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Monthly Roundup - April 2008

Posted May 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 April 2008.

25 most popular articles in April 2008

The following were the top 25 most accessed articles on this blog in April, 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. Formatting Dates and Times with MySQL (July 17th 2004)
8. Create RSA and DSA Keys for SSH (March 5th 2004
9. Install yum with rpm on CentOS (October 16th 2007)
10. Sendmail remote connection refused (November 30th 2003)
11. Process Forking with PHP (March 4th 2004)
12. Cross Table Delete with MySQL (March 1st 2004)
13. PHP Error Class 'SoapClient' not found (September 25th 2007)
14. VMWare USB device issues on openSUSE 10.3 (October 4th 2007)
15. Howto log into an SSH Server Using PuTTY (March 23rd 2004) 
16. Install VMWare Tools on a Linux Guest Virtual Machine (February 17th 2008)
17. Reinstall TCP/IP on Windows XP (August 8th 2007)
18. Installing fonts on openOffice (November 30th 2003)
19. Sendmail Connection Refused on localhost (November 30th 2003)
20. Use RSA and DSA key files with PuTTY and puttygen (March 23rd 2004)
21. Installing mod_ssl on Apache on CentOS 5 (September 20th 2007)
22. POP3 Commands (February 13th 2004)
23. Opening port 25 for mail servers with iptables (November 30th 2003)
24. Installing AWStats on CentOS (September 26th 2007)
25. Mozilla Thunderbird exceeded maximum number of connections to IMAP server (October 30th 2007)

Visitor numbers

I added Google Analytics to the site at the end of February, so now have over two 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.

The first table below shows visitor numbers and pageviews from January to April 2008, with the data coming from AWStats. The second table then shows the March and April data from Analytics. This will be the last month I include the AWStats data. You can easily see based on the different reporting methods how wildly different the numbers can be. I do intend to write a post about this at some stage.

AWStats

Month	Visitors	Pageviews
January 2008	17,852	23,098
February 2008	20,143	26,500
March 2008	21,699	29,367
April 2008	27,644	38,261

Analytics

Month	Visitors	Pageviews
March 2008	19,083	22,951
April 2008	24,158	28,804

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. Until around the middle of this month I still only had around 30 or so RSS subscribers. On April 17th I added an invitation to subscribe to the RSS feed at the end of most posts and that seems to have worked; the number of RSS subscribers has increased each day and is now around the 50 mark.

Technorati Score

I started logging my Technorati score from March, because I thought it would be interesting to see how it changes over time. Lower rank number is better; higher authority number is better. It was getting better overall from the start of the year when I first started looking at it and got a bit worse this month. It probably doesn't mean much but interesting to look at anyway!

Month	Rank	Authority
March 1st 2008	415,686	20
April 1st 2008	377,609	22
May 1st 2008	646,322	15

Things to do

I added an invitation to subscribe to the RSS feed to the end of most posts and this seems to have had a postive affect in increasing the number of RSS subscribers. I also removed the " - Chris Hope's Lamp Blog" from the end of titles for article pages to see if that would affect search engine results and clickthroughs. It keeps the <title> tag down in size so may have a positive affect from an SEO perspective. Also the search results don't really need to contain that anyway.

As part of the change to invite people to the RSS feed, I was going to add a previous post / next post function but it turned out to be a bit problematic so I shelved it for the moment. If I find time this month I'll add that and also the related posts list to see if I can get the number of pageviews up.