Okay, I’ve done 100+ posts. Time to look at when I usually post.
mysql user/passwd -s -e "select DATE_FORMAT(post_date, '%a') from wp_posts" | sort | uniq -c
gives a count for days of posting. In WordPress, the post_date field is a datetime value, and %a converts a datetime value to a day of the week.
Mon 16
Tue 7
Wed 17
Thu 22
Fri 20
Sat 6
Sun 14
Looks like I’m mid- to late-week kinda guy.
How about time o’ day? A little
mysql -s -e "select DATE_FORMAT(post_date, '%k') from wp_posts" | sort | uniq -c | tr -s " " " " | sed -e's/^ //' | sort -g -k2
gets the raw data. Then I make a little file like this:
set terminal png
set output “postinghours.png”
set nokey
set title “Posting hours”
set xlabel “Hour of the day”
set ylabel “Number of posts”
set nogrid
plot [-0.5:23.5] ‘postinghours’ using 2:1 with boxes
(yah, all this could be cleaner. It gets the job done, okay?) Then pipe that into gnuplot and you find out that I mostly post at night:
That sounds about right, since I normally prowl ‘n’ blog after work.
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Matt
Sorry to hear about your Cat.
Would be intresting to see a graph of GG posting times as I think they closely mirror yours
– Lots of G employees suffer from Insomia ?
Anyway – Jagger3 Done and Dusted – I still see different results on a handful of DCs including the original J3 – however some aspects of J3 have definetly spread – our the differences just flux – or more data to come do you know ?
I posted in another thread that G seem to have problems with determining my root page – anything that can be done to improve this from my end – I have all links going back to root and a 301 from non-www to www.
Cheers – enjoy the Thanksgiving weekend.
Stephen
Glad to see there are more people that work more hours than the standard 8 per day.
Matt,
When do I request a re-inclusion request?
Can you please clarify when a webmaster should ask google for a review, as it seems no visitors becomes the penalty or filter rather than complete exclusion from the index.
With the excellent use of Google | analytics it is evident when all major engines equally send traffic but google sends 0% a penalty is inforce but finding the exact TOS sometime is not easy.
Can you suggest a solution or advice to the mystery for webmasters, I have been told no penalty is in force but it becomes difficult with contrary facts.
Best regards
Peter
Whoa…cute! My vote is for more UNIX tips
Cool graph, Matt.
Now how about one with the dates/times others respond to your stuff?
Boy do I love those bar graphs -- so sexy! What geek can’t resist ‘em?
peter, I’d go ahead and do a reinclusion request. That can check for manual penalties. However, if the algorithms are just not scoring your pages as highly though, that’s not something that a reinclusion request will fix.
Hello Matt,
We met at PubCon in Vegas. Very timely post since I was just wondering when it was that you usually post so that I could check your blog. I find that I post mostly at night myself – in fact usually after 11pm, but I’m a night owl. Very rarely do I post mid-day.
We had a conversation one night downstairs in the hotel in a somewhat small group and I mentioned a demographics add-on I thought Google Analystics users (of which I am one) would find very helpful.
Will you be at SES in Chicago? If so, I could show you the add-on tool for your review. Please let me know. Aaron has my card with all my contact info if you need it. (Tell him I said hello , by the way.)
Nice graphs
Hello Matt,
I actually blog more toward the end of the week myself and definitely late at night – usually not until 11pm or so and very rarely mid-day.
We met at PubCon in Vegas and had a nice discussion in a small group at the hotel one night.
I mentioned an add-on for Google Analytics users (of which I am one) I thought they might find very useful. Are you going to be at SES in Chicago? If so, I could show you a demo of the add-on/plug-in tool. You could review it and evaluate its potential utility for any and all Google Analytics users. Aaron should have all my contact info if you need it. (Tell him I said hello , by the way).
Matt,
Let me clarify for Peter (and let me also mention that Peter is a long time defender of google and has had many fights in seo forums because of his support, was even let go as a moderator (too much information sorry)
Anyhow, I met Peter in a forum when I was trying to find out how I could sell rain barrels from my website, he caught my eye (seemed like a smart guy being picked on by a bunch of morons), I asked him a few questions and he has given me a few tips over the last few years that really helped.
Peter and I thought we had a brilliant idea; we would make a website that was a database of articles that people could freely submit to and pay ourselves with directory inclusion and a few adsense dollars. The site is http://www.knowledge-finder.com and it was doing ok until the Jagger updates when it was completely removed from googles index for whatever reason. Slowly indexing has returning but it appears that “articles” are seen as “duplicate content” and have been devalued to the point of them being worthless? Though I still see “goarticles” and “ezinearticles” are doing fine? The site is basically dead in the water and I have even heard a few negatives about google come out of Peter’s mouth lately…
Anyone want to buy another failed idea, slashed by google during a new algorithm change? We are not mad at G, we just are wondering how we can now make the site more useful and why it was removed if it is not spam or a scraper trash site, though I believe its value may be low currently.
The only things that might have been really lame that we tried were a sitemap on each page and a subdomain with cell phone adds, but people do strange things when they need to pay a few bills.
That about covers it, if you can learn anything from it great, if you can clarify what might have happened even better.
Do I talk too much?
-Aaron
To clarify further, the “peter” I speak of is from seo-works.com, not the same fellah above, he commented in another post.
To the two Knowledge Finder guys:
I’m not sure if this is somehow related, but your site loads pretty slowly and seemed to take a long time to reach. Maybe your problem is that you’re on a bad host and Google had trouble reaching it too.
Thanks Adam for responding BUT I do not think it is as simple as that, wish it was but I doubt it. I will spam some other forums to try to get an answer, no luck with google on this so far, must be some sort of secret that Matt can not respond too, oh well, it never hurts to try.
Matt , what should one do with this ?
I understand that google really hates duplicate content, but more and more you see google search affiliate result pages reindexed in the google results ,
in a way , google has been indexing his own results … and displays them when searching
examples ? search for – site:google.startsiden.no news -
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-08,GGLD:en&q=site%3Agoogle%2Estartsiden%2Eno+news
I reported this to google in the normal webmaster feedback forms
some months ago but got a standard reaction … read the faq
is there a special “keyword” to get these sites routed to the right support people ?
You’d be surprised, Aaron. And even if it wasn’t the case in the direct sense, it may increase your traffic simply because people can access it.
So there’s a non-SE reason to do so as well.
Matt,
OK. I’m impressed.
Should I tip my hat to you or an assistant.
Be honest now. The world is watching.
Hehe. I got a kick out of seeing your command line sql piped into other unix commands for sorting, grouping, re-sorting, etc.
You know in sql there are also some handy commands like group by, order by, having, etc. where you could have gotten the final results you were looking for
I’m in awe you can just whip out all those other commands to get what you want, but at the same time but I’m a sql zealot .. would have gone all SQL if it were me
Different lifestyles tend to give different post habits. Saturdays are my posting days and of course Thursdays. Odd you post alot on a Wednesday and a Sunday!