statzen // the official blog

Monthly Archive for October, 2007

Reporting That Makes Sense

October 23, 2007developmentNo Comments

It has been a while since I have posted on the statzen blog. The primary reason is that I have taken a little time for myself. I took a motorcycle trip from Tennessee to Washington, DC and back while camping along the way. It was a great time and now I am back and motivated to continue getting statzen into the hands of people who can benefit from it.

Right now I am sitting on a plane and have spent the flight working on a way to provide reporting in where visitors come from. I currently see the “referrer” report as the biggest missing piece in statzen. Granted, I am trying to do much more than provide a typical referrer report. I want a report on where people came from that follows common sense. Who cares about identical URLs? The real question is which site is sending the most traffic. Some ancillary questions are: Which pages on that site are delivering the most visitors? Are those links recognized by Technorati, IceRocket, Google Blog Search ,etc? Are those referrals from a search engine? If so, what are the most common search terms for that search engine? What about the most common aggregate search terms?

That is a fair amount of ancillary questions. The challenge is to how to keep it simple and useful. The key to simplifying referrals in a way that makes sense is through aggregate reporting. First I need to address polyURLism (www or no www, etc), this way a unique referrer will only appear once. Secondly, providing aggregate information on the domain is the primary information that people need. As long as their is an ability to drill-down, starting with the aggregate provides the most information with the least mental processing required from the user.

This is what I am currently working on. I hope to have this glaring hold in the functionality of statzen into the current users’ hands by the end of the week.

The Alpha Has Begun

October 8, 2007generalNo Comments

i'm in ur statzen testin ur code!

The statzen alpha test has begun. There are some users in the system and we are trickling more in as we have time and know that the system is stable.

The fun has begun!