State of the Gineipaedia

Hey there. Haven't been around very much lately (busy with life stuff), but i wanted to post here just to let you guys know what's going on from my perspective :)

I. SERVER / HOST STATUS

We moved to Linode at the end of last year ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]), and i think that's been a good decision, because i have noticed zero slowness or down-time, which is a huge improvement over what we had on DreamHost. Additionally, our search function is now greatly improved, thanks to Lucene.

There were some additional changes that i had mentioned i wanted to make, and a small number of those did get done, but some did not. I'm not certain when or if i'll have time to complete them, but of course let me know if we run into any unexpected issues, or if any other ideas come to mind.

II. SITE / CONTENT STATUS

In recognition of his many contributions and the fact that Canary and i have been somewhat negligent lately, Iracandus ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) has been made an admin, which gives him the ability to delete pages and junk like that. So that's cool. I have not yet updated our staff page ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) — i guess he can do that himself now :p

Featured articles: I have been selecting these all myself. If you guys are happy with that, i can continue to do so, but please let me know if you have any suggestions. I don't want to monopolise it if anyone is uncomfortable with that.

Other stuff: If you ever have any time, please check out the Policy talk page ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) — there are a number of unresolved questions.

III. POPULARITY AND VISITOR STATS

(Note: Images in this section might get clipped off — click to make them bigger)

Gineipaedia has established itself as one of the largest LOGH/Gineiden sources (if not the largest) on the Internet — and that's including Japanese sites. LOGH is a pretty niche subject, so it's not enormously popular, but i'd say it's successful for what it is. There have been several other attempts at LOGH wikis, and they've all folded, so we don't really even have competition anymore. :x

I've been watching Google for a while and i was surprised to find that we're now the #1 result (at least from where i'm sitting) for 'logh wiki':

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We've been three or four for a long time :)

And then i have hard stats for you, which might be the most interesting part of this post:

TOTAL DAILY VISITS (10 APRIL 2011 – 29 MARCH 2012)

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This chart shows the total number of daily visits (a 'visit' being a contiguous session on one computer, as opposed to individual page views) to Gineipaedia. As you can see, the number has been slowly but steadily rising, and actually peaked quite recently at about 220.

VISITORS' LOCATIONS

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This shows a list of the top ten countries where visitors have originated from over the same period of time. This metric is determined mostly by IP address. As you can see, we've become somewhat popular in Japan, Germany, and Russia.

VISITORS' BROWSERS

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This list and chart show the break-down of Web browsers used by visitors over the same period of time. Firefox and Chrome are the clear winners, obviously. On a related note, it isn't shown in this image, but mobile (smart-phone) users make up about 5% of our traffic, and the majority of those are iOS users.

REFERRER SITES

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This list shows the top 16 (meant to be 15 but i messed up lol) domains which refer users to Gineipaedia. In other words, this shows the 16 (non-search) sites that direct the most traffic to Gineipaedia by linking to us.

As you can see, the old Wikia site still contributes a huge amount of traffic to us, and this is partially because (until recently) it was ahead of us in Google's results. The second-highest source of referral traffic is Vympel's LOGH thread on SDN, and that's followed by various wikis and forums mainly.

Facebook appears because it aggregates a lot of our content (for example, Reinhard has a Facebook page that pulls data from our article on him). diary.ru is a LiveJournal-esque site which is the largest contributor of Russian traffic — there are a huge number of Russian LOGH fans on this site, and they all link to us.

(Note: When Google appears in this list, it's mostly because of Google Translator and Google Images. Traffic from actual searches is shown below.)

SEARCH KEY WORDS

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This list shows the top 15 (technically 14 i guess) search terms that lead users to Gineipaedia. As you can see, most are pretty generic.

MOST VIEWED PAGES

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This list shows the top 10 most viewed pages (by individual page view) on the site. The top two items are actually the same page (the main one).

LANDING PAGES

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This list shows the top 10 landing pages (by visits) on the site. A landing page is of course the first (and sometimes last) page that a user sees when they visit the site. This partially corresponds to the most externally linked-to pages on Gineipaedia, but not entirely.


Anyway that's all! Let me know if you have any requests or questions.

Thanks for this, good to see how things are going. Landing pages is interesting - need to look at improving character pages, its been on the back of my mind but its a very big job.

I've got no problem with your selecting featured articles - I wouldn't mind picking some either myself, but I don't know how to do it. Could you give instructions?

I agree, those main characters like Yang and Reinhard especially intimidate me a lot, it's so hard to cover everything consistently and thoroughly for them. I liked doing the articles for 'medium' characters like Ivan and Karin, and i've been meaning to do some others, but have held off due to still not being finished with the Gaiden....

Picking the featured articles is as simple as that, the only metrics i have are that an article be 'complete', have no clean-up tags or formatting issues, and preferably contain an image or two. I've also been trying to alternate ships and characters so that we don't have ship ship ship ship every month.

Filling out the featured-article excerpts is a little more involved, but not terribly difficult:

1. Go to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

2. Scroll down to the current or last month's featured article and open the 'Perma-link to this excerpt' thing in a new tab, then click Edit on that page and copy out the code

3. Go back to #1 and go down to the next empty month and click 'Click here to create', then paste the code you copied into the empty box

4. Go to the article you want to use as a featured one, click Edit, copy the code for the first sentence or two at the top

5. Replace all the relevant bits in the new month code with the code you've just copied, making sure to retain all of the formatting and links. If there are any HUGE spoilers (references to certain main characters dying, &c.) you can remove those, but otherwise whatever it says is fine. Make sure that the bolded word is linked, make sure that the 'more...' thing at the end is linked properly, and make sure that the previous month article and the current month's date are entered into the 'recently featured' bit at the bottom.

Then just save and everything else will update automatically

Cool, thanks I'll keep it in mind when I have a featured article in mind.

I wanted to start on some of the less major characters too - very busy with video games at the moment but I figure in mid-April ish CA's blu-ray (960x720) of both Gaiden will come out, and that'll give me the stuff I need to start some new ship articles and more eye candy pictures, so I'll do that first.