Thursday, August 30, 2012

Just When We Were Used to the Tunnel...


6 comments:

  1. Are we sure the page view logger is working?

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  2. The Troll is inadvertently inflating the number of hits?

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  3. Poor Fab. He always gets some pissy emails each time he talks stats.

    But, I'm glad to see an uptick as the semester is starting. I agree with him that it'd be good to reach more people, to get more eyeballs on the site.

    But, darling, don't sweat it. You've maintained a lovely sandbox for us.

    Leslie K.

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  4. Every now and then a cat comes around and poops in the sandbox, adding to its volume. Perhaps our latest troll was one such cat. Thanks for doing cleanup, Fab!

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  5. Disturbing. The higher number of hits signals higher levels of misery, and of us seeking solace in CM.

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  6. I, too, am delighted to see the uptick, but wonder whether it represents anything real, and/or whether it points to a reason for the downtick. As we've long noted, the stats for this, or any page, don't take into account the possibility that readers visiting using multiple devices/IP addresses (and one might argue that, with the advent of tablets and smartphones in the last few years, there's been an artificial inflation of apparent viewers over the last five years or so, that probably can't/won't be repeated, just as the effect of women joining the workforce in large numbers, which probably bolstered a bunch of measures of "prosperity" toward the end of the 20th century, won't be repeated, and may even have helped obscure some of the issues leading to our present economic woes).

    So, I don't know whether this is discouraging or encouraging, but I'll point out that, in the last week, I've once again begun checking CM regularly from my office computer (while continuing to check from my home one). I wasn't doing that in the late summer (but was sometimes during the early summer, since I had a summer course). I only do it a couple of days a week, but still, if this pattern is true of the majority of the site's readers, it might have a substantial effect on the stats, both summer and term-time. Of course we don't all have traditional academic schedules -- some of us are staff/administrators, some are adjuncts (which might multiply the effect further if they have office computers and/or log on using laptops from several campuses), some teach online -- but I still suspect that not only the fact that many of us have at least part of the summer "off" from teaching (or at least student and most colleague contact), but also the fact that our work locations change over the course of the year, is playing a role in the stats.

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