All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

2009 Traffic Statistics

Blogging, Websites

Following on from my 2008 web statistics, below is a summary of what traffic the site took in 2009.

In 2006 the site took about 95,000 visitors, increasing to 145,000 and declining to 135,000 respectively in 2007 and 2008. In 2009 the site took 106,930 visitors over the entire year which resulted in 136,525 pageviews. 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.

While last year saw a couple posts catch a moderate amount of attention and punch through the metronomic rise and fall in traffic each day, in 2009 none of my posts really got any traction within the greater internet. Not surprisingly traffic did start to decline towards the end of the year, however I’m happy that it wasn’t obliterated like it was last year when I moved web servers within the same host.

The traffic breakdown, just like in 2008  shows the complete dominance that Google has within the web search market. Yahoo! are still the first non-Google search engine and is still delivering approximately 2.5% of the traffic the they were in 2008. The latest addition to the web search ecosystem is Microsoft’s Bing, which sits at position five. Of course, that isn’t a fair comparison since they haven’t been around for the entire year. If you count Bing, Live and MSN together they drove about 1750 visits for the year putting them in at fourth however by the end of May 2010 I expect Bing to have delivered 2000 visits – narrowing the gap against Yahoo!.

The most popular posts for the year were similar to 2006, 2007 and 2008 but with a few newcomers:

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

Removing those posts from the top of the list since they clearly dominate, changes things a little:

  1. Making HP Laserjet Printers Work In Windows Vista
  2. Oracle Dynamic SQL Using The DECODE Function
  3. ASP Error ‘ASP 0104: 80004005?
  4. ORA-06552: PL/SQL: Compilation Unit Analysis Terminated
  5. Australian Idol 2006 Contestants: The Real Contenders

However still none from 2009 were showing up in the list. Isolating the posts written in 2009 and the landscape is vastly different:

  1. Apple iTunes Store Account Signup Process Needs Work
  2. Windows Vista Business Double Clicking On Single Click
  3. Best Home Phone Plan & Telstra
  4. Apple iTunes Account Verification Has Poor Usability & User Experience
  5. Gold Coast Beach Weddings Are Spectacular

I find it telling that my two gripes about the quality of the Applie iTunes account sign up process are within the list. You’d assume a company with a market capitalisation of nearly USD$200 billion would have such a visible component of their business highly polished but it just goes to show everyone has their problems. Having a home phone plan comparison post residing at position three is just more evidence that the consumer is becoming more savvy by researching online, even when purchasing offline.

Onward and upward for 2010!

Danger, No Break Lights

General, Travel, Work

Earlier in the year I came very close to having an accident when the car in front of me had his break lights reversed. This meant that breaking turned off his tail lights – thus making red lights meaning go, no lights meaning stop. This afternoon on the way home, in a very very similar stretch of road I nearly came unstuck as the minivan in front of me had no break lights whatsoever.

I was heading west on Smith Street, approaching the intersection and traffic lights of Kumbari Avenue and was increasing speed heading down the hill. The lights had been green for a little while so the dozen or so cars in front of me were all accelerating, due to the decline, green light pressure and the faster speed zone on the other side of the lights. With less than 50 metres before we cleared the intersection, the car in front of me decided to break suddenly as soon as the light went amber – when the car to his left and four more went through on the orange.

Had at least one of the minivan’s break lights been working, I would have slowed down with plenty of time to spare. However, it took another fraction of a second before I closed enough distance to realise he was breaking and aggressively.

Fortunately, I allow a little more breaking distance when driving my Ford Telstar; which has a striking similarity to a small tank and even smaller breaks!

2009 Blogging Statistics

Blogging

At the end of last year, I posted the 2008 blogging statistics for my site including the previous years. In keeping with that trend, below is the amended table which now includes 2009 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

While I haven’t managed to get back to 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 2010, I’m going to try and increase it again to between seven and eight posts per month. While that doesn’t seem like that many, it can be difficult to write at least one post every four days – I challenge you to try it yourself.

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

29th Birthday

Family, Life

It is that time of the year again, I’m now officially 29 years of age!

I woke up this morning slightly bleary eyed to Claire and Hugo wishing me a happy birthday which is fantastic. Being some what of a present fanatic, Claire thought I should open a present immediately and I obliged and received the following completely kick arse gifts:

  • A medium sized box of Ferrero Rocher. After the walloping I took over Christmas with great food and fantastic sweet treats, I couldn’t have possibly managed a massive box again like last year.
  • Two recent framed photos of Hugo to put on my desk at work, which I love dearly – he is a handsome little man.
  • A Nintendo Wii with the Wii Sports game and a second Wii Remote. This was a joint venture between Claire’s family and it was completely unexpected – I would have been more than happy with the first two presents.

We set about our morning routine with Hugo and we had pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast. Once that was done, I had to open the Nintendo Wii box, to make sure everything was in order of course. I was impressed with the neat boxing of the components and now easy it was to setup. More importantly, it worked but that took a couple of hours to verify!

As is the tradition, we went to Hogs Breath for lunch which is located on the Gold Coast spit beside Marina Mirage. When I booked, the lady at Hogs Breath mentioned that there was a lot of traffic around today – fantastic to know. I flicked off an SMS to everyone and we were soon on our way. To our surprise, as soon as we got to the M1 overpass at Upper Coomera we could see that all south bound lanes on the M1 were nose to tail and moving very slowly. We later heard on the radio that a car had burst into flames on the motorway and emergency services were on the scene – sure fire way to stop a major arterial if there ever was one.

To get around the huge backlog of traffic, we slipped along the service road and onto Hope Island Road. Fortunately the road was clear but a much slower driving speed as it isn’t a highway. After suffering through a moderate amount of heavy traffic coming through Southport, we managed to make it to Hogs Breath about 20 minutes late.

Andrew and Belinda travelled from Ipswich for lunch, braving the horrific traffic which was great and as a present said they’d help pay for a replacement graphics card since mine finally broke recently. Brendan rode in on his new Kawasaki Ninja, he of course didn’t have to suffer the traffic but he did play on my love of coffee and gave me a couple bags of chocolate coated coffee beans! Kylie, Brett, Hollie, Blake and Summer also joined me for lunch, Blake napped most of the time but Summer was full of beans – she is gorgeous.

Arriving home, Lucy was here waiting for us – which was a little senendipitous as we hadn’t arranged it at all but she arrived only minutes before we got home. Following on from the Nintendo Wii theme, Lucy and Michael gave me WWE Smackdown Vs Raw – which is an American wrestling game for those who don’t follow it. I had a quick game of it but got completely hammered, wasn’t as easy to pick up as tennis or boxing!

I’ve had a great 29th birthday and I’d just like to thank everyone who travelled to the Gold Coast, phoned, SMS’d, instant messaged, emailed and offered well wishes for my birthday. I can say that I have been absolutely spoiled rotten – thank you to everyone for the great presents.

Next year I’ll be knocking on the door of the big three zero!

Best ADSL Broadband Plan

Internet

I have been using ADSL for the better part of 10 years and in that time the meaning of best ADSL plan has changed quite a bit. Early on in the Australian ADSL landscape, best broadband often meant stable, reliable and not charging like a wounded bull. As more broadband ISP’s entered the market, best ADSL plans often meant biggest download quota, which subsequently became cheapest ADSL plans and these days the best broadband plans provide a mixture of competitive pricing, larger download limits, more flexible usage and even the option of bundling and VoIP services.

For the majority of my time using broadband ADSL, I have been using Internode. They have been providing, what I would consider, to be near faultless ADSL service over that time. They have a comprehensive network throughout Australia, which has proved itself to be very fast, low latency and tolerant to network outages. I’ve been so impressed with their service, I have lost count of how many people I would have referred to Internode and I stand by my recommendation as well – I have moved house four times in the last 5 years and each time I have chosen to reconnect my broadband with Internode at my new address.

While I use the internet heavily at work and at home, I no longer download a huge amount of data – so a lighter weight plan has suited me for at least the last five years. However since Hugo arrived in September 2008, the monthly usage has steadily been creeping up and in the last six months, our monthly usage has skyrocketed. The sharp increase of late, I’m quite sure is directly related to an increase in rich content such as songs and videos that Hugo likes to watch and my increasing use of YouTube. That increase had finally resulted in hitting our monthly 10Gb data limit and subsequently the shaping of our 1500kbit ADSL connection back to about 64kbit.

Like anyone that uses the internet regularly on a broadband internet connection, using a slow internet connection is frustrating and nearly intolerable unless you really need something. To make sure that doesn’t happen again next month, I went to the Internode web site and started reviewing their plans. My current plan, which has been grandfathered is $49.95/month and provides 10Gb of data. If I could avoid it, I didn’t want to spend more than that – it feels like a sweet spot for pricing in my opinion.

Internode had a newer version of my current plan, which was $49.95/month and provided 20Gb of data but I hadn’t bothered to upgrade to it because I had no need. I was about to upgrade to that plan, when I noticed a new plan called Easy Broadband. The basic concept behind Easy Broadband is that there is just one plan option, no more confusing choices and having to guess how much data you’ll need per month and worrying about topping it up if you run out. It comes in fast or faster configurations – which equates to at least 1500kbit and if ADSL2+ is available – you’ll get that automatically as well. It costs $49.95/month and provides a whopping 50Gb of data to use anytime of the day – not a peak/off-peak plan like a lot of ISPs provide. The only real difference between it and the other ADSL plans I’ve been using is Easy Broadband counts uploads and downloads, my existing plans only counted downloads.

When you couple the price point, a very respectible 50Gb of data per month with Internode’s impressive quota free unmetered content – the Easy Broadband plan seemed like a perfect fit. After using less than 10Gb per month for a number of years, we’ve now increased that to 50Gb – or in actual download terms probably about 45Gb since it counts up and downloaded data. I think it has to be one of the best ADSL broadband plans available in the market place at the moment and when it is backed by Internode, you can be nearly guaranteed that you’re broadband ADSL will just work.