Category: Net: Blogging

Yes, some of you may have noticed the new “sponsored link” at the top of most of the blog pages. I didn’t really want to have to increase the advertising on the site – but considering only a few people have taken up the sidebar advertising offer (500 impressions for just $1, or a minimum of 20 clicks for $0.25 per click), I’ve had to start running the premium adverts (1000 impressions for $3 or a minimum of 50 clicks at $0.50per click: but adverts are cached for 30minutes per time!).

Why the need for adverts at all? Well, whilst I’ve got plenty of disc space, it’s bandwidth that’s causing a few costs – I’m transferring around 2Gb of data per month and that’s quite a lot for a “personal site”. Combined with the other sites I host, it means that I consume too much bandwidth for most hosts and therefore I’ve got to have a dedicated server for myself and they cost lots of money 🙁

Add that to the fact that I’m having to fork out money for the prizes in the Guess That Movie competitions and I’m not getting a lot of returns via the Amazon links (just 4 purchases so far of Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix amazoncom:043935806X and that’s it!), means that the blogs costing me quite a bit of cash at the moment… I don’t mind too much, but I don’t want to constantly support it out of my own pocket (along with my time).

Hopefully, the adverts will be unobtrusive and hopefully bring in a few necessary dollar pounds every month, but comments on the adverts would be appreciated (or just buy some ads yourself: they’re really cheap and you’ll get your ad seen by around 660 daily visitors: plus they has been only two purchases for the premium adverts so far, meaning that there aren’t too many sites in rotation at the moment!)

All adverts are handled by TextAds (who accept payment via PayPal) and are included in the source code of the page (so no Javascript includes are required) – go on: help support the blog by buying an advert or making a donation via Pay Pal.

Of course, if somebody makes a generous donation of around £1,000 (which will cover the web hosting for the blog for a year by my reckoning), the adverts will disappear overnight…

Well, it’s been a whole two months since I last did a blog stats post, so what are the figures looking like now?

Well, my blogging activity has gone down a bit recently: this will be my 390th post: that’s only a rise of 90 posts in two months (45 a month) which is a bit poor for me (I was averaging nearly 100 a month). But I have managed to get 586 comments posted: that’s an extra 342 comments in two months – wow!

I’ll try and include February’s details here as well as March’s: I’ve had 118,574 hits during March (5,155 per day) – this is an increase of the 92,475 hits in January (2,983 per day), but a decrease from February’s 140,998 hits (5,035 per day) – and no, I’m not quite sure of how I can have more hits in February (which only has 28 days), yet a lower daily average – Webalizer must be playing up.

These hits were made up of 12,981 visits during March (564 a day), up again from January’s 11,040 (356 a day), but down from Feb’s 15,992 (571). I suspect it could be due to the war in Iraqi that is currently on going (many many sites have experienced a downturn in visitor numbers) – so I’m not too worried about it: At least I’m “only” using 1,245,191Kb (1.18Gb) of traffic and it’s down from Feb’s record beating 1,575,503Kb (1.50Gb) usage and up from Jan’s 9,82,762Kb (0.94Gb) – of course, these figures don’t include images…

For a number of months now, I’ve been running a little script on my website to control my blog rolls. Basically, a blog roll is a list of sites that I read regularly (they appear on the right hand side of the blog by the way) and “updates” on them are indicate (in my case with bold text and stars).

However, to ensure the blog rolls stay up to date, I use a service called blogrolling which provides a Javascript or PHP file for you to include in your site and will, therefore, display a list of recently updated blogs of your choosing. But what happens if you get nearly 600 visitors a day a day – that mean every time somebody reads your blog, they’ve then get to fetch the extra file from blogrolling and use up their bandwidth (which, as the owner of blogrolling realised can be quite a lot with popular blogs). Therefore, in the sake of conserving bandwidth, I’ve written a PHP script called “cacheremote” which will help take the load off the remote server.

Oh – and the script has an added bonus. If, when it comes to “refresh time”, the blogrolling server is unavailable for any reason, then your blogroll will still be displayed!

Read on for details and to download it… (currently cacheremote v0.05)

As some of you may have already noticed, fellow ODP editor Neil Turner‘s (aka totalxsive) blog is currently offline. I was aware he was having problems with people spamming his comments (I could tell by reading comments people had left that there were a couple of rather immature people with too much time on their hands) – but it seems it escalated into a flood attack resulting in his ISP (Freedom2Surf) taking the site offline – he’s tried contacting them, but no response after 36 hours! I’m disappointed if I (or another member of our technical team) don’t respond to a technical queries on website hosting business within 6 hours (that’s 6 hours full stop – not just “working hours”, after all – the internet doesn’t close down at 5pm, so why should your site?)

Neil’s currently looking for alternative hosting (I’ve recommended our hosting service as I know how good the tech support is and how reliable the servers are – I would move my own sites to them, but I’m a massive bandwidth hog and use up around 1.5Gb of traffic a week – that’s around 6Gb a month – on my various sites and I’m expecting that to return to normal levels of around 2-3Gb per week after the Iraqi war finishes).

Anyway, Neil’s got people looking to trace the person that spammed his account (and, yep, if whoever you are is reading this – Neil DOES know where you live and is contacting the relevant people), but has said in an email to me > Only downer is that I’ve probably lost a whole bulk of entries – my last backup was about a month ago <

Whether Neil will be bringing back his blog (which is one of the few that started me on my blogging adventure) at the same URL or reference to him as an individual, I don’t know, but whoever caused him this inconvenience lacks basic netiquette and intelligence – if you’ve got nothing nice to say, don’t say it at all!

Hopefully Neil should be back at the weekend…

Yippeee! Post 300 AND the “end of month” summary time: what a co-incidence!

Ok, ok – for the past few weeks, I’ve been blogging like made to try and make the two correspond – and it seems to have had a side affect of launching “Guess That Movie” which I’m “spinning off” onto it’s new website when I get time. In fact, to give myself time to do all that coding (database design is mocked up, some of the data is imported, and a brief website design has been completed) – I’m going to be “absent from blog land” until Monday.

Yep – no more posts from me after this one until sometime Monday (3^rd February) morning.

Oddly enough, when I passed the 200th blog entry mark it was snowing – and as I’m just passing the 300th mark now – it’s decided to snow again!

Anyway – on with the stats.