Frogfeet Blog type thing by Paul Munro

8th June 2010:- Ooooops a daisy, I forgot all about this blog. The reason for that may be that there has been nothing much out of the ordinary happening. Just bashing out websites. Now also, selling links on the less successful sites.

The summer holiday period is well underway and people are away from home or have better things to do than look at websites. This is reflected in the growth of visitor numbers. June, July and August have slow growth. September this year will see a huge increase. That should continue up to December which is always the worst month of the year. Quickly followed by the best month of the year (namely January, in case you are not familiar with the sequence of the months of the year :-) ). Then continued steep growth until next summer holidays.

World cup on Sunday so I expect visitor numbers to crash. However, perhaps people who are not interested in football (partners of football fanatics) will browse the internet when they would normally do something outdoors on a Sunday. Interesting, we will see.

While I am on the subject I thought I would mention the visitor numbers over an average week. Monday through Thursday are busy internet days. Friday is quieter and Saturday even more so. Sunday is volatile, usually about the same as a Friday, but sometimes as busy as a weekday. Perhaps the weather has an effect on Sunday's figures.

3rd April 2010:- Have a RSS XML feed for your site, make sure it validates. Not got one yet, WAKE UP!

RSSXML+PING=$+

1st April 2010:- Stopped counting sites done. Now counting pages done. After all, if you have 2000 one page websites that is 2000 pages. If you have 1000 ten page websites that is 10,000 pages. So the number of websites completed is a poor reflection of progress. Especially since no two sites have the same number of pages. With that in mind I hope to break 10,000 pages by the end of this month. Will take a bit of doing though so I better get on with it...

31st March 2010:- Mobile visitors growing steadily, so it was definitely worth providing for them.

Added a new link unit ad to the top of each page and the results have been fantastic.

Fixing the xml rss news feed as described below has made an amazing difference right across the board. New sites get busy quicker as well.

10th March 2010:- Discovered a correlation with poor performing Dash sites and non existent xml news feed files. Reasons for this relationship could be the fact that there is a broken link high (near the beginning of the HTML code) in every page. Or the news-feed has SEO value. Or when the auto ping (when the xml file is made it is pinged) to online news providers fails, this results in a lesser SEO effect. OR a Smorgasbord of all them there reasons and then some. My only question is "How long has this been going on?"

Big update complete. All sites now have all latest software, updates and fixes. With ongoing changes and ideas, I did not want to have to do another update immediately after this one, so I put it off again and again. Some sites were by now not functioning properly and had broken links etc. There comes a time when you just have to decide that enough is enough and do the update. Will need to do regular soft updates every month from now on.

26th Feb 2010:- Not as many daily mobile visitors as I would have imagined. A few every day but this will grow. Mobile facility not on every site yet. Waiting until next update (early March : bigBIG update as will have to ftp also).

Another little glitch found with the researchers admin system today but all is working smoothly again. Thanks to Andrea, for finding the problem and sending the error code.

Working on a new idea. I love new ideas, that's why I do this. So what is this incredible world changing idea? Well it is neither incredible nor world changing but it will add yet another facility to the Dash sites. A system to allow website owners and bloggers and possibly others (e.g. facebookers... Do people still use other social media sites like myspace and bebo? Are there any others? Why are they so popular? Am I the only person in the world that doesn't use nor has any interest in using any?) to easily add our data to their pages and in return, increase back links, traffic and exposure to Dash sites. More information to follow.

25th Feb 2010:- Discovered a problem with the xml sitemap. Was not validating or even displaying on a browser! Made a sitemap index to point to the previous regular sitemap and the new mobile pages system sitemap. New Sitemap index now referenced in the robots file. Or will be in next update.
Info:- Sitemap index files do not work across different sites, only different sitemaps in the same site. See this page. So "pop" goes the already built system to make one index for all. Doesn't really make any difference now that all Dash site sitemaps and robots files are created automatically.

22th Feb 2010:- Made all Dash sites mobile friendly. Previously, no google ads would show for mobile visitors. No idea how many people visit on phones but whatever, it will grow. Thought it would be worth half a day to provide a system where they can more easily view the sites. Most of all, ads now display for these visitors.

Link for mobile users on every page. Reference auto forwarding for mobile users:- I looked at paid and free services but decided to make my own. For now at least the simplest option is just to look at the resolution of the visitors browser. Then if it is less than say 800 pixels wide, it is probably a mobile device so forward to mobile perl script. Everyone else gets the regular page. Not sure if that is full proof, but works well on my blackberry, laptop and computers. If mobile visitor numbers get big enough, I will give it more time.

Google supports perl for mobile ad systems and now so do I :-) . Some new modules to upload but they did as they were told first time, without having to be forced. Always had to force in the past. w3.org XHTML validation gives a header/doctype warning (not an error so passed validation) for all my new sitemaps. However, the example code from google has the regular doctype, so of course, I went with what the google Gods dictate to the unworthies like myself.

10th Feb 2010:- Decided to reduce the robots.txt file down to a minimum. That is xml sitemap and disallow no search engines. Previously, it was several lines long, blocking many of the pages that are duplicated across all the Dash sites (for fear of copying issues). Also, blocked all dynamic pages for similar reasons. Have tried blocking none and see if there is any difference. Hopefully the sites will not plunge in the rankings.