Category Archives: Blogging

Caught Out By International Date Formats

Blogging, General

When I first registered lattimore.id.au in the early part of the 2000’s, I registered it via namescout who operated namescout.com.au at the time and had the best pricing for .id.au domain names by a reasonable amount. The nice thing about dealing with namescout back then was that everything was localised, as I was dealing with an Australian business.

Fast forward to 2011 and they no longer bother having a .com.au website and service everyone via namescout.com; same basic service just all via the one website. One significant change that appears to have happened with that is that they are no longer providing localised versions of their email notices, such as a domain renewal notice.

Last week I received an email stating that my domain was going to expire on 5/7/2011, fantastic. I dismissed it at the time and figured I’d deal with it next week – which sounded great until Belinda SMS’d Claire & I asking if we knew why her blog was down. After beginning to check a few things, I couldn’t see anything obviously wrong so emailed my Australian web hosting company to see if they could see anything and they let me know the domain had expired – didn’t I feel like a complete idiot.

This could have been avoided if they’d used my personal contact information to provide an domain expiry notice that provided an Australian date format of 7/5/2011, if they’d said 7 May 2011 or that somewhere in the email it said in 7 days time.

After a few hiccups getting it the domain renewed, everything eventually sorted itself out. However, it resulted in over 24 hours of website and email outage – which is frustrating.

WordPress 3.1

Blogging, Software

WordPress 3.1 was released during the week, which is the next major release of the worlds most popular personal publishing and blogging platform. There were over 820 enhancements or support tickets closed during this release, spread over more than 2000 commits to their source code by over 180 developers spread around the world!

Like I’ve become accustomed to and so many others around the world, the upgrade from WordPress 3.0.x was seamless, fast and error free. I was impressed that all of the plugins that I’ve got installed, which while not all were tested with enough volume against the pre-releases of WordPres 3.1 – all seem to be working without a hitch.

Now I just need to learn to grapple with all of the new functionality, to see how I can leverage it moving forward!

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.

WordPress 3.0 Upgrade

Blogging, Software

WordPress, the popular open source blogging software that powers this site and literally millions of others around the internet, has been updated to version 3.0. Version 3.0 has been some six months in the making, has seen contributions from 218 developers around the world and has resulted in a lot of new features and over 1217 enhancements and bug fixes.

I’ve gone through and updated all of the sites I own with the latest version, which is why my site looks different at the moment as I haven’t installed my old theme or bothered to make any changes to the new default Twenty Ten theme that ships with WordPress 3.0.

As predictable as the sun rising, the upgrade from the 2.9.x series of WordPress was simple, fast and no fuss. Back up your database and site contents in case something goes wrong as a precaution & then hit the go button. By the time you’ve depressed your mouse button, the upgrade is nearly complete.

I now just have to go through the paces of installing and checking all of the WordPress plugins that I use work with version 3.0, which should only take about half an hour or so.