A Pipe and a Keyboard

Dedicated followers of this site (i.e. Me) will have noticed that I have a passing interest in Alexa and its ranking methods.

My main reason for this interest is because Alexa seems to be the benchmark of choice in advertising.  I suppose they have to chose some method of ranking sites, but the choice of Alexa is a little baffling.

I have been charting the progress of several sites over the weeks, to see if I can spot a relationship between traffic an ranking.  So far, the relationship has eluded me.  For example, one of the sites has daily visitor numbers in the single figures, while another has daily visits of around 150, yet the two sites are running neck and neck in the rankings, and in fact the latter site is trailing the former, which is completely illogical.

Some weeks ago, I set up a test site.  It is self hosted, with its own domain, but as yet its existence has not been advertised.  As far as I am aware, there are only two people on the planet who know of its existence.  About three weeks ago, I decided to add it to my Alexa monitoring list.

When I started monitoring it, it had a ranking of 1,341,686, which struck me as being quite high for a site that essentially doesn’t exist.  Over the weeks, it has been climbing the ranks at an alarming rate, and now stands at 620,853.  I have seen quite popular sites that are still ranked in the millions.  What the hell is going on here?

One possible theory is that I am skewing the figures, simply by visiting the site to read the stats.  If that is the case, then I would contend that it’s like judging newspaper circulation by counting the number of times that paper is bought in one particular shop.  If one person is a representative sample of internet usage, then what value are the statistics?

My advice?  Unless you are an advertiser, forget Alexa.

The Philippines accounts for about 0.4% of traffic!!

Filed under: Tech stuff on May 5th, 2010 | No Comments »

I think the look of a site is important.

First and foremost, it should be pleasing to the eye.  It should also reflect the general content of the site, so that a simple glance at the screen should give an idea of the type of site it is.

Customising a theme can be simple or difficult, depending on how far you want to go.  My philosophy is to take a theme that is as close as possible to my final desire, and then to make the minimum of changes.  Head Rambles, for example has been through a couple of modifications.  It is now heavily customised to the point where the original theme is almost unrecognisable.

As I said before, I wasn’t too happy with the theme here.  I felt it was time for a radical overhaul of the entire site, both in look and name.

Why chose “A Pipe and a Keyboard”?  Mainly because it sums up my necessities for writing.  It is a personal site, with quite a bit of technical stuff, so the pipe represents the personal, and the keyboard represents the technical. 

I chose the design for its simplicity.  I like the simple layout, which doesn’t detract from the content, and apart from a few minor tweaks to the font, the only big change I have made (so far) is to substitute the banner image.  There are a few changes to be made yet, of a minor nature, such as additional navigation and tweaks like that.  I’m not too sure about the image, as yet.  I know the pipe looks a little unusual, but it is the pipe I generally smoke, so it deserves its place on the Internet. 

Filed under: Blogging, General on May 3rd, 2010 | 7 Comments »

I don’t profess to be a complete expert on WordPress and its finer workings.

Whenever I want to do something like a bulk modification or something like that, I tend to search around for some kind of plugin or some other solution on the Internet.  I am rarely disappointed.

I have been doing some modifications over on Head Rambles where I have shifted the links (Blogroll) onto a separate page.  I wanted to go a little further with this and to do this, I needed to place the links into the database rather than have them hard coded on a page.

I am a great fan pf PHPMyAdmin, so writing up an SQL textfile to insert a batch of links into the Links Table was relatively simple.  The Links Table had some legacy stuff in there so the result was a refreshed table with 147 entries.  So far so good.

I wanted to set all my Links to a particular category, and this is where I ran into a problem.  The last thing I wanted to do was to have to manually edit 147 entries and it would have been extremely slow and tedious.  I searched high an low and found quite a few others trying to do the same thing, but no solutions.  I had discovered the numerical identity of the category (it was 2) and tried a bulk change of the field ‘link_category’ to 2.  This didn’t work, for some reason.

On delving a little further, I found that in fact the relationship between links and categories is held in the table Term_Relationships.  As an experiment, I went back to my text editor and built up a series of inserts for this table –

INSERT INTO `term_relationships` (`object_id`, `term_taxonomy_id`, `term_order`) VALUES
(X, 2, 0),
(X, 2, 0),
(X, 2, 0);

where X is the ID of the link. 

On running this file, I got several errors indicating duplicate fields.  These represented the legacy entries, which was fair enough.  I just deleted the relevant entries from the text file.

Ultimately, my batch fix worked, and all the links are now entered under their correct categories.

I strikes me though that this would be a fine opportunity for someone to develop a plugin that does batch jobs on Links?

Filed under: Blogging, Tech stuff on April 27th, 2010 | No Comments »