Recently in About the site Category

Wow! That went quick. It was just over 3 years ago I installed some blog software called "Movabletype" onto my web server to run my personal playspace. I guess blogging is a phase of life that's still in me, though several things have been and gone. My running phase never quite restarted after "je suis tombe". Speaking of which, The French lessons I began in January finished and I haven't been able to get on the next ones (the teacher's great, but the course is over subscribed again and I wasn't quick enough to book in). I still get tears in my eyes when I read this post.

Onto happier things, someone other than me visits these pages. The server log shows that in November 2007 there were 10,208 page views. That compares to 1,599 at the end of the first year and 6,024 a the end of the second year.

Most people still look for this page on what the shortcut key is on Windows to show the desktop and minimise all the open programs (Windows key & D at the same time, at least for XP, I've not tried Vista enough to find out). That's not so closely followed by people searching for "steve root", I wonder who he is? After which, How much do books weigh? and how to know that shelf you are putting up is strong enough. I'm also not the only one to wonder "is damn a swear word?".

Did you know it's been almost two years since I created this site? Well, it has. About a year ago I revealed some of my top secret* page view statistics. Then the monthly page view totals looked like this:

Month: Pages Viewed
Nov 2005: 1599
Oct 2005: 1180
Sep 2005: 676

Compare and contrast the following then:

Week: Pages Viewed
17/Sep/06 1989
10/Sep/06 2053
3/Sep/06 1929

Yes, you read it correctly. There are now more visitors each week than in a whole month from last year. Another example from the logs is that 821 "Distinct Hosts Served" during the last week - say hello in the comments everyone! (see this entry for more detail about what web site stats mean).

What are you all coming here for? Well, according to the search logs - most of you are still looking for this entry although flavour of the month is Steve Irwin - he got a mention in our holiday photos. For those who don't know, Steve Irwin became famous from his TV programmes on wildlife (he became known as "The Crocodile Hunter"). He had a Zoo near Brisbane but was killed recently by a Sting Ray while filming a new series.

The question you're probably all desperate to hear the answer too is "How much have you earn't from the Google Ads?" (written about here). Well, it's safe to say that I haven't even reached two significant figures. That's another way of saying less than US$10.

*OK, they're not that secret it's just I don't process the log file often.

Well, traffic levels here are increasing regularly. Guess either a) I have a lot of friends b) Theres actually some content here people want to read c) Lots of people are getting lost and ending up here.

I've decided to try hosting some googleads here. The theory is if you are reading one of my pages, google will put some relevent adverts alongside the page. If you happen to be interested in that companies product (it's almost always going to be a product) then you can follow the link. The company pay google a few pennies for every person that follows the link, and google pay a (no doubt) miniscule percentage to me. Be interesting to see if it provides any holiday spending money.

Before you ask:
1) no, it doesn't work if I click on the links to earn money for myself. It also recognises the same person following the link, so don't bother clicking on an advert 30 times - computers can be clever things and will simply not count you.
2) Yes, if i do actually ever recieve a cheque from google for this, I have to pay tax on it :-( For me, that will simply be a case of raising a corresponding invoice to cover the reciept and it will be part of my business accounts. I guess other people have to register with the tax office and start doing a tax return.

It's been a whole year since I started this blog. I've managed to write at least one post each month, although somtimes the gaps between entries have been quite large.

Visitor numbers have been quite impressive - more interested than I would have guessed:
Month: Pages Viewed
Nov 2005: 1599
Oct 2005: 1180
Sep 2005: 676
Aug 2005: 434
(I accidentally deleted the log files from before July)

anyway, I'm out of time again - more to write later!

Made a few changes to the site stylesheet, made a screenshot of before and after too (I normally forget).

Another thing I'd like to do but probably won't get much time to sort out.

I'd like to make sure I put a little relevant image with every post. Something relevant, like a photo of someone if I'm writing about them, or a small map if I'm talking about a place. May be I'll go back over some of the old postings and add some images into them.

I know i've been rather quiet here lately. There's lots I want to write about, just not getting the time at the moment. Last month (August) we set a new sales record in the shop (an amazingly large amount of sales that I won't say because our competitors might get jealous - no point upsetting them).

The Boughton 10K is fast approaching and I'm busy entering entries into the computer.

Hopefully, I'll get time to write about some things soon (like all those old memories and life observations). Until then, I better concentrate on getting all my work done.

I've been approached by two companies this week wanting to advertise on my blog. Hmmm, confused I am. Can't really tell if it is random spam they are sending or if there really is something on this site that's attracting millions of potential customers for someone. (Well, I doubt it's millions because I have logs of server load and visitors).

Should I sell some space? Should just say no and keep this ad free ? Ah decisions decisions.

Those nice people at Movable Type have not only finished testing the new version of Movable Type, they made a nice little badge for the people who helped look for bugs. In all I found 1 bug that no one else had reported (fixed in less than 24 hours) and 1 that had already been reported and fixed (the beta was being fixed and re-released daily and I was one release behind the current!).

Now the new version is complete I'm running out of excuses to delay starting my first MT plugin...

The beta test is going really well (at least, I haven't found any major data damaging bugs, or been able to break it in any way). Therefore, I'm going to reset the site templates to the new defaults.

The site templates control how these pages look. I'd done a little customisation of the templates (adding things like the rotating banner at the top of the page with all the family photos) but I never quite made it look the way i wanted. The new templates have a few new features too, so be prepared for some strange looking pages while I experiment.

Things may look much the same to the casual viewer, but behind the seens there's been an update. The site is now run using MovableType 3.2(beta). Beta means that it's still being tested and it's not guaranteed to work without problems. As this site isn't critical (it's just me playing around) I've decided to try the beta and report any feedback. I'm glad I did, my version of RedHat Enterprise Server is getting a little long in the tooth (waiting for the latest version to be tested by my managed server provider before moving to a brand new server) and some of the software was a little too out of date for things to run smoothly.

SixApart (and especially Shirley) are doing a wonderful job responding to Bugs. First point of note - they work Sundays just like me! So when I posted my bug on Sunday evening I got a reply within an hour. The reply identified the problem, so I could go and research my particular set up to find out if that was the cause. It was, so not only is my server now updated an running 3.2Beta happily, future users of the software will benefit from an improved version that will hightlight the problem (the install routine should spot things like old software, but this particular one got though).

So, everyone wins from Beta software being tested on sites like this - before it hits production sites like ...erm.. can't think of any other than SixAparts own sites. Now I've re-enabled comments may be you can suggest some.

If it seems rather quiet on these pages lately it's simply because I've been busy doing other things. Things like getting electronic data from suppliers and working out the code to reformat their data into something my systems will read. Things like the boughton 10 run which not only have "Roots" agreed to sponsor, we sort of ended up helping with the administration and processing of the 'somewhere near' 600 expected entries.

I am still here, and will eventually finish off the half done posts currently hidden from your view. I may even get round to fixing some of the CSS display bugs I've noticed.

Oh well, back to work.

Thanks to those who've pointed out the bugs on the site so far. The current list reads:

• Comments Don't work
• Font size too small
• Site is different in Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox

I'll get to looking at the comments as soon as I get time.
Did you know you can change the font size for this site (and any other standards compliant site) in your browser? It's simple, just select
"View" from the menu bar, then "Text Size" from the list, then choose to make it larger or smaller. The font size you see on your screen is affected by many things including the size of your screen and some Windows settings.
The differences between Firefox and Internet Explorer are down to the way they implement the web's CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) standards (or more likely the way I've written my style sheet). Eventually I'll figure out why they are different and fix them to be the same.

I've begun a new category today called "Posts waiting to happen". If you see anything here its because it may be relevant for some to ready, but I'm not happy to list it as a complete entry. This will also be a category for me to place 'draft' and 'future' status posts. These types of post doesn't show on the website but placing them here will let me see easily the things I've started and not finished. All told, this is like a scrap book of ideas section, some things you'll be able to see and some you wont.

Well, it's up an running. This site is live. Well, if you count a count a grand total of three visitors (Hello Sister Sharon, Friend Alex and Friend Clive - that is if you ever come back to read this).

I keep a log file for all the sites I run and for this site it gives the not very impressive visitor statistics of:

General Web Traffic Statistics	(Figures in parentheses refer to the 7-day period ending 02-Dec-2004 21:23).	Notes on their meaning
Successful requests:	519 (368)	number of files the server delivered. A file is each page and each image. So a single page request will often be 10 or so requests. Commonly called Hits.
Average successful requests per day:	46 (52)
Successful requests for pages:	211 (159)	a.k.a it all worked from the servers point of view and a page was sent to the computer that requested it.
Average successful requests for pages per day:	18 (22)
Failed requests:	91 (75)	Uh oh, this means it didn't all work correctly. EG I didn't put the correct image name in a file. Also gets counted here if you go to a page that doesn't exist. I study the log files on sites to find the causes of these problems so I can fix them and hopefully keep this number at zero.
Distinct files requested:	70 (61)	We know how many files had been requested by visitors, but this tells us how many files we have actually used on the server. In this case there were only 61 files on the server that were used, although several must have been sent more than once because 368 file requests were made by visitors.
Distinct hosts served:	20 (20)	Distinct hosts means number of computers, but thats not the same as number of people. Actually, it isn't really number of computers, its number of internet addresses that connected to the server and asked for a page. At the shop we only have one internet address but several computers, a clever box called a router sorts out where traffic is going to and from. Even though I used two computers at the shop the server would only see one host. 20 sounds like a lot right? Well the shop IP address stays the same, but at home (where I've created several pages) it changes every half day or so. That's probably up to about 6 then. Add Sharon, Clive & Alex (I told them the site was here but they may not have come) then its about 9 hosts. Add the groups of servers that get told automatically when I update a page (built into the movabletype software so that people with weblogs can let each other know when a blog has been updated) and before you know it you've got 20 host visits but only 4 real people.
Data transferred:	3.02 megabytes (1.99 megabytes)	If you think that an old floppy disk held 1.4megabytes, then this week the server sent out one and a bit. I pay for the amount of bandwidth the sites on my server use so I watch these numbers for all the sites on the server to make sure none of them are using too much. Too much? Well, the server currently sends around 3,500 old style floppy disks full of data every month to visitors, but has a basic capacity of sending about 22,000 disks per month. If you're wondering what the real values are: 5GB usage, 30GB per month before I'm charged more.
Average data transferred per day:	279.44 kilobytes (291.57 kilobytes)

(I use a program called analog to analyse the log files in case you were interested)

Ho-hum, now theres some content worth looking at it must be time to submit to the search engines (say in a loud deep voice).

So tonight I've submited to:

• DMOZ - a directory site that needs a real person to verify the entry
• Yahoo Directory - a bit like DMOZ but it will probably take longer. Out of nostalgia I thought I'd list here first because it was the first site on the internet I ever went to... more on that another time. When I started the business it was easy to get listed although today business generally have to pay and the free submission have no guarantees of being listed. Still, nowdays most people use a search engine rather than a directory site (di't'ave those when i were a boy on t'net).
• Google - a proper search engine that's ever so popular. I'll let you know how long before the first google spider comes visiting the site.

Oh well, that's it for tonight, more ramblings later