned out Ken and I actually did the wiki part of the presentation not the blog portion-- the Serendipity35 blog lives on to discuss education (et al) well into the third year of postings. I'm grateful for whatever reasons those one million clickers gave this site a look.