Probably only of interest to me -- site stats

[indri]

Well, I've had webstat thingies up at my site for a couple of days and I've been finding the results quite interesting, even though I've far too little data for a proper statistical sample.

I have a much better idea now of how people find my site. A small but not insignificant proportion of visitors are people who aren't looking for fanfic at all, but want sites on British breakfast cereals or are googling combinations of words that just happen to match a story. For example, some poor bod in India was looking for "smooth breakup marriage" and wound up with Honeymoon. But the majority of people are looking for fic. Quite a few find my site by googling the titles of stories I've written, which is nice as it suggests they've read and enjoyed a particular story and have decided to go looking for more. But the largest proportion of people come via fic archives (especially All About Spike), award sites and rec lists.

The countries of visitors have varied a bit more than I expected. Often, the stat counter can't tell where someone is from or just lists it as "Network" but the remaining data shows that the majority of my visitors are from the US, UK and Australia, with other countries including Belgium and Saudi Arabia as well as that lost visitor from India. I'm surprised by the number of hits from US Military sites.

I seem to have about twenty visitors a day, of which a couple are looking for something else entirely. Most only look at a couple of pages per visit, but one or two might nose around for longer. Of course, I can't tell how many people actually read the stories in front of them. Maybe it's fifteen a day or a hundred a week, something of that order, which is pretty cheering, especially as I suspect most of my readers read me on archives sites elsewhere.

Comments

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

Your experience parallels my own. I'm getting well over a hundred visitors a day, but that's probably because not much of my stuff is archived anywhere. I've only allowed a couple of short works to be held elsewhere; anyone who wants to read my long stuff has no option but to come to my site. I'm big in Canada and Hong Kong, and (oddly) Estonia.

Of course anyone who only reads you on "All About Spike" is missing out on the Cardboard Giles blog, which is a delight. Pity you didn't continue it into S7.

I can't remember where I first discovered your work; I have a feeling it might have been through LiveJournal.

[indri]

Glad you liked cardboard_giles. I started it in "real time" in Season 7 but it became pretty clear pretty fast that it would be impossible to keep up and remain in canon, especially once he became Pod Giles.

Once I've done the Illyria fic, I'll be returning to S7 Giles, but it won't be comedy, given what transpired later on. A pity really, since I had enormous fun writing comedic Giles.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

How did I manage to miss out on Cardboard Giles?? That was hilarious, especially the 'Women' entry. I'm till sniggering over that one. Poor, poor Wesley!

Can't your S7 Gile start out comedic and then turn deliciously dark? I read a most unusual point of view the other day (but of course I can't for the life of me remember where) - the person was arguing that S7 was truest to Giles's character, and that she'd felt all along that he was hiding aspects of his personality from Buffy, and in S7 we finally caught a glimpse of that side of him. And it makes sense, if you think about his early history. You don't get from Band Candy Giles to Tweedy Giles if there isn't an element of putting on a costume.

[indri]

That's an excellent interpretation of Giles! Not exactly what I had in mind originally, but defibitely something worthwhile to chew over.

(Sorry for the extremely belated response.)

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

If you had fun writing comedic Giles why not do it again? Do an AU S7 in which Giles is Cardboard Giles instead of Pod Giles? A lot of the problems with S7 were due to factors which don't affect us as fanfic writers; ASH not being willing to work full time, the cancellation meaning that they introduced pointless characters hoping to throw up a potential spin-off, giving roles to friends who'd lost their jobs on Firefly even if this meant changing the plot so that it made no sense, having to wrap everything up in the finale even if it meant using a deus ex machina, and so on. Cardboard Giles is so much more fun than Pod Giles that he could produce a much more light-hearted S7. Cardboard Giles Rocks!

[indri]

Do an AU S7 in which Giles is Cardboard Giles instead of Pod Giles?

Trouble is, I think that deep down, Cardboard and Pod Giles are one and the same. And AUs scare me. Interpolation feels easier to me. S7 had very serious problems but I think a lot of the difficulty was execution. We didn't need the stupid Guardian person or Caleb and we didn't need the Deus Ex Machina. All we needed was some coherent storyline for the FE. (I even liked most of the Potentials.) So if I were to rewrite S7 it would look remarkably similar, I'd just tidy up some things they weren't able to take care of fot the reasons you give above.

Glad you liked CG though -- I'll let him know :)