Category: Net: Blogging

Woo! After several days of work, I’m proud to announce the release of MT-RefSearch v0.7. Inspired and based on the original version by Eliot Landrum, this new version not only recognises Google but also over 240 other search engines. (The “official” homepage of MT-RefSearch is still on Eliot’s site by the way). You can also see Eliot’s announcement of the release.

Basically, MT-RefSearch is a PHP script and Javascript which you can include MovableType powered site, and when people come to your site from one the 243 listed search engines, they will be presented with the most appropriate search results from your site.

Any comments, criticisms, problems, ideas etc – please feel free to comment here and I’ll do my best to assist. I will be adding even more search engines to the ‘scan list’ (I did mention to Eliot I was aiming to get it over the 500 mark, but ‘upgrades’ to the main bulk of the code stopped me getting that far) – so keep checking either my blog or Eliot’s “official” MT-RefSearch site for future updates….

Wow! This is my 100th blog entry. Since starting it on the 6th of November (ie a month and a day ago – as compared to Neil’s sedate 6 weeks) with a post about receiving flowers from an ‘admirer’ (which I’ve since learnt was, in fact, my ex-girlfriend, I’ve received 20 comments from a total of 2958 visitors requesting 17,465 files transferring 201Mb of data. So far, during December, I’ve had an average of 160 visitors a day (compared with November’s 96 daily visitors). Most people have come here looking for the Mystery Of Time And Space walkthrough, but quite a number seem interested in my coverage of World AIDS day and the facts and figures I provided. My little bit about picking on George Bush with his binoculars is still the third most popular page. More stats are available on my 1st December posting.

If I had blogged yesterday, I could have probably made it exactly a month – drat. Oh well, better luck next time 🙂

Yes, yes, I know I haven’t blogged for a whole two days now, but I’ve been busy. Between sleeping (today I slept for 19 out of 24 hours for some reason), search engine optimising a clients site AND re-writing MT-RefSearch (it’ll be ready tomorrow Eliot!), I haven’t had much time really to blog. I was going to blog last night, but unfortunately, the router this server is connected to died for around 4 hours so I couldn’t access my blog to make an entry. S–ds law isn’t it?

So, just to keep the 142 daily visitors to my blog happy for the next day or so: I’ll just make a few posts before I head out. My apologies if any of you are really obsessed with me- but I hope you can understand that other work does take priority (especially when I’m being paid for it 🙂 ).

Wooh! On Saturday night, as I was getting ready to go out (more on that, maybe, later) I thought it’ll be an ideal time to consider looking at my blog stats and see what observations could be made. As per, what seems to now be usual, Neil did his whilst I was still in the bath! Curse him. Then I thought I’d leave it until the 6th of December (as it’ll then have been a month since I started my blog), but I realised today/yesterday (Sunday) that my blog logs were analysed on a monthly basis. Rather that p– about either generating odd-timed log statistics or get out the old fingers’n’thumbs: I now present my first month of stats (with some of the text nicely plagiarised from Neil)! Woo!

During November I had a total of 12,658 hits, or 1,838 visits – that averages out at 666 hits/96 visits per day. This month has seen 121Mb of traffic to the 89 entries and 16 comments.

The following stats do not include articles/entries when they are displayed on the front page: The most popular article by far was the “Pick On George Bush!” page, with 334 hits. That page alone generated 2.1Mb of traffic. The second most popular was the about “The Mystery Of Time And Space Game” (complete with walk-through solution) with 257 hits (4.1Mb of traffic). “Nigerian Jerry Duruibe: Day 1“, Day 2, Day 3 and Day 4 were the third, fourth, fifth and sixth most popular respectively (producing 467 hits/6.1Mb traffic).

Google provided the bulk of my referrals (441 of them), with 127 hits from Xanga (but I don’t yet know why), 123 coming from the previously mentioned Q4Music thread (where a copy of the George Bush photo had been ‘leeched’ from my server), 115 from Slashdot. Neil helped lead 25 wandering minstrels this way, whilst “Is My Blog Hot Or Not?” provided 12 links.

115 people came searching for “george bush binoculars” or similar, whilst 96 lost people were seeking the “mystery of time and space walkthrough“. However, I’m puzzled how people found my site via search words such as “who want to be a millionare download”, “alicia silverstone outlook stationary” and “ps2 backups tutorials” as, until now, those particular words don’t appear in my blog.

The scary thing is, I had 31 hits from the US Government and 21 from the US military gulp. Windows users accounted for the majority of the requests (316 pages), whilst UNIX/Linux users only accounted for 32 pages (Macs were next with 22 pages).

“Prodded” into action by Neil’s observation that the W3C Validation service now supports a wider range of DTDs and has a slightly-niftier looking interface AND David Brake blogging about the “Xenu’s Link Sleuth” (and, yep, the Xenu is a reference to a certain organisation which claims to be a religion), I’ve decided to just check my blog for validation and links….

Well, after correcting a couple of URLs (mainly escaping the & symbol in them so it was & instead), correcting a couple of minor typos (ww instead of www, onClick instead of onclick) – my blog’s index page now correctly validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I’m working on trying to get it XHTML1.0 Strict though (there seems to be a niggling little fault which I can’t find at the moment), and once that’s done – I’ll try and ensure the other pages validate.

Oh – and I’ve also changed the category names slightly and added an internal webcam. At the moment (until I reboot my PC), both cameras are offline as the software I use for updating has semi-crashed and I don’t really want to reboot over such a minor matter.