Historic Wallace Idaho

Access Log Analysis, 2002-2008

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Greg Marsh skiing deep powder at Lookout Pass I created wallace-id.com and silver-valley.com in 1998 to popularize my new home in North Idaho as a way to mitigate the economic depression of the community and myself. I was a scientist for seventeen years before deciding at 45 that I had done enough chemistry, but not enough skiing. So in 1993, I ended my tour of duty as the vagabond scientist following state-of-the-art mass spectrometers around the world and bought a house in the mountains where I wanted to end up, and set about to become a "computer consultant" entrepreneur.

While it was lots of fun managing the ParlorHouse CyberCafe in downtown Wallace during the filming of Dante's Peak in the summer of 1996, I was basically ahead of my time in a very friendly and interesting town of 960 rugged individuals coping with double digit unemployment. Thus, when the ~300 person movie crew left in September, the ParlorHouse naturally collapsed. By 1998, I was forced to finally realize three sad facts:

  1. My home computer repair/instruction business was NEVER going to work.
  2. To survive, I had to be in Wallace, two miles away, EVERY day meeting possible clients.
  3. Although my home was paid for, I could no longer afford to drive my car.
So I started walking to Wallace every day, where I borrowed a friend's spare computer at the Great Northern Print Shop (1997-1999) and created wallace-id.com and silver-valley.com.

Ten years later, I am still walking to Wallace every day to work on my websites. I am in far better physical shape at 61 than I would have been had things been easy. Beginning in January, 2002, I began a monthly analysis of the wallace-id.com access logs. 3,104,156 successful page requests were recorded and analyzed by the end of 2008. These data are presented below.

 
Summary of all traffic
to wallace-id.com
2002 through 2008
  • Total Page Views Analyzed
    • 2008 — 584,496
    • 2002 — 235,003
    • 149% increase in pages viewed
  • Average Page Views per Day
    • 2008 — 1,480
    • 2002 —    644
    • 130% increase in pages viewed/day
  • Average Homepage Views per Day
    • 2008 — 226
    • 2002 — 109
    • 107% increase in homepage viewed/day
  • Average Number of People per Month
    • 2008 — 12,230
    • 2002 —   4,049
    • 202% increase in people/month
Four Season Mountain Recreation is a big theme at wallace-id.com. A chart of the interest in each of four areas is shown below.
  • Lookout Pass Ski Area
    • January 2008 — 189 page views/day
    • January 2002 —  42 page views/day
    • 350% increase in page views/day
  • Silver Mountain Ski Area
    • January 2008 — 105 page views/day
    • January 2002 —  53 page views/day
    • 98% increase in page views/day
  • Route of the Hiawatha
    • July 2008 — 321 page views/day
    • July 2002 — 176 page views/day
    • 82% increase in page views/day
  • Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes
    • July 2008 — 103 page views/day
    • July 2003 — 69 page views/day
    • 49% increase in page views/day
Page Views and Human Visitors, 2002-2008
(click image to open chart in separate window)
 

Each month, the total number of recorded page views is first adjusted to remove the retrieval of the snowfall log inline frame associated with the homepage. These adjusted page views are plotted to the left, along with the calculated human population that these page views represent. To get this number, requests made by robot operating systems are subtracted, and the remaining page views are divided by the average number of pages requested per visit for that month.
    84 month averages (± standard deviation)
  • robot operating system retrievals = 5.5% ± 3.2%
    (range = 0.8% to 15.0%)
  • pages per host (visit) = 3.78 ± 0.52
    (range = 2.52 to 5.17)
Community Service, 2002-2008
(click image to enlarge chart in a separate window)
 
The main reason for establishing wallace-id.com in 1998 was to provide essential information to those people thinking about vacationing or moving here.
Jan 2002
pages
Dec 2008
pages
relocation 3 18
festivals 3 26
maps/aerial photos 16 19
history 12 14
general recreation 12 25
local businesses 19 33
Recreation Promotion, 2002-2008
(click image to enlarge chart in a separate window)
 
I moved here in 1993 because Lookout Pass and Silver Mountain ski areas are a dozen Interstate miles east and west of Wallace. When the Route of the Hiawatha mountain bike trail was created as a result of efforts by the Taft Tunnel Preservation Society in 1999, I added this attraction as my third recreational websuite. In 2003, as the 72-mile Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes paved bike trail was nearing completion, I added this fourth websuite to wallace-id.com. This became the prototype for the large Friends of the Coeur d'Alene Trails website that promotes ALL bicycle venues in the region. The general recreation curve includes eight years of snowfall logs and commentary that tie the two complementary Silver Valley ski areas together, in competition with the other three ski areas available to folks in Spokane. In December 2008, these eight snow logs were consulted 42¼ times a day, in spite of the late start of the season.
Top Three Pages, 2002-2008
(click image to enlarge chart in a separate window)
 

Interest in local weather and business has remained rather constant over the years and may reflect a saturated local audience. The weather page naturally gets the most attention during winter, while the summer months see the most traffic through the business page. On the other hand, the homepage reflects a growing interest in our town beginning in the summer of 2004, with spiking due to the mention of Wallace in other media.
    84 month averages (± standard deviation) and totals
  • homepage = 170 ± 56 page views/day
    (range 81 to 312)
    434,064 total views (14.8% of all traffic)
  • business = 46 ± 13 page views/day
    (range 25 to 79)
    118,311 total views (4.0% of all traffic)
  • weather = 38 ± 17 page views/day
    (range 19 to 89)
    96,178 total views (3.3% of all traffic)
Various Pages & Suites, 2002-2008
(click image to enlarge chart in a separate window)
 

This chart shows a variety of interest patterns. Interest in Lana Turner peaked a couple of years ago and now seems to have reached a steady state of activity, similar to that for the 1313 Club. It can be shown that 17% of everyone who looked at my 1313 page in the last year went on to visit one of four pages at 1313club.com. Interest in my curriculum vitae seems to have stablized at 19 page views per day... popularity does not seem to correlate with job offers, however. Interest in Jim Carpenter's 11 page websuite, Silver Valley Real Estate, peaked in 2007 at 59 page views/day, and fell to 55 pv/day last year as the general economy of the nation fell. The traffic to Independence Lead Mines increased in a dramatic yet uneven way over the years, until the company was finally acquired by Hecla at the end of 2008 and the 44 page websuite was redirected to a single file: gone.html. Interest in Snow Cat Parts is increasing in a regular and seasonal way as Pat Foster builds his machinist business from his cabin on Dobson Pass. Google has ranked Pat at #1 for several key words and phrases for the last five years and this has enabled him to increase his product line substantially.
 

Return to top of page

Wallace History
June 06, 2003
Modern Wallace
October 10, 2008
Recreational Opportunities
January 27, 2011
Photo Album
December 29, 2003
Wallace Business
January 24, 2012
Relocation Information
January 24, 2012
Wallace Festivals
November 12, 2011
Today's Weather
(updated every hour)
September 10, 2011
Dates indicate when the content or structure of a page was modified. The Wallace HOMEPAGE was last modified on February 01, 2012. This Traffic Report was last modified on March 09, 2009.

 



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August 31, 2011

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new item     Thank you for your time and interest in Wallace Idaho. From January 1, 2002, through December 31, 2011, 5,085,944 successful requests for html, doc, pdf and kml/kmz pages were recorded and analyzed. As documented in my 2011 Annual Traffic Report (in press), these page requests imply visitation by ~1,139,000 humans over the 120 month period. About 138,000 of these visits were made in 2011.

In an alternative accounting, Google Analytics recorded 180,385 html page requests in 2011. It says that 147,927 of these page views were unique and represent 103,105 visits made by 83,842 people. This number of visits is comparable to my homegrown benchmark calculation. Google Analytics also says that 80% of these 103,105 visits were new. This implies that about 20,600 visits were made by those of you who looked at pages in this domain more than once in 2011. THANK YOU. This show of interest in a town with a population of 784 is very gratifying.

 

Please Note:
If you are a regular visitor, you know that this website is a thirteen year work in progress, from which I receive only trivial financial rewards. If you have found my efforts useful to you over the years, please consider making this the path you take when you go shopping at amazon.com. Without leaving wallace-id.com, you may search for and obtain information about any product in their inventory by pausing your cursor over the "search Amazon" dropdown box on the adjacent widget. I receive a 4% to 6% commission on items purchased through their secure shopping cart when you enter from Historic Wallace Idaho. Thank you for your support.
 
Greg Marsh, Ph.D.
Marsh Scientific Services

If you are new to this page, please leave a bookmark or share it with a friend:    
 
Wallace is at the center of a universe filled with mountain recreation and Old West history that you will want to visit more than once. Please tell me what you would like to see on this and other pages at my Historic Wallace Idaho webworks.



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new item Indexed 326 files (5,716 KB)
with 251,296 total terms on
August 31, 2011

Greg Marsh, Ph.D.
    doing business as     Marsh Scientific Services is Greg Marsh, Ph.D.
greg4mss@hotmail.com

Please visit my other websites and websuites:
  • Northern Idaho's Silver Valley      Four Season Mountain Recreation Paradise:
    two ski resorts, two long bike trails, a dozen alpine lakes, bountiful wildlife and backcountry solitude in harmony with 127 years of mining history and legend
    silver-valley.com homepage updated December 30, 2011
click to see the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes
click to see the Route of the Hiawatha
  • click to see THE MINER by Hal Payne
    Hal Payne

    Wallace's Master Doll Artist is now capturing Silver Valley history in bronze
    homepage updated June 12, 2010
Bill White, 1929-2008
Bill White's story:
Escape From Islas Marias

Marsh Scientific Services is Greg Marsh ©1998-2012, Marsh Scientific Services, Greg Marsh, Ph.D.
http://wallace-id.com/stats02_08.html
last update on Monday, 09-Mar-2009 10:47:37 PDT
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