Sam Reeves Blog: Heeere's Johnny! With an Outline

Life in General...

My wife spent last night at the hospital with her mother. The doctor released her today with barely more than, "It wasn't a heart attack, but we don't know what it was." She seems to be doing well, as her shopping trip this afternoon indicated.

Most of the day, I tried to educate myself about website traffic, and I washed a few dishes. Google Analytics proved to be a really useful tool. (For websites. I'm not sure what it does for dishes. Let's all Google it, shall we?)

Google Analytics is not completely accurate, but it more closely targets the number I am looking for than does Blogger stats. Blogger does not differentiate between real people and bots. G.A. does. How? Cookies. Bots lack them; people don't, usually. Some people disable cookies, so that's why the count is only close.

Now, we add another layer. In the old days, websites measured traffic with "hits." The problem was sites garnered a hit for not only a page, but also whenever someone clicked a picture or banner or link. One page could have 20 hits when the user viewed it maybe only once. Page views replaced hits.

Today, the reliability of PVs are starting to fall in with hits, because if a visitor revisits a page, the PV counter goes up. Maybe that person engaged, maybe they just really liked pressing the F5 key.

What are PVs good for, then? Reporting the most popular pages on a website. That way, the site owner can target those pages for placing links he or she wants people to follow.

What is more accurate than PVs? Sessions. Well, not more accurate, but they give a different type of data, more useful in judging overall traffic. Sessions measure the time from app open to app close. They show that a person visited your site and how long they stayed engaged. Obviously, that provides another dimension in understanding how well a website is doing.

The Writing and Current Projects...

No word count progress on the manuscripts, but I did brainstorm and outline. I consider myself a pantser but only to a certain point. I can vomit words onto a page all day, if I want. But it is usually a waste of time, just something mechanical. It reminds me of the conversation between Wendy and Jack Torrance in The Shining:

WENDY

Any ideas yet?

JACK

Lots of ideas. No good ones.

Sometimes a writer simply needs to see the path ahead, at least a vague impression. Outlining to excess (of which I am prone) traps a writer in a loop of never being ready to write. Points on a map, though, help immensely. When I write toward something, the writing is usually better, even if I am writing as fast as I can.