January 01, 2005

The Inevitable 'Communique' Year-In-Review

Our Requisite Look Back At 2004

A year or so ago, we posted some "year in review" items in which we offered an overview of the various stories we had followed over the course of the year just passed. This year, we're taking a different approach.

Rather than methodically cull through all of the material we've posted over the past twelve months, we've instead spent some time using various technical means, and various bits of software, to examine the past year of Portland Communique through different filters, based upon actual reader activity.

First, we offer a list of the 25 most-requested posts from 2004. This list is not entirely definitive, since it's taken directly from our web server's logfiles, and as such represents every single time one of these posts has been requested by a browser.

Technically, that includes any time a single visitor might have hit reload on one of these entries, or multiple requests during a reader comment process (once for the original request, and a second time when the page reloads after the comment is posted). In addition, some items, at least theoretically, may be more highly requested because they have existed for a longer period of time.

But it's an interesting list anyway, since it does provide something of a tour of 2004. It just needed these caveats and disclaimers beforehand. Requests from an enormous list of spiders and robots have been excluded from the results, as have requests from machines on our home network.

Secondly, we offer a list of the 25 posts from 2004 with the highest number of reader comments. This list represents the posts from 2004 which have received the most comments during the period ending at midnight on December 31. The actual number of comments is included in parenthesis following each post's title.

Third, we offer a list of the 25 top referring sites from which we received traffic, excluding both self-referring traffic from other pages within this site and various search engines or RSS feed aggregator sites. It's important to note as well that since some browsers/visitors do not pass along the "referer" field, we don't actually get complete data on this count. But, it makes for an interesting list nonetheless.

Finally, we offer some other random statistics about Portland Communique over the past year that don't fit the "top 25" model, culled from various sources.

25 Most-Requested Posts of 2004

25 Most-Commented Posts Of 2004

20 Top Referring Sites of 2004

Note: We don't provide a link to the 5th referer because that URL doesn't exist outside of the PDC's internal network. But it is the referer that gets passed along during those requests.

Other Random Statistics

March appears to have been our own busiest month, with a total of 124 entries posted. That was during the height of the same-sex marriage story, which likely accounts for this statistic.

In terms of pageviews, May saw the highest number, with 40,773 pageviews during that month. Bonus useless statistic: The week of March 28 through April 3 saw the highest number of pageviews for any one-week period, with 11,151.

But wait, we've got more bonus useless statistics. Over the course of 2004, the day of the week with the most pageviews was Monday, with a total of 63,720. The hour of the day with the most pageviews was 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM, with a total of 24,483.

Visitors from within the City of Portland's computer network accounted for 3.47% of all requests made during the year, while visitors from within the network at Portland State University accounted for 1.10%, and those from within the network at The Oregonian accounted for 0.80%.

Posted at 12:05 AM | PermalinkComments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
More In Meta-Communique

« Previous Next »

January 01, 2005

The Inevitable 'Communique' Year-In-Review

Posted at 12:05 AM | PermalinkComments (0) | TrackBacks (0)More In Meta-Communique

Posted at 12:05 AM | PermalinkComments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
More In Meta-Communique