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Does traffic mean page views, or bytes?
All the graphics in widgetopia (which is, btw, a very useful resource) could be skewing things.
On the Internet, a picture costs a thousand words.
these are requests to directories--not a perfect indicator of popularity, but directional.
i often use this request metric (tho at a file rather than a directory level) to understand what articles are most popular on B&A-- comment# is actually not a good report metric.
it's been amazing how quickly widgetopia has become a booster of my traffic, though as manu points out, people pointing to the historic blog entries is still a big driver.
Makes me wonder about people who pave over their old sites.
I checked "Widgetopia" only after having read this. I must say that it would be worth to make more immediately appreciable what by widgetopia is meant.
Of course, it is a morphing between widget and utopia (I'm soooo smart lol), yet the audience can be somewhat international: we read english, but not everybody who has also a relatively good english proficiency, though being non english native, should be supposed to understand also terms that have beeen somewhat obfuscated in the content they point to.
Now, this is of no concern as long as the page is not targeted to a wide audience, but that widgetopia can be truly interesting to whoever, having presumably landed on here searching about web design, could be delighted in viewing that section.
I'd try to stress in a more apparent way not only that that section exists, but what it is about (you have by a far a better talent than mine to device gracious words to stress that, so I won't make suggestions on _what_ type of words or what way this could be implemented).
Now, the reason that section inflates the statistics count is rather easy to spot: once found the section, the user realizes that the whole of the section can be easily navigated in a matter of minutes and the pics can be saved for further personal consideration. How many pages are there, about 20? All them load fast. As soon as an user realizes this, browses them _all_.
This doean't mean that widgetopia is necessarily the feature your visitors are most interested in: it simply means that it can easily gain a welter of clicks back and forth back and forth in a matter of minutes as soon as the user appreciates what is in it and that it can all be viewed in a short time. And of course that it is interesting.
This round-the-ten-minutes view could not be done with the blog archives for instance.
So, like in my case, an user who is more interested in the blog can give 3 hits in a day to the blog, yet as soon as he/she sees widgetopia, in one day he gives to it all the clicks it may collect given the amount of files in the page. Thence the "wrong" impression it is more visited: it is, but not because it would be truly more fascinating than the blog, it's just easier to raid and garner.
ciao
Alberto
