Category Archives: Tech stuff

How do Alexa rank sites?

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

For some time now, I have been collating statistics on four websites.

My main area of interest is in the Alexa trends, to see if they bear any relationships to other factors, such as traffic.

It would seem logical that a ranking should track traffic, but this is not apparently the case with Alexa.

There are some interesting things to note about the above graph.

The first is that the top line is pretty much stable, with no more than a 5% deviation throughout the period.  This site however has experienced a 50% growth in traffic over the time of the graph.  How come this is not reflected in the Alexa stats?

The bottom line is the growth in ranking for this site.  It has a very low traffic rate, and very few followers.  I post on it a couple of times a month, so it should be languishing at the bottom.  Yet the trend is constantly upwards.  Traffic to the site over the period is more or less a flat line, so why the growth?

Of the other two sites, one (the green) is a very popular blog though posting is sporadic, while the other (the red) is more of a niche site with regular postings.  Again the stats don’t reflect the figures I would have expected.

I hope Alexa know what they are doing, because I don’t!

Plotting journeys on Google Earth

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

There is a feature in Google Earth that I was unaware of.

I discovered quite by chance that it is possible to download all the information in my Garmin SatNav onto the application.

As the SatNav retains a considerable backlog of journeys taken, I downloaded mine, which still contains a lot of the French trips. I now have a record of every single journey I made since the 20th of September, including start and end times, distance covered, speeds and more.  Most importantly though is the track data, which displays precisely where I drove.

What is not apparent from the first image is the level of detail.

This is the track from the 22nd, which is the day we went to Domme.  That loop through the woods is not a tracking error – the road has to climb around 300ft up a cliff.

My one regret is that I didn’t discover this feature a long time ago.

Woopra on Google Earth

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I like messing around with software, trying new ideas and pushing it a bit beyond the limits.

I saw an interesting idea the other day for people who have Woopra Analytics in their sites, and Google Earth installed.  It’s a very neat integration of the two.

Essentially, all you have to do is add a Network Link to Google earth in the format http://localhost:9565/yoursite.com, obviously entering the appropriate site name.  Give it a low refresh rate (five to ten seconds) and sit back.

The effect is quite mesmerising.

As visitors arrive on your site, so little pegs appear on Google Earth, giving the visitor’s identity and their location.

woopra-gearth

The above snapshot shows three simultaneous visitors, where two are overlapping.

Needless to say, the location is actually the location of the ISP, so for example Grandad appears as a Dublin location, which is incorrect, but is near enough on a world scale.

As an application, it is not really of much value.

But it’s a lot of fun to watch in a busy period!

Blacknight are the business

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

So the dust seems to have settled on a rather tricky day yesterday.

It started with a cautionary email to warn me that Head Rambles was receiving a lot of traffic and that this was interfering with other sites on the shared webspace.  I had been meaning to move it to its own area anyway so this came as no surprise.

Head Rambles is effectively hosted on three servers – mail, web and database.  The move was simply a matter of moving the files on the web server to a new area.

Simple?

No.

Copying across the files should have worked, as all references to the database should retain their integrity, which they did.  However, Word Press and its ancillary plug-ins isn’t quite so flexible.  It transpired that there were quite a few references in the database tables to absolute paths.

A typical entry in a record could be something along the lines of the following:

/usr/local/pxm/vhosts/115124/webspace/httpdocs/headrambles/wp-content/

However, moving the site files from webspace 115124 to webspace 120566 could have implications for the site, as the record would then have to read

/usr/local/pxm/vhosts/120566/webspace/httpdocs/headrambles/wp-content/

That aside, the site should have functioned normally, with maybe a loss of functionality in a couple of plug-ins.

It didn’t.

For some reason, the site refused to function in its new home.  It was slow, to put it mildly, and while I was desperately trying to find the cause of this, I got another mail from the people in Blacknight. 

I must point out here, that I had been trying to sort the problem out on my own.  Blacknight had obviously been monitoring both Twitter (where there were a few caustic comments about the site being down) and the site itself, as they then stepped in and moved the whole site to a new server.

Anyway, the site ran perfectly in its new location (apart from the few changes that had to be made to the database), and we never did discover the cause of the original problem.

I cannot sing the prises of Blacknight highly enough.  They saw a problem.  They solved it.  As they are a large company, they presumably have a fairly healthy workload, yet they dropped all to help a client in trouble, even though I had not wanted to bother them.

So – a huge thanks to Niall, Nils and especially Paul.  And of course to Michele for running the best hosting company in the business.

Hi tech holidays

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Driving through Sarlat in France the other day, it occurred to me just how much technology has changed holidays.

First and foremost, satellite navigation has changed things dramatically.  Part of my preparation for holidays used to be the frantic gathering of maps and then plotting out routes.  Of course if I was going to some new area, this would mean ordering maps for the destination area too.  I would spend hours plotting out the best route to take, frantically jotting down notes to keep by me as I drove.

All that is done away with now.  The first time I took out the maps was the day before we left.  I took no notes and although I brought all my maps with me, I haven’t used them.  I have no need, as if I want to go to a particular spot, I just program the SatNav, and off I go.  Of course there are side benefits too.  If I am running low on petrol, all I need do is ask the SatNav and it will happily list all the nearest petrol stations and how to get to them.  That has been a life saver on more than one occasion and, what’s more, that is something even the best maps can’t do.

The mobile phone has also changed things.  Up to a decade or so ago, if I went on holiday, I was incommunicado for the duration.  No one could contact me, and if I wanted to contact anyone, it meant finding a phone box and making a trunk call.  Now I can instantly text anyone from anywhere.  Apart from that, it makes exploring a town a little easier.  The two of us can separate and go our different ways, and then meet up again after a quick phone call.

The Internet has had a big impact this holiday.  The place where we are staying has high speed wireless access and this has been a tremendous boon.  I have used Google Earth to find the best car parks in a strange town and even found the best areas within that town to visit.  I have used it to find out the opening times of the various shops around.  I have used it as a gazetteer to find out a little more about the places we intend visiting.  Naturally I can use it to keep track of the bank accounts and how the spending is going.  I can even use it to top up my mobile phone.

There is one thing that technology has not replaced though.

I still send postcards!