Subject: Popular pages on techdocs

From: Greg Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:50:17 -0400 (EDT)

I noticed today that direct links to techdocs pages are now all 
redirecting to the front page of the wiki.  Does anyone have any 
statistics on what the popular pages were on techdocs?  I was thinking 
that would be a good input on an organizational redesign, knowing what 
people were using the most.

--
* Greg Smith [email-masked] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

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From: "Dave Page" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:32:29 +0000

>  people were using the most.

You might be able to extract some useful data from Google Analytics if
you're willing to give it a go? You'll need a Google account so I can
give you access.

I am aware that some of the text we migrated is *really* old now, so a
culling/archiving session would be a worthwhile pursuit.

-- 
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK Ltd: http://www.enterprisedb.com
PostgreSQL UK 2008 Conference: http://www.postgresql.org.uk

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From: Greg Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:53:54 -0400 (EDT)

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008, Dave Page wrote:

> you're willing to give it a go?

I certainly was.  Ignoring the main navigation pages, here are the most 
popular pages on techdocs:

techdocs.54:  "A Guide to GUI Tools Supporting PostgreSQL"
techdocs.37:  "PGSQL Talks"
techdocs.16:  "Updating columns in PostgreSQL tables effectively"
techdocs.83:  "Why PostgreSQL Instead of MySQL"
techdocs.15:  "Using PostgreSQL's COPY function effectively"
techdocs.13:  "FAQ: Working with Dates and Times in PostgreSQL"
techdocs.29:  "HOWTO : Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL Migration"
techdocs.76:  "Howto SSL enable Postgresql LDAP Authentication"

To ease the transition a prominently placed "Looking for something from 
the old site?" page linking to these might be a helpful to all the people 
who follow a now redirected link.

On the broader topic of what people look for that lands them on one of the 
docs pages (which includes both techdocs and when they are redirected onto 
a section of the manual), here are the things people search for with 
Google starting with the most popular:

alter table
change password
sequence
psql
pg_hba.conf
create table
copy
vacuum
join
update
select
count
insert
schema
auto increment
pg_dump
cast
initdb
union
coalesce
createuser
timestamp
oid
like
date
show
delete
trigger

I had been working on a more task-oriented FAQ for postgresqldocs.org, 
staring at this data makes me think that would be nice to integrate with a 
"Popular manual sections" page of some sort.  I sometimes guess what 
people want but it's always nice when it can be measured like the above 
instead.

> culling/archiving session would be a worthwhile pursuit.

While there are some recent articles like my MySQL comparision, many of 
the most popular pages were dated 2001.  There's plenty to be culled, but 
some it should be probably be refreshed instead.

---

From: "Dave Page" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 08:49:15 +0000

>  popular pages on techdocs:
alter table
change password
sequence
psql
...
>  people want but it's always nice when it can be measured like the above

Agreed.

Magnus, do you think it would be worth adding this data as an
additional weighting on the search engine to favour appropriate pages?
Or perhaps we should just update the docbot thingy.

>  some it should be probably be refreshed instead.

You sound like you're volunteering :-p