Category Archives: website

Gogo Google

While playing with Firefox I got annoyed that Ghostery finds trackers on this website. One of them is Google. I used Google Custom Search to allow visitors to find something in the entire network (there are different sites which only allow searching ‘themselves’). Looking for a replacement I found the DuckDuckGo option. No plugin needed, no results page to add and a somewhat customizable result page at DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo is not my favourite search engine, but it is one of the private search engines, so I have killed another tracker.

Welcome to the new website

So I have switched hosts. The new host is considerably cheaper. In the transition I have cleaned up and slightly restructured the website. During the years a lot of junk was collected in the database. That is now gone. I have replaced some content from the website. I no longer use “custom post types” within the subsites to create “blogs”, tell “stories” or present “quotes”. When I started with that, I thought “custom post types” would be integrated within WordPress, but after 10 years they still require extra work to make, maintain and especially: show them. Therefor I have moved them to another subsite (“the blogs”) so I could use standard WordPress functionality. The “the blogs” site replaces the “news” site. It just collects all types of posts that I want to keep apart from the normal posts of the sites. Not too fancy, but it saves me a few plugins and an occasional headache. “News” simply became a page. Continue reading →

New website, new anti-spam

That was weird. When I was working on the transfer to another host, I noticed that I could no longer install the anti-spam plugin that I have used for years and which I was happy about (WP Spamshield). It proves to have been taken out of the plugin store because it is no longer maintained. Too bad!

I had one day without anti spam plugin and already caught a couple, so I have installed a plugin that I have no experience with (conveniently called “Anti-Spam”), so I hope it does not make any problems for ‘real people’. Let me know if this is the case.

I could have been rich

In 2002 I registered the domain Monas.nl. In 2007 I started with Gangleri.nl which eventually replaced Monas.nl (with the same content). In 2017 I let go off the domain Monas.nl. I had been owner for 15 years, but had not really used the domain for 10 years. I just ended the hosting.

When you now go to Monas.nl you are no longer forwarded to Gangleri.nl, but see this:

The present owner of the domain is called Media Village. I guess they just buy domains that are put back on the market, value them, and sell them again. They own hundreds, maybe even thousands of domain names and sell them for € 169,- or twenty times that, or anything in between. My old domain they apparently rated € 989,-. Not bad when you keep in mind that many of the domains they sell are below that price.

I should have sold the domain myself, I would have been rich!

New theme

After my post of yesterday I have changed themes. I started this website with a very simple theme, had some wishes a few years ago that required a more fancy one, but now I again opted for a relatively basic theme that has a mobile version out-of-the-box.

The website looks roughly the same as before. The text colour I let to default black. Most noticeable will be that the pages are less wide. This mostly catches the eye on a wide screen. Other than that the menu has a different colour, the fonts are different and there is more space between two lines, especially in the sidebar. I moved the little image of Gangleri from the header to a sidebar, incorporating it with the Facebook link. This proved to prevent some issues in the mobile version.

Maintenance

I use this plugin that tells me when a plugin is out-of-date, when there is some unknown file and apparently the latest update also added the function of telling me about plugins that have not been updated for years. I have quite a few of these…

The risk is of course that WordPress develops and the plugin does not so it stops working. Or even worse, it breaks WordPress or becomes a security leak. I have started the task of removing plugins that were not (really) necessary and trying to replace those that are. The problem is that I have not found replacements for all plugins that I use and I am very happy with the functionality of some of them…

During the proces I also discovered that some things simply stopped working, such as the sitewide search function…

So, I have been removing and replacing some functionalities and I seriously need to get myself a new theme that is mobile friendly of its own, since the mobile-version-plugin that I used also came from the stone-age.

More work to be done!

No more Monas.nl

Monas.nl

Monas.nl is registered per March 20 2002. Gangleri.nl took over in May 2007. That means that in 2017 I will have been owner of the domain for 15 years, but it has been inactive for 10 years. For many years I had the idea to keep Monas.nl for possible future projects. The only such project was the short-lived Traditionalism Discussion Group. For the other years the domain has just been forwarding to Gangleri.nl. There are a few links on the internet to Monas.nl, but not many. However I still like the domain, I decided to let go of it. Why hold on to something that has been out of use for a decade? Per March 20 2017 I have discontinued the ownership. It may be interesting to see if somebody else will pick up the domain and what kind of website it will be.

New statistics

It has been over two years since I had a look at the statistics. Why do I even bother collecting them? Perhaps they are usefull in a way. More about that later.

I do not even remember when, but the previous plugin that I used for statistics was no longer maintained and a while ago it actually stopped working. I had to look for another simple stats plugin, but the results are quite different from before. Did I misinterpret the previous plugin or do I misinterpret the current one? Do they work much different from eachother? One thing is for sure, the new plugin is hard on me.

The current plugin allows me to pick a period and then gives me a few numbers. I used the period “this year so far” and come to the following numbers:

  • Main website, 384 pageviews, that is 3 average daily pageviews over a 120 day period. In this period 233 unique IPs visted either the index page or the website intro. Many people come to the index by following a link to an old website (for example Monas.nl). With the previous plugin I came to almost 40 unique visitors per day. Now just below 2. Quite a difference! Which would be most credible?
  • Articles, 2804 pageviews, that is 23 daily average. 1791 Unique IPs. The previous plugin came at 73 unique visitors per day two years ago. When I have a look at the download counter for my ‘downloadable’ articles, I can see that two years ago the counter for the “Traditionalism vs Tradiotionalism” article stood at 307, now I have 337 for the PDF; the Epub went from 31 to 141 (!). “Traditionalistic Asatru” went from 115 to 261 for the PDF and from 45 to 133 for the Epub file. That does not sound too bad;
  • Book reviews, 1091 pagesviews in 2016, 9 per day, 535 unique IPs. Those were 85 unique visitors with the other plugin two years ago.
  • Film reviews, 415 pagesviews, 3 per day, 70 unique IPs; 38 unique visitors per day two years ago;
  • Music reviews, 805, 6 and 276; 86 unique visitors two years ago, 6 now;
  • News, 31, 0 and 14. I have not listed the news section previously.

This immediately tells me that close to nobody is going to see this message, since I posted it in the “news” section, which is visited by 14 people in 2016. Thank you for reading this when you are one of those. I am going to share this little text on Facebook and see what happens.

Like two years ago, I am quite surprised that the film reviews section has so few visitors. It is the section with the most updates. Almost every week I review one or two films, while music reviews go a lot slower, books even more and articles especially so. I suppose people have other channels to get ideas for films to watch or the films that I review are boring.

There seems to be more demand for the book reviews. So what are the most popular ones?

  • Index, the index of the book reviews section gets 14,64% of the pageviews;
  • De Geestelijke Wereld van de Germanen attracted 4,03% (44 hits). A Dutch title on an English website. Below, when I talk about Facebook, you will see how this comes;
  • The archive got 3,02% of the visitors, 33 hits;
  • The Faulkes translation of the Edda comes next with 2,10% (23 hits) in 2016.

Not really whopping figures. Next are books with 10 to 20 hits in 2016 and two tags.

What about the articles. What are people looking for when they find this website?
Actually, the popular articles are the same as always:

Top search terms list must be taken with a grain of salt, since the top search term “Freemasonry” had 8 hits in 2016 and can never have resulted in any of the articles mentioned above. What is different that most people come with from Google nowadays (or according to the new statistics plugin) 766 in 2016, while Wikipedia brought me 115 hits. Facebook 24, so that is not exactly a visitor attractor even when the counter currently stands at 195 “likes”.

Speaking of Facebook, Facebook has statistics of its own. Let me have a look at these. Facebook, for example, tells me how many people I “reached” with the links to new reviews, etc. that I post. A few numbers to give you an idea. Like I said, there are 195 people who “like” the Facebook page. That does (by and far) not mean that a post reaches 195 people. Perhaps a “reached” person has to click on my message in his or her wall?
I posted the Thorofon review 6 days ago. This post “reached” 36 people. I posted the last film review on the same day, but this one only reached 8 people. On 16 april I “shared” a link to the latest Idehall cd review, 11 people. The latest book review is of the latest Acta Macionica which reached 23 people. Then follow a few posts with 20 to 30 people and the next ‘peak’ is a track that I shared of the new noise project Ausströmen which reached 37 people. That is better than most of my own stuff.
Earlier I mentioned my review of De Geestelijke Wereld van de Germanen, a popular book review. The post linking to this review was “shared” by three people, thus reaching a whopping number of 191 people. It is very clear that Facebook is a social medium and that to reach an audience, that audience has to cooperate without “likes” and “shares” I “reach” usually around 25 people, sometimes a bit more, sometimes less.
As for Facebook’s statistics page. It tells me that in the last week I had one “action” (I suppose this is a “like” or a “share”), six “pageviews” (is that how many times the Facebook page is visited?), 41 “reached persons” (for different posts) and five “involved”s, whatever that may mean.

I am sure that the above was exactly what you have wondered about for years?

Oh, it could be that the website looks different for you. More about that here.

Screen settings

A couple of times I was annoyed when I was reading a longer text on my own website at work. I have a very wide screen at works and sentences and alinea just kept going which makes a tiring read. I decided to make a maximum width of 1350 pixels. When your monitor is less wide than 1350 pixels the website will just scale back normally. When you have a much wider monitor like myself, you will have two bars or nothing on both sides. This looks a bit funky but I think it reads better myself.

What do you think?