Monthly Roundup - February 2008

Posted March 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 February 2008.

25 most popular articles in February 2008

The following were the top 25 most accessed articles on this blog in February, along with the original post date.

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. Create RSA and DSA Keys for SSH (March 5th 2004)
8. Sendmail remote connection refused (November 30th 2003)
9. Formatting Dates and Times with MySQL (July 17th 2004)
10. VMWare USB device issues on openSUSE 10.3 (October 4th 2007)
11. Process Forking with PHP (March 4th 2004)
12. Cross Table Delete with MySQL (March 1st 2004)
13. Sendmail Connection Refused on localhost (November 30th 2003)
14. Howto log into an SSH Server Using PuTTY (March 23rd 2004)
15. Reinstall TCP/IP on Windows XP (August 8th 2007)
16. Use RSA and DSA key files with PuTTY and puttygen (March 23rd 2004)
17. Install yum with rpm on CentOS (October 16th 2007)
18. Installing mod_ssl on Apache on CentOS 5 (September 20th 2007)
19. New_Face failed error when using MPlayer (October 10th 2007)
20. PHP Error Class 'SoapClient' not found (September 25th 2007)
21. How to use a flash card reader with Linux (March 24th 2004)
22. Opening port 25 for mail servers with iptables (November 30th 2003)
23. POP3 Commands (February 13th 2004)
24. Mozilla Thunderbird exceeded maximum number of connections to IMAP server (October 30th 2007)
25. Fedora 8 KDE Live CD Screenshots (November 10th 2007)

Visitor numbers

Desipte there being only 29 days in February, this was the month with the highest traffic ever for this blog and each week was busier than the previous one.

The table below shows visitor numbers and pageviews from October to February, 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.

I added Google's Analytics to my blog a couple of days ago, so from next month will include the Google Analytics visitor and pageviews numbers as well.

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 30 to 35 subscribers, up from 10 at the end of last month.

Technorati Score

I thought I'd add this statistic to the monthly round up as well, to see how it changes over time etc. As of right now, Technorati is reporting an authority of 20 and a rank of 415,686 for my LAMP blog.

Things to do

The number of visitors coming from search engines (primarily Google) and the bounce rate for my blog is very high - people are generally coming in to find an answer to a problem and then leaving. I would like to get the number of pageviews per visitor up and to do this need to add a few bits and bobs to the site, including links to the previous and next post, links to related posts, popular posts and that sort of thing. Also an invitation to subscribe to the RSS feed at the end of each post, and also the ability to receive the daily post by email. I have been meaning to do these for a while and maybe I'll finally find the time to do so this month...