If you’re a regular visitor to this site, I’m sure you’ve noticed the new look, Yep, I’ve redesigned it and I’m now back to blogging, after about 3 years of near inactivity. Before I went on blogging sabbatical I stopped using any Google products on this site, including Google Analytics. (Did you also notice that there are no Google ads?) During those 3 years of inactivity, I wasn’t really sure what kind of traffic I was getting.
So a few days ago I searched for an alternative to Google Analytics and settled for Fair Analytics. It’s Free Software. Gives me just the info I need about traffic on the site in a very clean interface. While looking at the Sources section of the dashboard, I noticed that there was more traffic from a source called Direkter Zugriff than even from Google. Since all but one of the sources visible in that section were search engines, I thought it must be a search engine too.
Figure 2: Traffic analytics data of LinuxBSDos.com from the dashboard of Fair Analytics.
But why haven’t I come across it before now? I did an Internet search of that term, but found no reference to a search engine by that name. Then it struck me: Fair Analytics is a German outfit, so perhaps Direkter Zugriff means something in German. Sure enough, Yandex Translate says it means Direct Access. “Blimey!”, I said. “That should have been obvious.” Why I never made that connection initially beats me.
This last bit is only tangentially related, but just as I was about to publish this post, I looked over at the dashboard, in the Countries section, and noticed a reference to Taiwan, Province of China. The Chinese Communist Party will never rest until it takes over Taiwan by any means necessary. That country scares me.
Figure 3: Taiwan labeled as Taiwan, Province of China in Fair Analytics..
