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Monthly Roundup - March 2008

Posted April 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 March 2008.

25 most popular articles in March 2008

The following were the top 25 most accessed articles on this blog in March, along with the original post date. The list is compiled from Google Analytics, looking at the "Top Content" report and sorting by unique pageviews. In previous months (before I had installed Analytics on this blog) I used the data from AWStats, but I feel Analytics gives a better idea because it's not as prone to skew by bots and people viewing pages multiple times.

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. Formatting Dates and Times with MySQL (July 17th 2004)
9. Sendmail remote connection refused (November 30th 2003)
10. Process Forking with PHP (March 4th 2004)
11. Cross Table Delete with MySQL (March 1st 2004)
12. VMWare USB device issues on openSUSE 10.3 (October 4th 2007)
13. Install yum with rpm on CentOS (October 16th 2007)
14. Reinstall TCP/IP on Windows XP (August 8th 2007)
15. PHP Error Class 'SoapClient' not found (September 25th 2007)
16. Sendmail Connection Refused on localhost (November 30th 2003)
17. Howto log into an SSH Server Using PuTTY (March 23rd 2004)
18. Use RSA and DSA key files with PuTTY and puttygen (March 23rd 2004)
19. Install VMWare Tools on a Linux Guest Virtual Machine (February 17th 2008)
20. Installing mod_ssl on Apache on CentOS 5 (September 20th 2007)
21. Opening port 25 for mail servers with iptables (November 30th 2003)
22. New_Face failed error when using MPlayer (October 10th 2007)
23. POP3 Commands (February 13th 2004)
24. Installing AWStats on CentOS (September 26th 2007)
25. Switching SELinux off on CentOS (November 13th 2007)

Visitor numbers

I added Google Analytics to the site five weeks ago and now have a full month's worth of data to be able to look at. Previously I used AWStats, but this is prone to over-reporting due to bots and screen scrapers stealing content, looking for email addresses etc. I will post later in the week about the difference between AWStats and Google Analytics.

The first table below shows visitor numbers and pageviews from November to February, with the data coming from AWStats. The second table then shows the March data from Analytics. I will continue to show both for the next two to three months until I have three or four months of comparitive data from Google Analytics.

AWStats

Month	Visitors	Pageviews
November 2007	15,310	20,098
December 2007	14,967	20,133
January 2008	17,852	23,098
February 2008	20,143	26,500
March 2008	21,699	29,367

Analytics

Month	Visitors	Pageviews
March 2008	19,083	22,951

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, around the same as at the end of last month.

Technorati Score

I started logging my Technorati score from last month, because I thought it would be interesting to see how it changes over time. Lower rank number is better; higher authority number is better.

Month	Rank	Authority
March 1st 2008	415,686	20
April 1st 2008	377,609	22

Things to do

No changes from last month...

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...