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Stats

Suddenly I wanted to have a look at my stats. Just to have you enjoy the figures…:
In the last week, the main part (index and intro) had an average of 73 unique visitors per day; the articles section 170, bookreviews 115, filmreviews 114, musicreviews 123 and the news section 14. Overall that comes to an average of 122 unique visitors per day for the entire website, based on my WordPress stats of course.
Other funny facts: hits on the main site are about twice the number of unique visitors (so I guess people do read the index and the intro), articles have twice to two-and-a-half the number of hits against visitors, books too, the filmreviews section has real browsers with six to seven times the number of hits in comparison to unique visitors, music reviews too and the news section has a very low number of visitors, even for the RSS (70 per day). The musicreviews section is relatively popular among feed-readers.
Recently I did some Facebook integration, but this has no effect whatsoever. As far as I can tell, no posts have been “shared” yet, and there is only one website visitor who “like”s Gangleri.nl, the other three ‘likers’ came from my own FB account. So far for “boosting contact with your visitors”!

Facebook integration

I am fooling around a little with Facebook integration. I made a Facebook page where I built in the news feed, so FB users can stay up to date. On ‘single view’ pages on this website, I made “recommend” buttons (which I prefer over “like”). It is hard to test everything with but a ‘webmaster’ profile, so if you could mess around a little with these “recommend” buttons, since I have the idea that they do not work properly yet.
I am not sure if I will build in commenting with FB accounts. Anyone can already comment here and that feature will be a lot more work.

Hansel and Gretel

With more subsections such as quotes, blog and stories, I wanted to make navigating these pages easier. When someones comes in at a quote, it may not occur to him/her immediately that (s)he has to hover over “books”->”quotes” to see more quotes. So, I decided to add what are called “breadcrumbs”, so like Hansel and Gretil, you can follow back from where you landed. I only added the breadcrumbs on sections with ‘subsections’, so articles, book-, film- and musicreviews.

Bugger

BUGGER! I thought I found a sollution for a minor problem I had and trying to solve that I completely nuked this website. It did not take too long to get things back up roughly, but I had a lot of work editing ALL image sources… I hope I got them all. Worst of all, the little problem is not solved, hopefully nothing of the new problems remain…

[edit 28/2/11] Most of the image url are correct, but I found a lot of filmreviews with broken images. I’m working on that.

Improved navigation

I improved the navigation links on top of the screen, at least, I hope you agree. I found a way to cluster the links and create dropdowns. This way I can make more links, but it looks a lot cleaner. So from now on you can jump right from the toplist of filmreviews to the articles blog. To get this to work I had to redo the entire layout, so some things may look slightly different. Should you run into anything funky, please let me know. Quite a job, I hope it is worth it!

[edit 28/2/11] Hm, this new navigation does not seem to work on mobile phones (at least, not with my Opera Mini) and in IE’s older than 7… So all of you, time to get a proper browser when you experience problems with my new navigation.

500

DAMN have I been a fool. Monday I edited my htaccess file (IP banning) and apparently made a typo. Since then Gangleri.nl visitors received a 500 server error and of course I didn’t discover this myself until this morning. I can’t edit anything in my htaccess from work, but with a little help from the ICT-crowd, I cleared half of the htaccess file, making the website reappear. I’ll fix things better when I’m home.
Sorry for the downtime, I’ll pay more attention in the future, even when I have no time……………..

Anti spam

There is a problem with my main anti spam plugin, so I installed another one that I have no experience with. Should you have any problems commenting, please see “website intro and contact” for an emailaddress to notify me of this.
[edit] Problems with Akismet solved, the other plugin deleted.

Searching

During the last week I have been messing around with the search function of this website. Since the beginning I have had a standard search that searches only the section you are reading and another searchbox with a Google search that searches the entire website. Since I now no longer have a database for each section, I figured it should be a lot easier to make a ‘sitewide search’. Not so! I found a way that supposedly nukes databases. Moreover, I could not style the search results to my liking. Then I miraculously found a way to display Google searches within my own website and I even managed to make radio buttons to choose between the current section or the rest of the website. Thrilled as I was in the beginning, testing things out proved that Google has results I am not happy with. Some articles or reviews display twice in the results, some not at all, or only in some archive (of the category the review is in or even the date-based archives). Being not amused with a couple of such things, I looked again for a sitewide search option based on the WordPress search, but the only two plugins that seem to do something like that do not work, either because I have a new version of WP or because my server uses a too old version of MySQL… So, I am back with the two search-boxes in the sidebars. One to search the current section, another to search the whole of Gangleri.nl or alternally the entire www. The only thing different is that these results are neetly displayed within the website, so at least something got better.

Automatic news

With a ‘network’ it is a lot easier to have a ‘new on Gangleri’ page. Now all new posts will be listed here on the right automatically without me having to do anything. I realise that this is not the perfect sollution, since you might have a feed subscription for this section to follow the whole of Gangleri.nl, but I am working on that.

Security and anti-spam

I almost forgot to mention that when I was working on the complete makeover of this website, that I had to replace some security plugins and/or was suddenly able to use the latest version. Of one very extensive security plugin I was never able to use but a very old version and now I use the latest with many many features of blocking access and stopping bots.

Then in the old setup I found an easy way to block IP’s, referrers, hosts, etc. I am not completely sure if this still works, but you will know soon enough when you are on the blacklist 🙂

As far as I know this has not resulted in new problems with commenting of access to these pages. Should you experience problems, please visit the “website intro and contact” part to send me an email about this.

A few other things that I consider with all the spamming etc. going on is disabling or at least replace the “live comment preview” and the “subscribe to comments” (in the articles and book sections). Bots load the “live comment preview” files every time they stop by even when they are not able to do anything. The same goes for the subscription feature. Spam are caught, but the emails end up in my subscribtion list. Both cost server effort which is not really necessary. There are hardly any subscribers in the first place, but a preview before posting a comment is an almost obligatory feature.