More Rambling

I could have continued this from the bottom of the previous post. I decided to do it separately after the two disastrous attempts to get the 2006 summaries on line.
As much as 2006 was a hard year to predict visitor demographics for Cards From Ogden Point, 2007 is starting off even more unpredictably.

www.ogdenpoint.ca has had 421 visits and 839 page views at mid March. http://www.ronmclean.bc.ca/ has had 328 visitors view 529 pages, and www.photoserver.ogdenpoint.ca sits with 367 visitors and1464 page views. Those numbers are all better than the 2006 totals at the same point in time so those sites appear to be getting a few more visitors. The PhotoServer page count suggests that someone may have actually looked at a full slide show or two.

www.cardsfrom.ogdenpoint.ca (Cards From Ogden Point) got off to a really slow start in January. Then February made up for the slow times. By Valentines Day at the mid point of February, there had been more visitors to Cards From Ogden Point than in any month in the site history. The previous visitor count records were held by May 2005 and December 2005 with 1,957 visitors each, and December 2005 with 26,394 page views. February 2007 ended with 2,786 visitors and 22,657 page views. That leaves it clearly as number one for visitors and a close second for page views. That represents over 4 visitors per hour and 33.7 pages per hour for the month. My Compaq in the corner was purring along wonderfully through all that. The reality is that a lot of the traffic came between the 11th and 15th with 5 consecutive days with over 100 visitors each and over 1000 page views each. Those 5 days are the busiest 5 day period in site history and represent 1,867 visits and 15,766 page views in less than 120 hours. The averages are 15.6 visitors viewing a total of 131.4 pages per hour.

The site won the CardMaster competition that was running for Valentines Day -- it was a strange win however because the 28% of the votes I got actually only amounted to 31 votes.

March 2007 is back to a much slower pace. If the first 14 days are an indication of the projected traffic, it will be a slow month. Easter comes at the beginning of April and Easter 2005 and Easter 2006 were busy times so March could just be slow in starting and get just as busy at the end of the month as February was. (I hope.)

The one other significant thing that is happening is that I am getting more feedback from Porn Sites, On Line Casinos, and "Pharmacutical" Suppliers than I am from visitors. I don't count the Spam that is picked up at my inbox as part of what I am talking about -- there is lots of that too. I'm talking about actual feedback and Guest Book signings that are being done by people on behalf of the Spammers. My feedback forms and guest book entry pages are Posties from the site. They need a human to fill them out and send them. Either Spam is very profitable, or some folks must have a lot of time on their hands.

2006 Year End

This is actaually my third try at this post. The other times Blogger didn't save it despite my request to save it in draft form. If you see the posting it means that I finally got the post completed. I am giving it the old "Three Strikes" treatment. If you see this the third strike was a hit not an out.

2006 was an interesting year for my web sites.

http://www.ogdenpoint.ca/ had an increase in the number of visitors and a decrease in the number of pages that were viewed from 2005. The 2005 visitor count was 842 visitors viewing 3237 pages. The 2006 count was 1197 visitors viewing 2686 pages. That amounts to 3 visits per day and 7.4page views per day.

http://www.ronmclean.bc.ca/ saw the visitor count from 2005 drop in 2006. The 2005 count was 1463 people viewing 9949 pages. The 2006 numbers were 1219 visitors and 2771 pages. The numbers are quite close to those for http://www.ogdenpoint.ca/

http://www.photoserver.ogdenpoint.ca/ is the Index Page for my PhotoServer which runs Cards From Ogden Point. The index page gives access to my photo albums and webcams as well as links into the various other sites the computer runs. The PotoServer Index and subpages saw a moderate increase in traffic from 450 visits and 2177 pages in 2005 to 1441 visits and 5533 pages in 2006. That gives it an average of 3.9 visitors per day and 15.43 pages per day. The average visitor viewed 3.9 pages. Access to my WebCams and photo albums would be included in these totals. When one considers that the "Recent Photo Album" contains 200 pictures that are generally updated more than once a month, the numbers reflect a rather low visitor count. One visitor arriving through the index page and viewing the full slide show would add over 200 hits to the counter. Obviously not many people viewed the whole slide show, let alone the others on the site.

Those three sites probably get more of my time in keeping them up to date than they get visitor time during the year.

http://www.cardsfrom.ogdenpoint.ca/ (Cards From Ogden Point) is quite another story. It gets much more traffic and saw a 50% increase in both visitors and page views from 2005 to 2006. The 2005 count was 9,028 visitors viewing 100,278 pages. The 2006 count was 14,111 people viewing 157,693 pages. That represents 1.6 visitors per hour, and 18 pages per hour for all 365 days of the year - 24/7. That is a lot of traffic when you consider it is being "Served" from a computer sitting in my living room.

The most interesting part of the Cards From Ogden Point traffic for me was that the busiest times all year were the last three days in September, and the first three days in October. On September 30, 6211 pages were viewed -- making that day the busiest in the site history. That 6 day period was busier than Valentines Day, Easter, Christmas or New Years Day. There were no contests running, and there were no holidays until Canadian Thanksgiving nearly two weeks later. December 2006 was much slower than December 2005. (Not to mention being slower than January, February, April, September, and October 2006.) There is certainly no predicting traffic patterns and prospective visitor dates. Christmas 2006 ran a distant third behind Valentines Day and Easter. -- Mother's Day, Father's Day, and Thanksgiving were quite uneventful.

The year end statistics also give some demographic information about computer use. Almost exactly 5 years after Windows XP arrived on the scene, 77.75% of my visitors were using XP. 89.45% were using some form of Windows including 14 visitors still using Windows 3.1. The biggest disaster in Windows history as far (as I'm concerned) Windows ME was represented by only 20 visitors while Windows 98 was used by 988 visitors or 7.2%, and Windows 2000 was used by 522 visitors or 3.8%.
The Mac operating system was represented by 311 visitors (2.26%). Linux showed up 43 times for less than one percent of the visitors.
80.65% were using Internet Explorer, 13.95% were using a Mozilla based Browser -- mostly Firefox and Safari, and 4.1% were using Netscape.
From my reading of various on line services, those results are quite typical.

It will be interesting to see if Windows Vista has 77.75% of the operating systems 5 years from now. When XP arrived 5 years ago, most Internet access was by dial up and computers were slower, less powerful, and more expensive than today. What will the next 5 years bring?