flanerie.org

My site got suspended yesterday after something weird happens in my blog software and took down the server. That in turn took down 200 other sites. Oops.

The techies don't know what caused it, and I certainly don't, so it might happen again.

I guess it's my own fault for not posting for a couple of weeks.

I have put flanerie on a diet and reduced the homepage size by around a third. In theory this means it has been loading a lot quicker since a couple of weeks ago.

Have any of my regular readers noticed?

I have also started work on a redesign, although it is very embryonic.

Another big surge in traffic last month with a total of 4,190 unique visitors. I guess that means I need to apologise to more people than in previous months!

Actually, it was all down to my walkthrough for the Submachine Adventure, which was viewed over 1,000 times.

Google continues to deliver traffic by the shed-load - 1,800 hits in March - although the entire top 10 search terms has only two themes - Submachine and Getiffree.

Thankfully I still get mental search terms, and here are a few of the most tasty in March (these are the search terms that led people to click through to flanerie.org):

hung like a horse (that would be me, of course)
high heels crush a kitten
car wash in socks
beekeepers of massachussetts
kitten head went underwater what to do
how is the solar feeder of squirrel defence inc position in the market
why do kittens tails stick up
lambo pearls condom

I am not sure what freaks me out most: that people are entering these as search terms, that search engines include me in their results, or that people then click through.

Still, traffic is traffic. Now, I'd better get back to my plan for aquatic pachyderm world domination.

What was that?

The whooooosh?

Yeah, the whooooosh. What was it?

That was January flying past.

Oh, so it's February already?

Yep, enjoy it while it lasts.

Although January seems to have been in a real hurry to get it over with, it was also a month in which traffic at flanerie.org leapt up after three fairly flat months.

There were 2,221 unique visitors, up from 1,863 last month, and they made 6,151 visits in total. Iceland slipped from third to fifth in the country rankings, but what the heck was it doing at third anyway?

The most popular individual post page was the Submachine Adventure Solution, and after the blog traffic exchanges, the site that gave me the most hits was Miss Elly.

The search engines were flanerietastic in January with a doubling of hits, including some very odd ones. Here is a sample of the sensible ones - people entered these in a search engine and select flanerie.org from the results:

flanerie
gerald
submachine adventure solution
guardian crossword
simon frost citrix

And the mental ones:

posh his vice was her misfortune
wwho was the first man to set foot on the moon
winter fucking
sluts down on the farm
farm fucking sluts
fucking my wife in style
flanerie in the service of the state
sexy canals.org

Now that I know there is a demand, my next project will be to create a website of sexy canals.

In a feeble attempt to generate some traffic I have resorted to banner advertising.

My first attempt was spectularly lame so I am not even going to display it here, but if you really want to see it, go look here, although it did get a 1% click through.

My second attempt I am rather please with, not least because it means I have mastered some of the basics of my graphics package, the wonderfully named GIMP.

It is getting 1.24% click-through which is bad. If the rate doesn't improve I will have to go out and buy a puppy to kill.

Regular visitors might have noticed the appearance of some text links on the left for various commercial sites, plus slightly more advertising on the rest of the site.

The aim is to earn some commission, but not because I need the money. This site costs me $10 a month, and when converted into English Nuggets, is a tiny amount. The commission will be going to charity.

So far I have earned a sum very close to zero and on current trends I won't reach the payment threshold until 2015, but hey, every little helps.

So click on links and use my search box in the knowledge that one day, in the very distant future, it will help someone somewhere.

For starters, here are my Amazon links:
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com

Once I reach a payout threshold with one of my partners, I will take nominations for a beneficiary :-)

After a lot of research and even more trial and error, I have managed to create user-selectable styles.

Over in the right sidebar is a 'style selecta', currently with two styles, Temple and Sedna. Simply select from the drop-down menu and the site will be reskinned.

It is also cookie-based, so you will keep the selected style for your next visit.

The biggest problem was styling the Amazon and Google ads so that they blend in with each style, but thankfully there are people out there who are way smarter than me, and are happy to share their knowledge.

Please test it and post a comment if it doesn't work properly. I will try to get a couple more styles created over the coming weeks.

Flânerie.org had 1,787 unique visitors in October, up from 1,383 in September. There were 4,287 total visits and 10,037 page views. Which must mean that people are coming back. Possibly even voluntarily.

The search engines are getting used to having me around, and they delivered 112 page views, more than double last month. Google leads the way of course with 58, but MSN is still batting above its market share with 39.

If you search on msn.com for 'ipod dying' I am listed 3rd. 'happy birthday thatcher' has me 10th, and most bizarre of all, 'birdland bourton' has me 2nd, one place above the official site of Birdland in Bourton. MSN must love me, or something. Definitely something.

Yahoo is still lame, but six other search engines joined the scrum this month - Dogpile, AllTheWeb, A9.com, AOL, Excite and Ask Jeeves.

My tracking software also tells me what people were searching for when the engines steered them to my site. Top of the list is flanerie, natch. Guardian Crossword is 2nd, then a whole load of search terms that relate to my posts, plus a couple which don't - 'blg' and 'woman survives 30 000ft fall'. Quite wtf those are about I don't know, but hey, I'm grateful for the traffic.

The other vaguely interesting thing my tracking software claims is that 107 of my unique visitors have bookmarked me. Which seems like a lot.

Of the 10,037 page views, a little over half were viewed from the USA and a little under a quarter from the UK. The remaining quarter were viewed in 50 different countries. Strewth. Fifty! It is probably safe to assume that most regret the visit, but I am tempted to try to make the site more welcoming to Brunei, Denmark, India and Argentina.

Which is just a weak excuse for more flânerie.org bollocks.

I received an email from Amazon yesterday: "Amazon.co.uk Associates--Activate Your Account Now". It goes on to suggest I place links on my website and possible even banner ads.

I do indeed have an Amazon Associates account and I use it for both banners ads, for example in the right-hand sidebar, and specific product links, as on the left-hand sidebar.

So my account is already active. Indeed if I go to the Associates extranet I can see that I served over 10,000 impressions in Q3 2005 and there were 54 click-throughs. But no orders.

All of which reveals two things:

Firstly that the script that sends out the associates emails is lame. My account is very active, it just isn't successful. What the email should have said was 'Improve your conversion rates numb nuts' and list a few tips on ad placement and ad relevance.

Secondly, my UK readers are not doing the decent thing and navigating their Amazon shopping via my links. So support my idle lifestyle by ordering via my links and I will be moderately grateful.

And two and a halfly, since most of my visitors are US-based I should serve Amazon.com ads instead of .co.uk

I am working on a redesign of the site, although it is probably at least a couple of months from being ready to go live.

The draft site is here, and the plan is for a new colour scheme, redesigned sidebars, a new banner and better titles.

Currently the draft site has horrendous pastel shades, but that is only to show clearly the different divisions within the code. At the moment I am erring towards a pale grey/blue background, with darker panels for the sidebars and the central content. Individual posts will probably be boxed.

The new menus are rollover-style and apart from the colours, the ones on the right of the draft site are what I will use. I also want to change the look of the comment entry section, although I don't have any specific ideas yet.

But whatever I end up doing, rest assured that I have no plans to improve content and it will be drivel-as-usual.

According to feedvalidator.org my atom feed is non-compliant with Atom 1.0.

Three questions:

1. Is there an Atom 1.0 compliant MT3.2 template?

2. Does anyone read atom feeds anyway?

3. Is atom named after the smallest unit of matter (which is made up of three quarks and therefore isn't) or does it refer to A to M which, according to my friend Pervy Pete, means something rather unpleasant.

Over time more people will return by choice, so the theory goes, or will find this site via search engines and links on other sites.

The exchanges I use, and my impressions of them, are:

BlogClicker - gives me the most traffic of the three, and a good range of sites to view, but is low on features
BlogExplosion - close on the heels of blogclicker for traffic, but with way more features
BlogAdvance - the least traffic, by some way, as it is a very new site; but it has the best community spirit.

When I step down to two exchanges, it will probably be BlogClicker that I drop, since banner impression can only be bought with cash, whereas BlogExplosion lets me buy them with blogview credits; and I am figuring that BlogAdvance will grow quickly due to a strong community.

Meanwhile 55 visitors were supplied by search engines, somewhat contrary to broader market shares, with 28 from MSN, 24 Google and 3 Yahoo. Rather spookily, if you search for 'perfume quiz' on MSN search, my blog entry of that title is ranked number 1. Equally spooky is the non-performance at Yahoo. I need to do some research on Yahoo SEO.

The other highlight was being quoted on slate.com (here) which delivered 20 visitors.

Which is nice.

Not than I am blogging for traffic. I am blogging to improve my writing, which is one of my 43things, but the traffic helps to judge what I do, and also encourages me to keep it regular, as it were.

And in that, the blog exchanges provide many many examples of well run blogs, giving both the inspiration and ideas to do better.

P.S. All of the links to the blog exchanges above have referral codes which gain me a few extra credits if you sign up so, like, get on with it ;-)

I am an accountant and business professional. I am good at what I do because I can foresee consequences and can think of better ways of achieving the same result. I am creative. In cliche-talk, I think outside the box.

If food could only be bought with art, I would have starved to death many years ago.

So... if anyone would be kind enough to create something better, I will be exceptionally grateful. And, y'know, it's not going to be difficult to improve on my oafish opus.

Details of the favicons spec are here. I made mine using GIMP 2.2, and it's not the fault of the software that my attempt is so lame.

I am trying to figure out the best colour/font scheme for the site. This will take some time, possibly years.

While in progress, there will be several versions of the site.

www.flanerie.org for the current preferred version and then
www.flanerie.org/index1.htm (and index2, index3, etc) for other versions.

Red definitely doesn't suit the site, and will be banished shortly.