Monthly Archives: February 2009

2007 Traffic Statistics

February 25, 2009Blogging, WebsitesAlistair Lattimore

Following on from my 2006 web statistics, below is a summary of what the site saw in 2007.

I was pretty happy in 2006 to see approximately 95,000 visitors come through the site in six months however in 2007 I wasn’t able to sustain that level of traffic. By the end of the year the site was visited 146,075 times which resulted in 206,898 pageviews.

The breakdown of traffic sources over 2007 still highlights the complete dominance that Google held in web search. However, unlike in 2006 where the first non-Google search product came in at 11th position – Yahoo! made a showing at position five. It’d be nice to think that meant that Yahoo! was actually competing against Google but when they are sending this site less than 2% of Google web search – it feels like a one horse race.

The most popular posts for the year looks similar to 2006, however with a few newcomers:

I wonder what posts will make it into the top list in 2008, I think we’ll see some familiar faces since there are already repeat offenders from 2006.

Reckless

February 23, 2009GeneralAlistair Lattimore

During our weekend away in Chinchilla, we had a late night encounter with a beavan in a ute. For whatever reason, he or she decided that the intersection in front of the home we were staying was the perfect location to lay a considerable amount of rubber.

The person driving the ute let his excitement get the better of him in my opinion. The first two circles on the intersection were great, neat and in control but the third one got lose and the back of the ute came very close to the power pole. Not letting that phrase the driver, maybe he didn’t realise just how close he was, it continued for another couple until he hit the brakes in a hurry and pulled up less than 2 metres from a parked car on the side of the road.

Anyone that knows me will attest to the fact that I love virtually anything with an engine, especially if it goes fast. You have to wonder though, Chinchilla is a small town – it’d have taken the driver 60 seconds from that intersection to get to somewhere that that had ample breathing room.

Instead they chose that intersection, nearly hitting a power pole and a parked car – numpty.

Good Times

February 23, 2009FamilyAlistair Lattimore

On Friday, Claire, Hugo and I made our way out to Chinchilla for a bit of a break.

We drove out and back using the same schedule that we did at Christmas and we had the same non-screaming success. The drive out was great, leaving on a Friday morning meant that there was pretty much no traffic on the roads all the way out to Chinchilla. On the way home, we thought we would have been sandwiched in the traffic because of the Melon Festival but we must have left early enough and completely missed it. The drive from the Gold Coast to Chinchilla is approximately 350Km in each direction and due to the roads we’re travelling on – we normally see a solid police presence. On the way out, we didn’t see any police and then five vehicles in a matter of minutes and then nothing until we got to Chinchilla and on the way home, none at all – which was very strange.

While we were in Chinchilla, we stayed with Claire’s parents and Grandmother and got to chat and catch up. When we’re next in Chinchilla, we’ll rotate over to my parents place and do the same – it’s so great having both our families in so close to one another now!

The Chinchilla Melon Festival was also on, which we made our way down to. We’ve been to it numerous times before and it is normally a whole bunch of fun to watch all of the crazy activities like seed spitting, melon skiing, melon bungy, melon splitting world record and many more. By the time we’d looked after Hugo in the morning and made it down the street it was a little after 11:00AM so we unfortunately missed the parade. We had intentions of staying down in the town centre for an hour or two and take in the festivities but with the heat, Hugo and a crazy amount of people about – it wasn’t all that practical. In the end, we turned the outing into a small shopping expedition and picked up some food items from the local grocery shop.

Saturday afternoon we made our way around to see Cam, Tina and the kids and Phil and Tammi were also there was was great. Not too long after we arrived, a whole swag of other family friends turned up and we had a drink and a bit of a chin wag. The intention was to go over for an hour or so as we had to feed Hugo but we were having a bunch of fun, Hugo was in good spirits and was getting oodles of hugs from everyone so we stuck around a bit longer and plodded home later on.

Not sure when our next trip out to Chinchilla will be but it’ll be great to see everyone again when we do.

Robina Squash Club Finals

February 18, 2009SportAlistair Lattimore

Last week I mentioned that our team was successful in their semi-final campaign and made it into the finals.

My finals match was against a young Scottish doctor that I first mentioned back toward the end of 2007 after I jotted down some squash strategies following our first encounter. Coincidentally, he is also one of the opponents I mentioned in my semi-final post that I had lost to in a recent string of poor performances. If I was to stand any chance of winning the match, I really needed to bring the form from my semi-final match back onto the court.

A couple things I noticed I wasn’t doing in my semi-final was boasting enough and I was frustrated with my lob. This evening, while I still didn’t boast as much as normal – I certainly added more of that back to my game. However the point I’m most pleased with myself about tonight are the lobs, I think I hit more lobs tonight than I have in any other game and with the exception of a handful – they were all on the money. The side effect of a good lob is that it gives me a chance to recover court position, forces your opponent to run back to cover the ball and if the lob is well positioned, also limits the return heavily.

I think that I played at least as well as I did in the semi-final against Steve, however tonight it wasn’t quite enough. We were both moving around on the court so much that by half way through the fourth game I was hurting, a lot. The game score was 2-1 in favour of my opponent and I was up on points in the fourth – poised to draw the match but it wasn’t to be. I lost my serve and that was the tipping point – I lost five points in a row and the fourth game. While the game score was 1-3 against me, I’m happy with my performance tonight as I know that I lost the match as opposed to him winning all of it. What has become quite clear, if I want to move up to B grade the season after next – I absolutely must improve my aerobic fitness.

Despite my loss tonight, our team absolutely hammered our opponents – yielding only 5 games in total! In my time with the Robina Squash Club, teams I’ve played in have made it through to the semi-finals twice but never into the finals. It was a great feeling tonight, not only to be in the finals for the first time but also to win the squash season!

If you’d like to join the club for learn, fun or fitness – get in touch:

Robina Squash Club
University Drive
Robina QLD, 4226
0427 627 229

2006 Traffic Statistics

February 14, 2009Blogging, WebsitesAlistair Lattimore

At the end of 2008, I mentioned that I was going to publish some of this sites web statistics. It took a little longer to find the energy and time to put it together and without further ado, my web statistics for 2006.

I only installed Google Analytics on the site half way through July 2006. I was happy to see my traffic going up at that point, until I found out the hard way that being popular online has a cost associated to it. Over the roughly half year reporting period, 95010 visitors came to the site which resulted in 139687 pageviews.

The breakdown of the different traffic sources to the site over that window paints quite a scary picture of the search engine competitiveness, even back in 2006:

As you can see, the first non-Google search engine comes in at position 11 and they are delivering about 3% of the traffic of Google web search. If I include all Google sources, such as Google Image Search – the Google network of sites is providing a whopping 89% of all traffic to the site.

The most popular posts for the year were:

What do your web statistics look like?