a Google Gadget for Jimmy Buffett fans.
http://michaelthompson.org/goo/parrott.xml

This chart from Google Analytics shows the sources of visitors to this site during one fairly typical week in July, 2006.

Any traffic labeled [referral] comes by way of the various Google Gadgets hosted here.

Traffic labeled (direct)[(none)] is generated when a visitor types the URL in the address bar or more likely, uses a bookmark to this site.

Traffic labeled [(organic)] is generated when a visitor clicks on a link to this site found in a page of search results.

After removing the referrals it becomes evident that most of the traffic for this week was direct. People have bookmarked the site. Less than a third came from any kind of search result.

Finally here is a the same analysis over a longer time period which shows that at this time direct visits are more important to this site than search results.

Our appreciaton goes out to our regular visits who have reserved a place for us in their list of bookmarks. We hope the site is useful to you. If you have an suggestions, please reply to this post. Thanks!

Today I was listed at #17. The rankings change every week or two so look quick! This is the message I received:

Subject: Greetings from Google / congratulations Hi again, Congratulations! You might not know it, but your gadgets are hugely popular, making you one of our top developers. As a simple thank-you, we created a page where you can post a photo, bio, quote and most importantly, a link to your website: http://google.com/ig/authors For more information about the page and how to post your information: Google homepage API posting Thanks! p.s. apologies again, Google corporate policy doesn't allow me to disclose the number of users you have, but rest assured, it's a lot.

Here is a screenshot taken today:

This link leads to an excellent series of articles on what tourists can expect when visiting Beijing. It covers Beijing itself, the Great Wall, the Jade museum, Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and a silk factory. There are also some practical travel tips at the end.

We wanted to glob all the hits from Google Homepage Modules into a single category so instead of being presented with a long list of equivalent subdomains (33.gmodules.com/ig/ifr, 82.gmodules.com/ig/ifr, http://35.gmodules.com/ig/ifr, etc) I would see a single item, something like this... ##.gmodules.com/

Unfortunately the data filters can only be applied to incoming data. They do not have any effect on the data that has already been collected. So if we see something in our report that we would like to change and set up a filter accordingly, it will likely be a day later before we get to see if the results are what was wanted.

Will we eventually be able to apply filters to the data already collected? Or at least see a preview of what the results would be? Google only knows.