Samuel's Blog

Absence of posts

Apoligies for the absence of posts, the last few days have been pretty hectic. Things should return to normal shortly.

Samuel

13 comments August 30th, 2006 at 04:49am

Section 84

Alrighty then, time for an update…I’m not taking the photos of section 84 today as I just don’t feel up to it. Based on my work roster for next week, I will probably have the photograpic tour on Tuesday.

Samuel

August 11th, 2006 at 04:00pm

Blog View Stats for June

Time for the Blog View Stats for June.

The webstat reports and the Persiflage download stats can be found at https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/blogstats/2006/june/

There were 10,046 page views in June, down from 14,259 in May, and 4,083 visitors, down from 4,787 in May.

There were 4,482 views of the front page on all of its URLs.

The most popular articles were:

• Tired
• Unwelcome Behaviour
• Dickson College Protest
• John B1_B5 Adds To The “Voice Of Reason” Confusion and
• Birthday In Review

Google once again remained the most popular search engine with 90.09% of all search engine referrals coming from Google. Yahoo was next with 8.70%, and MSN was next on 0.58%.

The top ten search keywords were:

1. samuel gordon stewart
2. schnappi video
3. Samuel Gordon Stewart
4. samuel gordon-stewart
5. 2ue studio
6. SAMUEL GORDON STEWART
7. samuel gordon
8. samuel stewart
9. dickson college
10. wheel of fortune rob elliot

Among the odd keywords were

• calendar whiteboards
• 2005 2006 email contacts of fuzhou @hotmail.com
• my coffee cup braddon
• why is it neccessary to have outside broadcast production
• samuel gordon stewart meeting
• kryal castle
• citcard reviews
• Kambah Dickson Cook Hall
• early bird worms
• automatic door saturday night live
• 234 802 554 9993
• optusnet mail christmas card 2005
• Samuél Stewart
• male model dreadlocks
• sunfire T2000 blog
• fasha dog spam
• pie graph and sleep deprived
• boys in skivvies
• clive stuart cycles

Internet Explorer gained quite a bit and remained the most popular browser with 67.32% of the readership, Firefox dropped and was next with 25.80%, Safari also dropped to have 5.01%, Opera had a slight drop to 1.49%. Mozilla Suite and Netscape were under 1%, with Konqueror and others under 0.1%.

Windows was the most popular Operating System, and gained a few points, with 89.77% of the readership, followed by Mac, which recorded a large drop, with 8.63%, and Linux which dropped a bit, to be on 1.56%. All others were under 0.10%.

The vast majority of readers were in Australia, althought the number did drop slightly, 82.96% of readers were from the sunburnt Country of sweeping plains. Next was the US with 4.63%, Japan with 3.38% and the UK with 3.26%. The rest of the 69 countires were under 1%.

The most popular files for the month were:

• Mike Frame’s first moments on-air at Bunnings Belconnen in Real Video format, downloaded 123 times.
• Editorial Echoes #8, downloaded 88 times.
• Mike Frame chatting with Bruce Huskings, manager of Bunnings Belconnen, and 2CC’s Bunnings Broadcast, downloaded 84 times.
• Wayne Mac talking about “Don’t Touch That Dial” on 6PR last year, downloaded 84 times.
• Mychat with John Kerr before the 2005 New Day Australia Christmas Cruise, downloaded 81 times.

The top referring sites for the month were:

• The Spin Starts Here: 386 referrals
• The RiotACT: 38 referrals
• GrodsCorp: 14 referrals.
• Brown Noise Unit: 11 referrals.
• Loadedog: 8 Referrals.

Bandwidth
June 2006: 5,900MB
May 2006: 14,680MB
April 2006: 32,130MB
March 2006: 12,350MB
February 2006 9,280MB
January 2006: 14,240MB
December 2005: 14,010MB
November 2005: 2,870MB
October 2005: 657.85MB
September 2005: 519.89MB
August 2005: 82.93MB

Samuel’s Persiflage Statistics

Samuel

2 comments August 4th, 2006 at 12:26pm

Lack of content

Apoligies for the severe lack of content over the last couple of days, I was unwell for the few days before that and as such ran out of pre-written (or almost finished) posts to polish and drop into the schedule…and have since been too tired and busy to update the site very much…I wish I could afford some staff, I would enjoy making this my day job…it would prevent these low content days as well…

Anyway, things should be back to normal within the next day or two.

Samuel

August 3rd, 2006 at 06:19am

Blog View Stats for May

With the end of July fast approaching, it’s as good a time as any to catch up on the backlog of Blog View Stats and other statistical posts. Over the next few days I will catch up on the Blog View Stats and Radio ratings posts, and then, once I have caught up on them, it should be just about time for the next Blog View Stats post.

This post, as the title suggests, contains the stats for the month of May. Towards the end of May I started a new job and subsequently had minimal time to write any posts, let alone the lengthy Blog View Stats, and now as things are settling down, I can bring you these long overdue stats.

The webstat reports and the Persiflage download stats can be found at https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/blogstats/2006/may/

There were 14,259 page views in May, down from 20,002+ in April, and 4,787 visitors, down from 5,476 in April.

There were 5,934 views of the front page on all of its URLs.

The most popular articles were:

• Here’s the Schnappi video
• John B1_B5 Adds To The “Voice Of Reason” Confusion
• Samuel on Insatiable Banalities #45
• Loonie Have Long Memories and
• Email To The Treasurer

Google once again remained the most popular search engine with 93.05% of all search engine referrals coming from Google. Yahoo was next with 5.72%, and MSN was next on 0.88%.

The top ten search keywords were:

1. schnappi video
2. samuel gordon stewart
3. samuel gordon-stewart
4. magic 1278
5. 2ue studio
6. kelly underwood
7. www.samuelgordonstewart.com
8. Schnappi video
9. riotact
10. race caller tony campbell

Among the odd keywords were

• how do you make a good radio jingle
• loudspeakers making
• people dressing up as vegemites
• 203.129.37.
• cats following path of powerlines
• $”Moira Brooker”, “pregnant”$
• australian driving licence tests in the 1940\’s
• mows jcdecaux
• samuel gordon-stewart pineapples
• peep holes melbourne
• american elephant
• Newsli .au
• melbourne cricket ground siren music feature:audio
• strange jewellery
• Sing Hallelujah to the Lord dots
• dockers siren decision diagrams
• extra week in 2006
• TRANSLATION OF 机场建设费
• win television westfield woden feed

Internet Explorer gained slightly and remained the most popular browser with 59.5% of the readership, Firefox also gained and was next with 31.15%, Safari gained again to have 6.91%, Opera had a small rise reaching 1.76%. Netscape and Mozilla Suite were under 1%, with Konqueror & others all being under 0.1%.

Windows was the most popular Operating System, despite a very minor drop, with 84.15% of the readership, followed by Mac, which recorded a gain, with 13.69%, and Linux which more than doubled, to be on 2.08%. All others were under 0.10%.

The vast majority of readers were in Australia, 83.82% of them to be precise. Next was the US with 5.19%, Japan with 4.18%, the UK with 2% and Canada on 1.07%. The rest of the 78 countires were under 1%.

The most popular files for the month were:

• Mike Frame’s first moments on-air at Bunnings Belconnen in Real Video format, downloaded 127 times.
• Mike Frame’s first moments on-air at Bunnings Belconnen in Quicktime format, downloaded 87 times.
• My chat with John Kerr before the 2005 New Day Christmas Cruise, downloaded 85 times.
• My extremely outdated aircheck, downloaded 74 times.
• Mychat with John Kerr on his 64th birthday, downloaded 73 times.

The top referring sites for the month were:

• The Spin Starts Here: 554 referrals
• The RiotACT: 24 referrals
• GrodsCorp: 11 referrals.
• Thin Potations: 9 referrals.
• Loadedog: 5 Referrals.

Bandwidth
May 2006: 14,680MB
April 2006: 32,130MB
March 2006: 12,350MB
February 2006 9,280MB
January 2006: 14,240MB
December 2005: 14,010MB
November 2005: 2,870MB
October 2005: 657.85MB
September 2005: 519.89MB
August 2005: 82.93MB

Samuel’s Persiflage Statistics

Samuel

July 29th, 2006 at 07:10am

Technorati have been busy

The last week has been a busy one for Technorati from my “outsider’s point of view”. Firstly, Technorati are now indexing this blog properly again (it only took about 100 days and two emails), but I forgive them because it all works now, and is even indexing scheduled posts after they appear, which sounds like they’ve either setup periodic RSS feed checking, or are taking notice of post timestamp (if that gets sent in the “ping” when I click “Publish”).

The other day (July 20 to be precise), I received the following email from Janice Myint from Technorati Support

Hello Samuel,

Please accept my sincerest apologies for the delay in getting back to you. We’ve been experiencing a backlog in support and
are working hard to address everyone. I’ve taken a look at the issue regarding picking up your pings for
“samuelgordonstewart.com”. After making a small adjustment, I’ve sent our spiders to revisit your page and your blog has been
indexed with your most recent posts.

http://technorati.com/blogs/samuelgordonstewart.com/

Everything now appears to be working as it should, but please let us know if you experience any problems in the future. Do
not hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions. We apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you for using
Technorati!

Best Regards,
Janice Myint
Customer Support Specialist
Technorati

I’m very pleased about this, and I even replied to Janice’s email to express that sentiment.

Dear Janice,
Thanks for fixing that, I really appreciate you taking the time and effort to do so. I hope you get through the backlog of support tickets soon.

Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart

The other thing that appears to have been keeping the staff at Technorati busy is a redesign of their website and an upgrade of their backend software, as a means of celebrating their third birthday (happy birthday by the way).

The new site is much easier on the eyes, faster, and much easier to use and navigate. Quite a bit of work appears to have gone in to it, and it looks like that effort has paid off.

All in all, a busy and redeeming week for a company I had almost given up hope on.

Well done Technorati!

Samuel

July 25th, 2006 at 03:07pm

Samuel’s Persiflage #6

Samuel’s Persiflage Episode Number Six is now online. There is also a low quality version for the bandwidth impaired here.

HTML Transcript
PDF Transcript

This month’s Persiflage Puzzle has two words of seven and four letters respectively. The clue is “You would be hard pressed to find a shopping centre which doesn’t have at least one of these.”

The episode kicks off with the persiflage puzzle and a retirement message for Margaret Phillips, the (now retired) Director of Digital Archiving at the National Library of Australia, and guest on Samuel’s Persiflage #5.

Then it’s time to chat with Pia Waugh (on our brand new phone system!), one of the organisers of Linux.Conf.Au 2007 to be held in Sydney. Pia joins us via mobile phone from Armidale.

We chat about Linux.Conf.Au, Australia’s premier technical Linux conference, what it has to offer, and the related “open day” for people who just want to find out more about Linux and Open Source Software. We talk about highlights of conferences gone by, and discuss Open Source Software. Naturally enough, a phone rang in the studio during the interview…these fun interuptions are becoming a bad, but amusing, habit I think.

Pia’s recommended Linux distributions:
Ubuntu
Suse
Red Hat/Fedora
Mandriva

The open source applications Pia mentioned:
Open Office (Office Suite for Linux, Mac and Windows)
Mozilla Firefox (Web Browser for Linux, Mac and Windows)

I then reveal a few more letters in the Persiflage Puzzle…hmmm, actually they’re all letters which aren’t in the puzzle. Not to worry, they help too!

Then we go to the Samuel’s Persiflage listener feedback, which features a berating from one listener over one of the odd news stories from the previous episode, a complaint about the old phone system, praise for Margaret Phillips and more.

All listeners are invited to send in more feedback, both in written and audio format. As per usual feedback can be sent to podcast@samuelgordonstewart.com (text, MP3, Wave or Ogg Vorbis), spoken feedback by clicking here or on the button below would be great, or leave a comment below.

Then we have the thought for the month and some more letters from the Persiflage Puzzle.

After this we talk about some of the telephone scams which have been doing the rounds…I was going to Interview somebody from Telstra about them, they asked me to send an email in so that I could speak to the appropriate person, I wrote the email…but I hit “save” rather than “send” and didn’t realise until Friday night…whoops! None the less, we get by quite well and cover some interesting scams and hoaxes.

Under the misapprehension that the episode is running much shorter than usual I play a song which Nattie thinks is great, and then it is time to say goodbye and reveal the answer to the Persiflage Puzzle.

The Samuel’s Persiflage #5 file itself is available here, and is 1:00:41 in length (55.5MB) at 128kbps stereo. The 128kbps format was decided upon because it produces a very good sound quality, and doesn’t “flatten” any music used in the podcast. (You’ve heard it all before, right?) I do, however, acknowledge that this is just unreasonable for dial-up, so a 16kbps mono file is also available here. The sound quality isn’t as good, but some people like it. The low quality version is 6.94MB

For those of you who are using podcast software to receive your podcasts, the feed can be found here and if you are using iTunes you can subscribe to Samuel’s Persiflage by clicking here.

Podcast related questions and comments can be sent to podcast@samuelgordonstewart.com or left in the comments section of this post. Spoken feedback is preferred (but not mandated) and can be sent either in MP3, Wave or Ogg Vorbis format, or sent even more easily by clicking the button below and following the prompts.

Samuel

July 23rd, 2006 at 02:55am

More Emails

Serial detractor Sam Granleese (we previously met Sam here) has sent in an email titled “Good News”

Hi Samuel,

I wrote to you a few months ago declaring your website to be the most trite piece of word-vomit on the known internet.

Upon returning, it is good to see that nothing has changed. You are still trying to lose your virginity by going to www.tammin.com, you are still a freak and you still have nothing interesting to say about anything.

Congratulations!

Sam

I decided, with some trepedation, to visit the website he mentioned so that I could work out what he was going on about…it turned out to be the website of some singer I’ve never heard of before. I still can’t work out what he is going on about…I don’t find her in the least bit attractive.

On the bright side, it would appear that Sam is still wasting his time reading websites of people he doesn’t like, and making sure that they know about it…either that or he secretly finds this site so interesting and entertaining that he has to make sure he gets to take part in the fun and excitement…I’ll let you decide.

Next email is from “bob759” (sorry for bundling you into the same post as Sam Granleese) who writes

You said “I (generally) can’t check the website, or update it, from work”, does that mean you had the day off yesterday as you updated the blog many times

No Bob, I scheduled the posts to appear throughout the day…that is my standard practice for all but the most urgent posts as it keeps the site “ticking over” and means I don’t post five things at once, which effectively buries most of the posts for the majority of readers who don’t often venture past the first post. For the record, the majority of those posts were written in the wee hours of Friday morning, with one written earlier in the week.

Samuel

4 comments July 16th, 2006 at 08:25am

Website Downtime

There may have been an extended website outage this morning from 9:25am to 10:55am Canberra time (11:25pm Friday – 12:55am Saturday GMT) due to a major power outage in Orem, Utah where this website is hosted. At this stage I’m not sure whether this website was completely down, intermittently down or not down at all, but I do know that about half of the Bluehost servers were down.

Bluehost CEO Matt Heaton wrote to customers a short while ago:

This evening (July 14th) from about 5:25pm-6:55pm many of our servers were offline causing significant downtime for many of our users. The outage was due to a severe power outage in the north end of Orem, Utah where our servers are located. We do have UPS backup as well as diesel generators, but at about 5:30 they finally gave out. The power outage
was for much longer than that period of time, but the reserve power was eventually consumed in its entirety. When it rains it pours.

The Bluehost Forums elaborated a bit, saying that the cooling systems in one of Bluehost’s buildings failed during the power outage, and naturally you can’t run a room full of servers in a rapidly heating room and expect them to continue working.

I suppose that I could look through the logs and work out if this website was one of the severely affected websites or not, but it doesn’t really worry me all that much. Based on statements by Bluehost support people on the Bluehost forums, and the one which follows from Matt Heaton’s email to customers, it would appear that Bluehosy have learnt from the incident and are in the process of improving the contingency systems.

The downtime is extremely regretable. We apologize profusely for the inconvenience to our customers and in turn to those who were trying to visit your sites during the outage. With the fixes we have put in place in the last few days coupled with other upgrades you should experience MUCH better uptime in the future.

Thanks for you patience,

Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com

These things will happen, and in my experience Bluehost is much better than many other hosting providers out there. I trust that they did all they could to keep the hosted websites up and running whilst ensuring the safety of the servers, and that they will learn from the experience.

Samuel

2 comments July 15th, 2006 at 08:54pm

Your Questions, My Answers

By now I suspect that most of you have noticed that I have been absent from this site almost all week…a number of you have emailed me about that as well, and I haven’t quite got around to answering all the emails yet, but please do keep them coming.

To summarise the common questions and answers, yes I’ve been away from the site, no I haven’t left the Internet, no you may not take over the website (you know who you are…), yes I do have a good reason for not being here, no it will not continue during your vacation next week (again, you know who you are), and yes I’m very glad you’ve enjoyed reading the archives.

I will elaborate on the reasons why I haven’t been here much lately. Firstly, work is keeping me as busy as ever and I (generally) can’t check the website, or update it, from work…that is no excuse though. The main reason behind my absence is that I have recently been suffering from back and shoulder pain which has, at times, rendered sitting an impossible task…I have had some treatment for this, and will have some more, some adjustments have been made to some seating and sleeping arrangments and I am now, for the most part, feeling much better. Unfortunately though, the entire incident has cost me a lot of sleep, and I have been unwittingly catching up on the lost sleep.

So now I’m back, my sleep cycle is cactus for the moment, but that gives me an opportunity to get to work on keeping the site up to date whilst I mend my sleep cycle.

Another question that people continue to ask is if there will be any more episodes of Samuel’s Persiflage. I can assure you that there will be, the next episode is in planning at the moment and is expected online by the 20th. I have had a potential guest pull out for the moment due to his own work commitments, but he will probably appear in a future episode…right now I’m concentrating on securing guests for this month’s episode.

There have been a couple emails about the lack of photos of late. Regular readers may recall that my camera developed a nasty “black semi-circle in certain corners” fault, the camera has recently been sent off for repairs and should be back soon…which is just as well as I have a few things I would like to take photos of.

I continue to receive emails about various upcoming (and overdue) posts, including Blog View Stats, Canberra radio ratings, ACTION changes, etc…they’re coming, please be patient.

I would like to thank everybody for their emails, I should reply to most, if not all, of them within the next 48 hours.

Samuel

July 14th, 2006 at 08:37am

Unwelcome Behaviour

Most of what you see below was originally posted in a comment on this post, however most people don’t read the comments, and this is all very important in shaping the future of this website, so I’m repeating it here.

Heatseeker said:

I don’t know … I think this blog is losing its way – this time last year we would have had photographs of Samuel and Nattie with the cake, the plates of food, a stepometer report and a special birthday tribute photograph of that Nice Garden in Reid in all its winter glory, perhaps with a can of Black and Gold Pineappple Pieces thrown in.

I think it’s ironic that the song of the week is Power to the People when legions of loyal fans who log in here hourly to get vivid imagery of Samuel’s enthralling adventures are essentially being let down.

That is important as my comment led off from that.

I said:

Heatseeker, you weren’t even here at this time last year. You are correct that the type and frequency of posts has changed, but so have I, and so have my circumstances. I had much more spare time in June last year. Right now about the only spare time I have is at night, and that means less posts here.

In many ways I wish that The Spin Starts Here had never linked to me, I was quite happy with a limited number of page views, especially seeing as most of the people who left comments had something constructive to say. Lately I’ve been seeing the same old stuff regurgitated over and over and over…spatchcocks, nice garden in reid, silly infintile jokes. Johnboy might enjoy that stuff appearing here, but I’m sick of it. I have better things to do with my time than deal with that nonsense, and I would suggest that the people (or as I suspect, the person) responsible for the nonsense also have better things to do with their time.

I’ve been considering this issue for a few weeks now, with multiple options considered, including the possibility of just disappearing from the Internet. As it happens I have decided on the more sensible idea of deleting accounts of people who drive me up the wall.

It may seem harsh, but it’s my website, and if you don’t like it…tough.

(Somebody is bound to bring up my previous statements about freedom of speech. Unfortunately some people are too immature to moderate themselves. I’m tired of moderating them, if they want to act like idots they can go and find somewhere else to do it).

I’m really getting de ja vu over this, but enough is enough. The people I banned a while back are reappearing, and being very clever and deceptive about it. It’s hard to imagine why people go the trouble of using open proxies to leave silly remarks here day after day after day after day, but they do, and as I said, I’m sick of it.

I’ve already deleted a few accounts, and I will delete more if I have to.

Samuel

5 comments June 6th, 2006 at 10:57pm

Scheduled Posts No Longer Appear in “Most Recent Posts”

I have finally gotten around to fixing the problem with the “Most Recent Posts” list on the “single post and comments” pages, where posts scheduled for the future would appear in the list, and clicking on the link to them would give you a “404 page not found” error.

Here is what the list looked like on Saturday night before the change.

Here is what it looked like after the change.

Notice that a bunch of posts are no longer listed…those posts were, at time of the pictures, scheduled for the future.

The problem was caused by an oversight in the “Blix” theme coded by Sebastian Schmieg where he didn’t take into account WordPress’ ability to schedule posts. You see, to schedule a post you have to specify a time in the future for it to appear and then click “Publish” once you are happy with the post.

This changes the post’s status from “draft” to “published” in the database, which means that WordPress may show it to you on the blog.

The WordPress dashboard shows a list of recent posts and scheduled posts

This is acheived through code which checks the timestamp of the posts with the current time…much like the blog pages do. Here is the code for the recent posts:

And here is the code for the scheduled posts:

If you look carefully you will notice that the main difference (other than adding time until post appears to the scheduled posts) is that the “recent posts” section looks for timestamps “< " (less than) the current time, whilst the "scheduled posts" section looks for timestamps ">” (greater than) the current time.

The “variable” $today is defined near the top of this particular PHP script (multiple PHP scripts make up most pages both on the admin interface of WordPress, and on the public blog side of things).

So here is the code for the “Most Recent Posts” section of the sidebar, I have highlighted the code which I added from the “dashboard”.

Samuel.

2 comments May 20th, 2006 at 11:49pm

A Whole Lot Of Spam Comments

Praise the lord for spam filters!

In the last few hours, one of those unscrupulous spambots bombarded this blog with 415 spam comments about hotels, credit card rates and mortgages amongst other things.

The first comment came in a few hours ago and hit the moderation queue (technically it was misuse of the “trackback” feature found on most blogs, and I have all trackbacks and pingbacks set to hit the moderation queue, as they tend to just be notifications that other websites are linking here), and since then, the nearly 400 bits of spam have been picked up by the spam filter.

All of the comments contained a bit of bold text outlining what the link was about (eg. “Free Credit Cards”), and then some raondom gibberish text to try and fool the spam filter into thinking it is a legitimate comment (eg. “chestnuts Donovan subscribing gleamed.clattered punished anthems scroll”), followed by some more text which explains the link (eg. “Amercan Express”), followed by a link to one of their many websites.

The spam attack is still going, and I have just received my second email telling me that a comment has hit the moderation queue, with the comment being a spam comment that hasn’t been picked up by the spam filter. This time around Gmail decided that the email was spam, although I have corrected it.

A few weeks ago I was thinking about finding a way for the spam filter to email me when spam comments get caught, as it was catching legitimate comments, but now I’m glad it doesn’t notify me, as having Gmail’s spam filters start declaring that my website is spamming me with emails containing spam comments would be really annoying.

If you’ve posted a comment in the last few hours and it hasn’t appeared, could you send me an email so that I can track it down and make it appear. I’d rather not delve into the spam filter list if I can avoid it, but if it has falsely recognised legitimate comments as spam, then I would like to know so that I can inform it, and therefore improve the adpative spam filtering rules.

Incidentally, one of the really exciting things about this spam filter is that it is built in to WordPress 2.x, which means that almost every installation of WordPress is using it, and by making use of some central resources, it is a mass adaptive spam filter. So if one website gets spam, the others can learn from that and block that spam when the spambot hits them, and even learn what tricks spambots are attempting to use, and block them as well.

This is similar to what Gmail does, just Gmail does it with the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Gmail users, and therefore has millions, and possibly billions of emails to learn from each day. For the record, I have received 1165 spam emails in the last 30 days, with all but two (from memory) being correctly identified as spam by the Gmail spam filters.

1 comment May 20th, 2006 at 12:53am

I’m Still Standing…

You could be forgiven for thinking that I’ve disappeared, but I’ve just been so busy over the last few days with Samuel’s Persiflage and other things that I just haven’t found time to write anything (I didn’t even hear any of John Kerr on the weekend!).

The good news is that I’m still here (or still standing if you believe certain songs), and I’m currently working on Samuel’s Persiflage, which willbe online later today.

Samuel

May 16th, 2006 at 02:58pm

Blog View Stats for April

May has “only just begun”, to quote a famous song, which means it is time for the Blog View Stats for April.

The Webstat counter stopped counting due to the site receiving more than 20,000 page views for the month, but the Webstat reports for April can be found here, I just haven’t used them as the basis for this post. I have used AwStats (one of the many statistics services provided by my hosting provider) as the basis of most of the stats.

AwStats says that there were 55,916 page views for the month, a figure which I find highly dubious as this is far more than three times what Webstat reported for March. Even taking into account the fact that Awstats counts page views in the administration section of the site, I still find this number dubious, so I will settle on the 20,002+ figure provided by Webstat. The rest of the numbers provided by AwStats seem OK.

Therefore there were 20,002+ page views in March, up from 15,478 in March, and 5,476 visitors, up from 4,710 in March.

There were 9,670 views of the front page on all of its URLs.

The most popular articles were:

• Caz Stops Blogging
• No, I Am Not Going On Big Brother
• The Proof Is In The Pudding
• John B1_B5 Leads The 2CC Drive Show Spelling Competition and
• Samuel’s Blog Year In Review: November 2005

Google once again remained the most popular search engine with 91.8% of all search engine referrals coming from Google. Yahoo was next with 3%, and MSN was next on 1.6%.

The search keywords were mostly various combinations and misspellings of my name, and variations of “schnappi video”, “2UE Studio” and “Windiz Update”. Among the odd keywords were

• peep holes
• bango cricket
• 234 802 554 9993
• singing hallelujah even for a new site for you my
• samuel office live
• south australian peep holes
• traudle junge
• 100m race footage
• hole under canberra?
• sam goat boy
• blog fire alarm control panel
• show me the child at seven
• salad au lard
• password codes for volume 2ue
• convoluted answer to 2 2
• loopy music programme

Internet Explorer recorded a larger than usual drop, but remained the most popular browser with 57.4% of the readership, Firefox also had a loss (albeit a small one) and was next with 29.2%, Safari gained again to have 5.1%, Opera also recorded a rise reaching 1.4%, as did the Mozilla Suite which hit 1%. Konqueror & Netscape were both under 1% with the others all being under 0.1%.

Windows was the most popular Operating System, despite a minor drop, with 84.2% of the readership, followed by Mac, which also recorded a drop, with 9%, and Linux which climbed to 1%. The BSDs, Solaris and even OS/2 picked up most of the slack.

The countries report is unavailable this month.

The most popular files for the month were:

• The happy birthday music, downloaded 118 times.
• My conversation with John Kerr prior to the christmas cruise, downloaded 115 times.
• My somewhat outdated aircheck, downloaded 112 times.
• Mike Frame’s first moments on-air at Bunnings Belconnen in Real Player video format, downloaded 107 times.
• Theoriginal intro to Samuel’s Persiflage, downloaded 94 times.

The top referring sites for the month were:

• The Spin Starts Here: 2208 referrals
• Behind Big Brother Forums: 284 referrals
• GrodsCorp: 153 referrals.
• The RiotACT: 145 referrals.
• In My Shoes: 46 Referrals.

Bandwidth
April 2006: 32,130MB
March 2006: 12,350MB
February 2006 9,280MB
January 2006: 14,240MB
December 2005: 14,010MB
November 2005: 2,870MB
October 2005: 657.85MB
September 2005: 519.89MB
August 2005: 82.93MB

Samuel’s Persiflage Statistics

Samuel

5 comments May 3rd, 2006 at 06:56am