how popular is this blog

Submitted by alaa on Mon, 04/07/2005 - 21:40.

now I usually enjoy inflating my ego, being told my blog is important sure is flattering but watching EgyptianSandMonkey taught me a bit of humility, if I let my ego run free I'm bound to get delusional.

so in the interest of painting a realistic picture I decided to analyze my webbrowser logs. I usually don't do that, I only look at performance metrics but I had to know how popular is manalaa.

I used a couple of loganalysis tools, did not like the way they work and decided to count on my own, if anyone is interested in knowing what analog and webalizer had to say about it just ask.

Quick Analysis of Manalaa.net June 2005 traffic

Hits

Successful GET Hits
542509
Successful POST Hits
6862
Other Successful Hits
938

impressive isn't it? if I was an impostor I'd run around screaming HALF A MILLION HITS PER MONTH but we all know that while is factually correct is misleading, lets take a closer look

Overhead

Administration overhead hits
2515
BOTS
15445 (2001 of them for robots.txt)
Visit to Atmo2Rss gateway by aggregator
66632
Favicon.ico
3884
Site Logo
24995
CSS
82692

thats quite large overhead when you think of it around a third of the hits. note though that I'm too lazy to avoid overlap, for instance some of the hits on the logo might be by bots and so are counted twice.

The Aggregator

the Aggregator had 26962 visits last month.

note that one does not need to visit the aggregator pages, most people are probably using the sidebars which appear on all pages.

so it is anyone's guess how popular the aggregator really is (maybe other bloggers can tell us how many hits they get referred from manalaa.net).

Main Page

front page hits
14143
site rss feed hits
3451 (excluding hits from the Manalaa aggregator itself).

now that's not much, and average of 471 visits to the front page per day, keep in mind alot of them are just here to check the aggregator and not to check manalaa.net.

but it's not bad either specially when you consider that We don't update this blog daily.

the RSS number is significant though, considering that very few Egyptians know about RSS and RSS aggregator, but then again being part of the FOSS community means I deal with tech savvy people.

Multimedia

files/*
264941
thumbnails
162106
photos
48641

most of the media files I serve are on the files/ subdirectory, more than half the hits (and most of the bandwidth) is due to images.

Politics

Never Forget pdf
1715
Zeitun protest banner
7448
Lazoughly protest banner
12078

direct links to these three files where mass distributed by email, they probably had higher visibility since many posted copies instead of links.

Writing

Hits on full articles
31246
Hits on Sayeda protest advert
3550
Hits on my May25th account
833

this is the true measure of the popularity of the blog, how many people bother to read the full text and check the comments.

so is that the number AVERAGE OF 1042 READERS EVERY DAY

well thats still not accurate, how many repeat readers who just came back to check comments? how many arrived via google while looking for something else (the lack of properly encoded arabic websites gives manalaa very high ranking), for instance the weird post about the Linux sicko (الشباب المصري و الجنو لينوكس و التهتهة) is one of the most popular posts just because it has the word سكس.

drupal claims only half of those who visited the sayeda protest advert where unique readers the rest where repeat visitors.

I would say according to drupal statistics that on average a post on this blog gets 1000 unique readers, thats a big rise before the 25th of may it used to be 200 directly after black wednesday it became 400, when this blog was used to advertise political events it became 800, when I started distributing the URL on leaflets it became 1000

so did I answer the question?

not really, I would love to take a look at wa7da masrya's logs and at misrdigital and maybe one of the popular but not particularly political bloggers.

finally there is the question of influence, obviously my blog is being read by many activists and journalists, I like to think blogs in general where influential in attracting more young people to the protests.

might analyze May's logs, but I don't think I'll do the whole exercise again, I'll probably just trust analog next time.

( categories: technology | Web )
can you please add me
Submitted by sonofegypt (not verified) on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 06:54.

can you please add me to your list, thanks

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aggregator is seriously lagging
Submitted by alaa on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 09:12.

the aggregator is seriously lagging behind the Egyptian Blogs Ring, I really need some free time to hunt down and add all the missing blogs.

anyway I added your blog per your request and promise to fix the missing blogs soon.

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egybloggers help
Submitted by Abdelhalim (not verified) on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 16:37.

Can egyblogger provide the opml file directly to you, they can request the feeds link from each one upon the registeration.

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opml would be cool
Submitted by alaa on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 17:15.

mindbleed sent me a sample of the php code that runs egybloggers I supposed to create opmls and rss out of it, as usual I involve myself in way too many things, I will try to locate the code and come up with a decent solution soon.

any examples of a categorized opml files out there?

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grouped opml file
Submitted by Abdelhalim (not verified) on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 17:31.

sorry my file is grouped to directories, I don't know if that's what you want.

I usually use Omea Read from Jetbrains (requires windows and .NET framework) at work to read the feeds, and I group them manually. I know you don't use windows and I don't know if thunderbird will understand it correctly, but I remember I tried it once on Solaris and it worked with some bugs but it worked.

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categorized opml file
Submitted by Abdelhalim (not verified) on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 17:26.

I have one for my favourites, it's continuously growing. do you want me to send it to you ?

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is it categorized according to egybloggers.com
Submitted by alaa on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 20:57.

is it categorized according to egybloggers.com?

the thing is I don't want to be responsible for some category system that people don't like so I offload this responsibility on egybloggers.com

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Nops
Submitted by Abdelhalim (not verified) on Wed, 13/07/2005 - 13:57.

Nops, it's not categorized according to egybloggers. Sorry for that.

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my blog also
Submitted by Abdelhalim (not verified) on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 16:05.

Hi,

My blog abdelhalim.blogspot.com also is not included.

Abdelhalim

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Great...
Submitted by رامي on Wed, 06/07/2005 - 06:03.

That's great. Of course you get lot of hits because of us, but we also do get hits because of you. Nice synergy.

You know what, you should place some google ads to get some money to compensate the stuff that is stolen from bloggers. Remember that--after all--their cameras were stolen because of your call to deomonstrations :)

I bet you can make a decent sum of money by placing ads... Why not?

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nice idea ya Ramy
Submitted by mostafa@mostafa... on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 18:38.

actually it can help Alaa pay for the debts for his new laptop too. Not only the cameras.

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not sure
Submitted by alaa on Wed, 06/07/2005 - 08:41.

a 1/5th of my hits are due to the aggregator (around 60,000 overhead for running the thing, 20,000 people using my atom2rss gateway to read blogspot atom fields, ~30,000 people visiting aggregator pages).

while this 5th is probably checking my website from time to time only a small percentage is becoming regular readers, april logs show high level of activity on the aggregator and very little activity on the other pages.

besides this is all quite low by any reasonable standard wether it is the aggregator or my writing, your average successful forum gets more traffic.

as for google adds I find it unethical to profit from the work of others, running an aggregator is not a difficult or time consuming job, in fact it is trivial.

do they really make a good revenue aslan?

and ads suck anyway, in no time I'll start thinking how to change the nature of my content so I can attract more high paying ads and end up selling my soul.

yes to all you bloggers who run ads you are doing something rotten and seriously wrong.

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Not sure either!!
Submitted by رامي on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 08:54.

"do they really make a good revenue aslan?"

No. Actually they don't at all. Since I write in Arabic, I get very few ads to start with. Until now they haven't sent me a penny, but if I ever reach a $100, they will.

"Unethical?"

I'm not sure either. Whoever doesn't want to be on the aggregator can ask you to be out. Besides, you can specify the money to protect bloggers and defend the first of them who goes to prison (very likely to be you :))

"yes to all you bloggers who run ads you are doing something rotten and seriously wrong."

I don't think so. Changing content of your blog to attract ads is impossible, unless you really blog for ads. If you try it once you will give up. Actually, some Google ads are really informative. They inform me of lot of services and most of times are related to the content (when in English). I can always ask them to remove some stuff (like dating services and pro-Bush ads).

It's up to you not to place ads (it was after all an idea for fun), but don't tell me I'm doing something rotten because I'm not.

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sorry
Submitted by alaa on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 09:03.

sorry but thats how I see it.

anyway thatnx for the suggest, the one who is most likely to go to prison (though I don't believe we are that important) would be wael abbas of الوعي المصري and don't worry we'll get free legal aid when we need it.

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no offense
Submitted by رامي on Thu, 07/07/2005 - 23:30.

"sorry but thats how I see it." It's ok, it wasn't a very serious suggestion. I rarely make one!

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Thats GREAT BlueLue
Submitted by Bluelue on Tue, 05/07/2005 - 18:16.

Thats GREAT

BlueLue

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front page too heavy
Submitted by alaa on Tue, 05/07/2005 - 11:55.

just realized it takes 30 hits to open the manalaa front page, which is alot.

makes me wonder how well the page performs on dialup, any feedback?

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You two are too full of yours
Submitted by MohamedfromCairo (not verified) on Tue, 05/07/2005 - 10:34.

You two are too full of yourselves :)

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LoL
Submitted by The Sandmonkey (not verified) on Tue, 05/07/2005 - 00:54.

"now I usually enjoy inflating my ego, being told my blog is important sure is flattering but watching EgyptianSandMonkey taught me a bit of humility, if I let my ego run free I'm bound to get delusional."

LOL

Shokran! LOL.

Ya 3am a7na ghalabah gambak ya 3am. It's not a competition, cause it's not even close!

I am a just a mere blogger whose posts are published here, and you are the aggregator and the political activist! Negeh gambak eih a7nah?

We 3amatan, if i did teach you a little humility and to not get delusional (like me), then rab daraten nafe3ah we asl koloh 3and al 3arab saboon! :)

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knew you'd take my jab in goo
Submitted by alaa on Tue, 05/07/2005 - 03:57.

knew you'd take my jab in good humor, wouldn't have dared otherwise :-)

not a competition at all walahi but being th famous most important person that I am I've been doing alot of interviews lately due to the apparent popularity of my blog and I wanted to know the truth.

blog being popular or not does not change the fact that I'm the greatest, just changes what kind of greratest thats all :-)

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