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Richy's Random Ramblings

Blogging: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

October 2, 2007
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Ok, no lies, but last months blogging stats.

I currently have 763 posts (14 during September) and 2,410 comments (only 8 of those during September) with 436,819 spam comments caught by Akismet (a further 70,298 were caught by Spam Karma before that) since my last install.

Since I seem to have conflicting information from my stats systems, I’ll put the data in a table:

Item/Source Google
Analytics		 AwStats Webalizer
Unique Visitors 3,287 6,785 10,799 -“Total Unique Sites”
Visits 3,424 46,744 73,298
Page Views 4,426 81,673 125,511
Average pageviews 1.29 6.88 n/a
Bandwidth usage n/a 2.45Gb 2.67Gb

And now for the top 5 visitor locations – it’s amazing that the 3 different stats programs gave different top 5 results: 9 different countries were in the top five:

Item/Source Google
Analytics		 AwStats Webalizer
Visitors UK 2. 32.56% visits 4. 2121 pages 3. 0.68% hits
  US 1. 43.08% visits 1. 47,195 pages 2. 3.34% hits
  Canada 3. 3.68% visits 5. 1415 pages 11. 0.02% hits
  Australia 4. 2.75% visits 6. 1004 pages 9. 0.08% hits
  Germany 5. 1.55% visits 9. 673 pages 16. 0.01% hits
  India 6. 1.08% visits 21.93 pages  
  Sweden 10. 0.58% visits 3. 11,201 pages 4. 0.51% hits
  Unknown 38. 0.15% visits 2. 12,654 pages 1. 94.48% hits
  Mexico 37. 0.18% visits 37.11 pages 5. 0.23% hits

But what browsers do my visitors use? I’m a bit disappointed not to see ArcWeb or Fresco in this list:

Item/Source Google
Analytics		 AwStats Webalizer
Internet Explorer 69.86% – 2,392 visits 33% – 43,760 hits  
  9.0 0.04% – 1 visit 0% – 15 hits  
  7.0 37.54% – 898 visits 13.5% – 17,871 hits  
  6.0 61.87% – 1,480 visits 19% – 25,276 hits  
  5.5 0.29% – 7 visits 0.1% – 164 hits  
Firefox 24.53% – 840 visits 20.2% – 26,756 hits  
  2.0.0.7 26.31% – 221 visits 2.4% – 3,248 hits  
  2.0.0.6 58.10% – 488 visits 6.5% – 8,608 hits  
  1.5.0.12 2.98% – 25 visits 0.3% – 451 hits  
  2.0.0.4 2.14% – 18 visits 0.1% – 245 hits  
Safari 2.69% – 92 visits 1.3% – 1,724 hits  
Opera 1.34% – 46 visits 0.6% – 845  
Mozilla 0.96% – 33 visits 1.1% – 1,503 hits  
Netscape 0.23% – 8 visits 0.2% – 363 hits  
Camino 0.15% – 5 visits 0% – 89 hits  
Konqueror 0.12% – 4 visits 0% – 66 hits  
Playstation 3 0.03% – 1 visit n/a  
Sony Ericsson 0.03% – 1 visit 13 hits  

I think that’s enough stats for now.

Blog: Now With Speech

September 30, 2007
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You may notice the new “Listen” option on the blog entries – this is because I’ve just signed up with Talkr which converts (via a computer) my blog entries to audio so you can now listen to my blog on your iPod or similar if you wanted to.

Listen to ANY blog

Talkr: Letting blogs speak for themselves.

Hope it comes in handy!

Sorry for not blogging much

September 30, 2007
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Meh – sorry my blogging rate has decreased quite dramatically the last two weeks: a combination of workload, tiredness and problems with the Mozilla Firefox browser have prevented me from blogging when I wanted to.

What problem with Firefox? Well, I rebooted and then Firefox wouldn’t stay open for more than 2 pages at a time without crashing (sometimes it wouldn’t even load without crashing). Tried loading Firefox in safe mode (with extensions disabled) and same problem. So how did I fix it? Basically, I somehow managed to track it down to an update with Real Player pushed out via Google Updater which had a dodgy Firefox/RealPlayer integration which caused Firefox to die. Uninstall Real Player and it worked perfectly.

Only problem I have had to date with Google Updater though.

TV: Adverts Per Hour

September 15, 2007
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My other half has got me watching Ugly Betty, but so that I can catch up with the episodes I’ve been watching pre-recorded episodes. I’ve just finished watching Episode 7 which according to the DVD player was 42 minutes long: however, the same episode on the UK TV schedules with advertisements takes up a 55 minute slot – that’s 13 minutes of advertisements!

It’s only a bit better then the US version where the show takes up a 60 minute broadcast slot – providing 18 minutes of adverts: that’s more than a quarter of the “show time” being ads.

This is one reason why I like the BBC (no adverts) and pre-recorded shows.

It’ll be interesting to find out advertisement lengths per hour in other countries…

Puzzle: Who Owns The Fish

September 13, 2007
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We were recently given the following puzzle at work (for some unknown reason) and were told the record for solving it as far as our boss knew was 4 hours – some people have spent days and months over it and some people aren’t able to solve it at all! I managed around 2.5 hours 😀

Allegedly set by Albert Einstein who said the 98% of the world could not solve it, you’ve just to got simply work out who owns the pet fish.

The following facts are known:

  • There are 5 houses in 5 different colours (Red, White, Green, Blue and Yellow)
  • In each house lives a man with a different nationality (British, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and German)
  • Each man (who owns the house) drinks a certain type of beverage (Tea, Coffee, Water, Milk and Beer), smokes a certain brand of cigar (Pall Mall, Dunhill, Blends, Bluemasters and Prince) and keeps a certain pet (Dogs, Cats, Fish, Horses and Birds)
  • No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same beverage
  • All the houses are on the same side of the street and the first house is on the left hand side. References to the “neighbour” refers only to a directly adjacent neighbour.

You also know the following “hints” or clues:

  1. The British man lives in the red house
  2. The Swedish man keeps dogs as pets
  3. The Danish man drinks tea
  4. The green house is on the left of the white house
  5. The green house’s owner drinks coffee
  6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds
  7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill
  8. The man living in the centre house drinks milk
  9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
  10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats
  11. The man who keeps the horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill
  12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer
  13. The German smokes Prince
  14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house
  15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbour who drinks water