I’m not going to present charts of statistics.  You can find some around the web. I am going to present my observations and a small amount of the data behind them.

Ranking Systems

I have used three ranking systems to follow my own sites and/or blogs:  Technorati authority, Google Page Rank, and Alexa.  Of these, Technorati seems to be primarily a way of comparing popularity of blogs, not by the number of readers, but by the number of links to the blog content.  I have found it to be relatively consistent and to give a decent idea of which direction your blog is going.

Google page rank appears at the moment to be largely a prestige thing, but to the extent that I can observe, it seems to be fairly accurate.  This doesn’t mean there aren’t significant glitches, with lousy content moving to the top of the heap and good content lost at the bottom.  But if I look at my own book catalog, for example, books that I know have been reviewed online many times will have better page rank than books that have not received such attention.  My current understanding is that page rank doesn’t play much role in the placement of search results, but that could change.  I suspect that some of the same logic used for page rank does play such a role.

Alexa is another matter, as its rank is based on visits to the site.  According to the Alexa web site, results aren’t reliable for sites that are not in the top 100,000.  I can’t test this directly, as none of my sites are in the top 100,000.  I do have a number that are in the 200,000 range, however, along with many that are less popular.

A few weeks ago I decided to try an experiment with Alexa rankings on my least popular sites.  These were sites for individual books that are only linked from the book’s catalog page, and thus get only a subset of those who might be interested in that book.  Examples include lukestudy.com, liberalcharismatic.com, speakforgod.info, and grieftolight.com.  All four of these sites were in the several million range when I started the experiment.

What I did was visit them with a browser equipped with the Alexa toolbar once daily for a few weeks.  This was just a quick visit, long enough to allow the page to load.  According to Alexa, again, they count only one visit from the same IP each day, and they do have a factor for traffic without the toolbar, but visits by browsers equipped with the toolbar are factored in.

If you check those sites you can see the results.  At one point all were under 1,000,000, a change that varied from -2,000,000 to -7,000,000 approximately.  A couple are now over 1,000,000, because the experiment is over.  What I found was that once I got into the 500,000 to 1,000,000 ranks, my own visits had little impact.  There are other ways to confuse the ranking system, but I suspect that the Alexa rule of only counting one visit per IP per day reduces the possibility for really gaming the system.

While I do not recommend or approve of gaming the system, I do think it is valuable to know just how reliable a ranking system is.  If one can alter it just through one’s own single visits, then one can’t be sure just what the competition is doing.  It appears, however, that Alexa is quite correct–these lower traffic sites simply don’t get enough of a sample to make their statistics usable.  My take would be that below 1,000,000 Alexa stats have a shred of validity, below 500,000 they are often reliable, while only below 100,000 are they truly accurate, which accords reasonably well with what Alexa says about them.

I was unable to push any site below 500,000, and the couple that I tried tend to remain in the same range even without my attention.  It appears that the ranking becomes progressively more reliable, as one would suspect, as one approaches 100,000.  The only surprise there was that a single daily visit from a browser equipped with the Alexa toolbar had that much impact.  (Note that I use a variety of browers with various toolbars to observe web sites.)

Now for stats.  I have kept an eye on several sources of stats, including AWStats, Webalizer, SiteMeter, wp-stats (for my wordpress blogs/cms sites), and Adsense impressions.  I have observed for some time that many of these indicators do not agree on the popularity of a web site.  It is not simply a difference in the totals.  Sometimes one indicator will go up while another will go down.  I have had days on which a site shows more traffic via its stats program, while Adsense reports many less impressions.  SiteMeter and wp-stats don’t always agree, though they are very close.

I found quite a number of claims on the web that Webalizer reports higher numbers than AWStats.  I have only been using the two side by side for a week, but my results differ a bit here.  For any blog or CMS based site, Webalizer shows higher page views and to a lesser extent higher visits.  In some cases the page views in Webalizer are more than double those in AWStats.  But for simple page based sites the numbers are closer, and I even found some in which Webalizer reported less page views than AWStats.  I don’t know why this is and I intend to keep observing.  The difference is about 25% overall for he set of sites I used, during the week in question 80,000 page views reported by AWStats and 100,000 reported by Webalizer for the same set.

Because those methods that I would a priori regard as more accurate (wp-stats and SiteMeter) tend stronly to lower numbers, generally substantially lower than either AWStats or Webalizer, I am inclined to believe AWStats more than Webalizer.

Note, of course, that SiteMeter requires that their graphic on your page be loaded, so quick passes  by your page might not count.  I’m not certain, but I’m guessing wp-stats might be subect to a similar problem.  Also, wp-stats is not going to count reads in an RSS reader, but then neither will anything else.  They might, however, count the RSS readers’ loads of the feed from your site.

None of this is terribly scientific, but I do feel that I’m getting a better handle on just what each of these methods is good for–and what it is not.

I did not need to delete the files indicated, however, I had to delete folders.db, also in folder “local.”  That fixed the problem.

Always, always back things up before deleting files in this fashion!

I have already encountered some of the programs mentioned on various computers.  This should just be another warning to:

1. Keep your anti-virus products up to date
2. Keep your backups current
3. Be very careful what you download from the internet

McAfee’s SiteAdvisor is very helpful.  Don’t download if the site doesn’t check out healthy.  There is no absolute safety, but if you do all of these things, you will have less problems.

If you are one of my customers and are in doubt about how to respond to a Windows dialog or whether some piece of software is safe, get on the phone and call me.  I’d rather hear about it right while you’re working on it.  Sometimes I can prevent further problems.  Be sure to describe what you’re seeing accurately and completely when you call.

There’s a helpful series on GIMP right now at OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas.  You may ask what GIMP has to to with OpenOffice.  Well, not much directly.  But I can testify to the value of the combination of OpenOffice.org, particularly the Draw module and GIMP working together.  The illustrations and charts for one of my company’s recent books, The Messiah and His Kingdom to Come: A Biblical Road Map, were done with that combination to quite good effect.

You can find all the posts in this series via this link.

There does seem to be an “everything must be free” attitude in the open source community. I don’t know enough to say whether this results in precisely what the article suggests, but I have had difficulty with getting drivers, and I can certainly testify that the graphics people aren’t going to give up Photoshop for one of the open source alternatives that do not do everything they want.

Note, however, that I’m typing this on my Linux desktop on which I do most of the work for my publishing business–just not the graphics that I always hand to contractors in any case.

Many of these will look obvious to you, but since I started in the Computer BBS world back in the mid 1980s I have noticed that things people take for granted in their daily social interactions are ignored in electronic media.

People want value from a business or they aren’t going to read.  If they don’t read, they won’t hear about your products.  You need to write something or share something that is valuable in itself.

(Heading off to think of something worthwhile to write!)

I don’t have the minimum 30 days experience Michael suggests with Blogger, but I do with both Wordpress.com and self-hosted Wordpress, and I also have some experience due to dealing with questions from the Moderate Christian Blogroll community.  I found that my experience agrees with his.  It is much more difficult to do advertising and so forth on your Wordpress.com account than on Blogger, and of course either gives you less flexibility than self-hosted.

I found out the limitations the hard way, because I started out with a standard web site before blogging really got going.  (My Energion.com domain was first registered in 1997).  I was essentially “blogging” by posting essays on a regular basis using standard HTML, uploading them, updating directories by hand, and so forth.  So being used to the self-hosted idea already, I simply installed Wordpress the same way when I started blogging in 2005.

I learned about Wordpress.com via the Moderate Christian Blogroll blog, which I established specifically so that I could learn to understand the difficulties of Wordpress.com users.  I still do the very rare blogging that the blogroll requires there.

So I commend this article to those who are considering where to start blogging, or who are considering a change of platform.  It’s a good summary of the situation as it stands.

The mimeograph machine used a stencil in which the text or graphics were cut so that ink could seep through, thus getting to the individual copies.  You could even do color pages by running more than one stencil using a different color of ink, though the process was difficult.

An interesting variation on ditto, which was done quite cheaply, was a gel filled pan.  We would buy teaching materials on masters which could be set on the gel which would take an image of the contents of the page.  Then each sheet that was placed on the gel would get a copy of that image.  After a few copies, the image would fade.  If you waited long enough, you could do this again with the same gel, though eventually it would become too filled with leftover ink to be useful.

The reason I know this is that I worked as a volunteer in my very tiny private school starting when I was about eleven years old and on into my teens.  I had learned to type when I was 8 years old, a childhood decision I have celebrated through the rest of my life.  My handwriting is nearly illegible, but I can type consistently between 80 and 90 words per minute and in a hurry can attain well over 100 wpm.

The little school used a great deal of material prepared on the spot for their lessons, and there was no money for a regular secretary, so after school each day I would type masters, first the ditto masters, and later mimeograph masters.  The ditto masters were a bit easier to handle, but they were very hard to correct.  They consisted of a sheet of thick paper attached to a sort of reverse carbon paper.  When you typed on the front of the paper, the carbon stuck to the back of the sheet.  If you made any errors, you had to use a razor blade to scrape the carbon from the back of the sheet, and then type again.  It made me very anxious not to make mistakes!

The mimeograph sheets were harder to handle in the first place.  It was quite easy to get stray marks by scratching or folding them.  Our machine was a Gestetner, which I believe was regarded as a Cadillac of machines at the time.  The stencils were green and waxy.  Corrections were made with a fluid which would block the marks of the previous error.  Once the fluid dried, you could type something again.

For those used to modern typesetting programs, I must mention that in some cases I was asked to right justify text on these mimeograph sheets which involved counting out characters and adding spaces manually as you typed.  It wasn’t fun, and was hard to make look at all decent.

We eventually also did some sheet music this way, using special pens and symbol plates that were placed on both sides of the stencil.  Perhaps it would be clearer to say that you would place a rough plastic sheet behind the stencil and then used a guide of the shape (notes and various musical symbols) you wished to draw.  After the notes were placed on the stencil I would have to go through and type the words between the musical lines.  In that case errors were even more devoutly to be avoided, as too many corrections would make the stencil unusable, at which point the person who did the musical notes would have to redo their part.

In any case, reading this little post really brought back some memories.

Frank Ableson at Linux Magazine talks about replacing his laptop with a smart phone along with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse at his office and at home.  The technology for this all exists.  With cloud computing, much of what you may want to do can be done with any device that has a browser and a user interface that is, well, usable.

All of that exists, and a fairly substantial computer can be put in a very small package, always provided you don’t have to worry about the I/O.  Humans do mess things up!

In any case, I would say Ableson is right and many of us will be using the system he’s discussing in the not very distant future.