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Monthly Roundup - January 2008

Posted February 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 January 2008.

10 most popular articles in January 2008 from all articles

The following were the most accessed articles on this blog in January for all posts from all time. It's still all the really old posts showing up here so nothing much has changed.

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

It was a pretty poor month on my part as far as posting goes: I didn't post for 14 days in a row but am now back to one post per day. For this reason I won't bother posting the most popular articles from January but will include both January and February in next month's roundup.

Visitor numbers

There was a slight drop in visitor numbers in December, presumably due to the Christmas and holiday period (indications earlier in the month were looking to be the best month ever, so there was a definite slow down later in the month). This month saw the highest number of visitors ever in a month to my blog.

The table below shows visitor numbers and pageviews from September to January, with the data coming from AWStats. AWStats 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
September 2007	11,432	14,554
October 2007	14,750	19,476
November 2007	15,310	20,098
December 2007	14,967	20,133
January 2008	17,852	23,098

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 20 to 25 subscribers, up from 10 at the end of last month.

Things to do

I need to add an invitation at the end of each post to get people to subscriber to the RSS feed. I'd also like to add the ability for people to subscribe by email. Also previous/next post links at the end of each article and "related posts" as well. Maybe I'll finally get around to doing this sometime this month. All of these should help to increase pageviews and subscribers.