Monthly Archives: January 2011

How To Kill Paper Wasps

Humour, Life

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had several encounters with paper wasps and had varying levels of success in attempting to kill paper wasps as well.

In the last couple of weeks, there have been four different sets of paper wasp nests forming around the house. Two of the four were in really inconvenient places, such as above the back sliding door near the laundry and in the joint of our clothes line.

On the weekend, it seems like as good a time as any to try my hand at killing the paper wasps again. Last time I attempted it, I was armed with a can of Mortein and I can assure you, when I sprayed their nests – they were very unhappy.

Wanting to see if I could one up the paper wasps this time, I was armed with a can of Baygon Surface Spray and WK-40. You’re probably wondering what WK-40 is; well it is your garden variety WD-40, the spray lubricant with a thousand uses with an awesome new label provided by Andrew for my 27th birthday. The WK-40 was the key in avoiding getting bitten this time, as with the thin nozzle connected you can spray a tight stream of WK-40 for over 2 metres – great for distancing yourself from angry as hell paper wasps!

With a can in either hand & feeling a little like Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters, I walked up as close to their nests as I dared and coated them & promptly ran away as the wasps swarmed the area looking for something to string! As it turns out, WK-40 and Baygon Surface Spray is a lethal concoction with great knockdown power.

In each of the four paper wasp nests, I came out on top without getting bitten once. I’m sure WD-40 didn’t have killing paper wasps on their list of 1000+ things that their fantastic lubricant is good for!

2010 Traffic Statistics

Blogging, Websites

Following on from my 2009 web statistics, below is a summary of what traffic the site took in 2009.

In 2009 the site took 106,930 visitors over the entire year which resulted in 136,525 pageviews. During 2010, the site generated 97,509 visits and 132,068 pageviews. That figure is down from my two biggest years of approximately 145,000 and 135,000 during 2007 and 2008 when I was posting less frequently but the posts were of a more technical nature and also pop culture related such as Australian Idol. It’ll come as no surprise that from a traffic driving potential, a lot fewer people are interested in reading about my personal ramblings compared to technical style posts that I used to post.

During 2008 and 2009, I wrote a couple of posts each year that grabbed a moderate amount of traffic and were clear standouts with respect to the number of pageviews. During 2010, none of my posts really caught the attention of the internet; which per above can be attributed to the topics that I’m writing about.

The traffic breakdown by source shows a considerable decrease in the reliance of search engines, with their traffic percentage falling from around 85% in 2008-2009 down to only 74% in 2010. Within the search engine space, Google are completely dominating with 94% of the search engine traffic. During 2009, Yahoo! were the first non-Google search engine with about 2.5% & Microsoft Bing was the new kid on the block. Fast forward a year and the tides have turned with Bing now accounting for 2.6% and Yahoo! 2.4% of the search engine traffic.

The most popular posts for the year were nearly identical to 2009, with four of five remaining and one newcomer:

  1. Disable Options In A Select Dropdown Element
  2. Select Option Disabled & The JavaScript Solution
  3. Oracle RETURNING Clause
  4. ORA-04030: out of process memory when trying to allocate <x> bytes
  5. Making HP Laserjet Printers Work In Windows Vista

Removing those posts from the top of the list since they clearly dominate:

  1. ORA-06552: PL/SQL: Compilation Unit Analysis Terminated
  2. HP Laserjet & Windows Vista Driver Support
  3. Oracle Dynamic SQL Using The DECODE Function
  4. ASP Error ‘ASP 0104: 80004005?
  5. State of Origin 2006

It is probably worth noting that nine out of ten of the highest traffic web pages on my site are not about anything to do with myself or our family but are in fact to do with helping others. This makes a lot of sense, especially when you see the meteoric traffic growth question and answer sites Stack Overflow and Quora have seen in the last two years.

That being said, still nothing from 2010 were showing up in the list. Isolating the posts written in 2010 and the landscape is vastly different:

  1. Doodle 4 Google Winner On Display
  2. 4 Car Motor Vehicle Accident
  3. Medibank International Sydney Winner
  4. Ford Falcon XR6
  5. Mantra Group Wins Circle on Cavill Trade Mark Court Case

Onward and upward for 2011!

2010 Blogging Statistics

Blogging

At the end of last year, I posted the 2009 blogging statistics for my site including the previous years. In keeping with that trend, below is the amended table which now includes 2010 as well.

POSTS AVG. POST LENGTH TOTAL POST LENGTH COMMENTS AVG. COMMENTS
2004 1 478 487 0 0.0
2005 82 1949 159835 511 12.7
2006 103 1837 189259 865 4.5
2007 127 1977 251150 229 1.0
2008 68 1597 108623 78 0.6
2009 77 2114 162804 104 0.8
2010 81 2147 173969 105 1.0

I still didn’t manage to reach my peak of 2007 in the total number of posts, I’m happy that I’ve managed to increase it slightly over last  year. In 2009, I said I was going to try and post between 7-8 times per month but I only managed a shade under 7. I’m going up the ante slightly, 8 or more per month and try and break through the 100 per year barrier again. To do that, I think I’ll be writing about a different topics and throwing up cute photos of the kids more regularly.

For those that are interested in doing the same, I’ve made the blogging statistics SQL script available for you to use.