Fellgernon Bit

Analyzing SimplyStatistics visits info

Recently we had to analyze the data of the number of visits per day to SimplyStatistics.org. There were two goals:

1. Estimate the fraction of visitors retained after a spike in the number of visitors
2. Identify (if any) any factors that influence the fraction estimated in 1.

For me it was a fun project in part because I like SimplyStatistics but also because I think that finding the answers to the questions would be interesting and help understand the readers of that blog.

Sadly, I didn’t work on it much. We had lots of stuff due that week, but well, I’m happy enough with the analysis I did. My own report is hosted here and this is the pdf file of the report itself.

Half joking with other students, I said that I basically did t-tests. Hopefully I can work on changing this tendency with the pile of recommended books I’ve been acquiring but not really reading through. Except for the ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis and the R Graphics Cookbook. Sounds like spring break will be fun :P

Kind of related to this, Jeff Leek announced yesterday that he is going to  compile a list of student blogs that have something to do with statistics and data. He added a link to my blog which is why I saw a large peak of Fellgernon Bit’s visitor data. After all, when doing the data analysis described above I played around with the data from Fellgernon Bit and now know that at a minimum posting drives visitor’s into sites (which sounds obvious, but maybe you get random traffic) —see fig 1 of the report.

Had Jeff done so before, I could have a point estimate (but without being able to say something about the uncertainty of it) that SimplyStatistics has 142 visitors that read the posts AND click on the links. Maybe using the info from Hilary’s and Alyssa’s blogs we could have an estimate with some measure of uncertainty, but only for March 8th.

Re-purposing Fellgernon Bit

I have decided that it’s in my best interests to separate my academic posts from my personal ones. Thus, I have moved the posts I considered to be personal to my new blog, Fellger Byte. I like the name since it goes along with Fellgernon Bit, plus it involves mostly cooking posts.

Fellgernon Bit will continue to have it’s posts linked on twitter and on the Fellgernon Bit facebook page. By the way, I’m considering turning off my auto-post to facebook from twitter option. Yet I think that most of my friends find the new posts through my personal facebook and not the Fellgernon Bit fb page.

In constrast, posts at Fellger Byte will not be publicized beyond my personal facebook account. Also, posts will not appear on twitter. You can subscribe to it via RSS or email which is something I enabled for family and friends to ‘follow’ it. 

I don’t plan on posting stuff that is more personal in Fellger Byte than what I used to post here— maybe a little bit. But still, I think that it will be good to separate them. Also, I do think that Fellger Byte will turn into a bilingual blog to practice my Spanish —for some topics Spanish might be more appropriate.

Right now Fellger Byte has 40 posts while Fellgernon Bit has 78 (79 with this one). I took advantage of this re-arrangement of my posts to edit the tags on most of them. I cleaned them up by using the same letter cases; for example, ‘Blog’ and ‘blog’ are now only ‘Blog’. It looks at lot cleaner, right?

This is the tag cloud at the other blog, which is mostly about my cooking, GSL, and Shoulder topics.

With this separation, I’ll add a link to my academic blog in my academic email signature. That’s something I have been looking forward to.

So, as you can see, my goal is to “brand” my academic name via Fellgernon Bit and twitter while still sharing with friends and family some of my life events via Fellger Byte.

See you around!

PS I also increased the width from 800px to 1000px (520px for posts to 720px) since I frequently have long text posts and I now want to include R code. Also, I limited the number of posts from 10 to 5 per page to decrease load times. Finally, I removed some of the “share” buttons and the twitter feed that were making things a bit slow.

Correctly synching AddThis and Google Analytics social stats

As a minor addition to my previous posts about setting up a blog, I want to detail a bit more how to synchronize your AddThis social sharing statistics (AddThis Analytics) with Google Analytics.

The main help file explaining how to do so has been a bit confusing for me. Though, in part that’s because I didn’t read it completely. Plus there were a few things I didn’t know.

First, Google Analytics (GA) has two ways in which you can add it to your site: synchronous and asynchronous. There are a few posts around, like this one, explaining the difference. Basically, the asynchronous mode is supposed to give your site faster load times (negligible normally) and most importantly more complete data in cases where people close your site before it finishes loading.

I prefer the asynchronous mode, and the recommendation is to include the script tage before the end of the head tag. In a few cases in Tumblr’s free blog themes, this script is included at the bottom of the html code. So, you might be interested in changing this otherwise the great advantage of the asynchronous mode is lost: the page has to load entirely to report stuff to GA.

Once you do so, note how the AddThis manual has a note that the AddThis script has to go after the GA script. I didn’t read this the first time and I was quite puzzled when no social events were showing up in the GA report.

Next, compared to ShareThis, AddThis social events will be shown in your GA report as “facebook”, “twitter”, etc instead of “ShareThis: facebook” (or something like that). That’s only true if you included the “data_ga_social : true” part in the code. Otherwise GA will only shown under the “Social” tab the Google +1 clicks. 

In short: use the GA asynchronous code before the end of the head tag. Add the AddThis script tags below it. Happy social sync :)

I have to say that so far I like the AddThis Analytics way more than Google Analytics for the social stats. Part of it is the “viral lift” percent that AddThis shows. The other part is that it seems to contain more data. Though it might be because I just fixed the sync.

You might want to read the:

• AddThis GA sync announcement at AddThis.com
• Another AddThis tip about how to do the sync
• The post on GA’s blog explaining a tiny bit about the difference between ShareThis and AddThis sync to GA.

Bye endless scrolling

Just a quick change to Fellgernon Bit. I removed the endless scrolling from the blog because it was looping posts infinitely when browsing a tag as Roger noted. It’s likely that there is a small bug on the html code, but I’m not going to look for it anytime soon.