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Monthly Roundup - December 2007

Posted January 1st, 2008 in Monthly Roundup

My monthly round up posts a summary of the most read posts over the previous month, numbers of visitors to the blog and any changes I have made over the month that may have affected visitor numbers etc. This is the monthly roundup for December 2007, posted on the first day of 2008 so Happy New Year to you all!

10 most popular articles in December 2007 from all articles

The following were the most accessed articles on this blog in December for all posts from all time. My RSS readership is still very low so I need to promote it more and will modify the pages to invite people to subscribe at the end of each post. I also need to add in a "related posts" function and "previous" and "next" post links at the end of each post to encourage people to read more articles throughout the site. I'll get this set up this month. The dates are included of the original post date for these older articles which are still the most accessed, from searching Google etc.

1. Open firewall ports for MSN Messenger and ICQ (February 13th 2004)
2. Delete All Data in a MySQL Table(July 16th 2004)
3. How to check an MD5 hash on a file (January 19th 2004)
4. Cross Table Update with MySQL (March 1st 2004)
5. Howto Restart Apache (December 22nd 2004)
6. Errors Using mysqlimport to Import Data Into MySQL (March 21st 2004)
7. Formatting Dates and Times with MySQL (July 17th 2004)
8. Sendmail remote connection refused (November 30th 2003)
9. Create RSA and DSA Keys for SSH (March 5th 2004)
10. Process Forking with PHP (March 4th 2004)

5 most popular articles in December 2008 from December articles

This is the top 5 accessed articles from December posts only.

1. Shell scripting using the date command
2. SQL query to work out top selling categories
3. Replacing relative URLs with absolute URLs in PHP
4. PHP Magic Constants
5. Triggering errors with PHP

Visitor numbers

Earlier in the month it was looking like I would surpass the numbers of visitors from November and have the highest number to date, but there was a drop in the number of daily visitors from about the 24th which resulted in slightly less visitors this month. This could have possibly been to a decrease in search engine rankings traffic but it's more likely to have been caused by Christmas. We'll see what happens in January. Interestingly, the numbers of pageviews remained around the same.

I use AWStats for reporting visitors to my site, and this generally reports overly high than true numbers due to undetected bots pretending they're real browsers. While absolute numbers are a little useless, comparing them with previous months at least gives an idea of trend.

Month	Visitors	Pageviews
August 2007	10,661	13,696
September 2007	11,432	14,554
October 2007	14,750	19,476
November 2007	15,310	20,098
December 2007	14,967	20,133

RSS Subscribers

I use Feedburner to serve my RSS feed and give an indication of visitor numbers. I only started the RSS feed at the start of December and very few people have subscribed so far. The indication from Feedburner is that there are about 10 subscribers.