Mike Little’s Journalized

I can’t quite believe the growth in visitors to this site. Since I posted about my visitor count passing the quarter of a million mark on June 1st, I have had another 50,000 visitors taking the total count to well over 300,000! That’s 25,000 visitors a month. For little old me, I find that quite impressive. I’ve also had over half a million page views in that time. The page views counter passed three and a half million a while ago.

I know that being one of the feeds to the WordPress dashboard helps, but the vast majority of my visitors still come from search engines. Eleven of my top fifteen referrers are search engines. Of those, Google accounts for a whopping 76% of search engine hits. In fact, as I write this, the last 15 minutes has seen 15 unique visitors 12 of whom are visiting old pages via search engines.

With all this visitor activity, it certainly seems that my page caching is holding out ok. I still get some weird slow-downs on the server, but I think some of that is down to the statistics package I use, Power Pphlogger is starting to creak at the seams. I doesn’t appear that version 3 is going to appear any time soon, so I’m starting to look elsewhere.

It was my Mum’s birthday today. Happy 75th Birthday Mum!
Wow! 75 years is a long time. I think she was most pleased about getting her free TV licence!

Don’t forget we are only half way through WordPress Backup Week.

WordPress is celebrating blog security and protection with WordPress Backup Week July 23-30.

WordPress, one of the most popular blogging and website management tools, is sponsoring WordPress Backup Week July 23-30. Step-by-step backup instructions will be available in the online manual, the WordPress Codex, and online in the WordPress Support Forum to help you through the process.

There is lots of help on the WordPress Backup page, covering common hosting control panels like cPanel, Ensim, Plesk, and many more. It also covers using phpMyAdmin and other, simpler, methods. Lots of links to resources too. It’s worth a read, even if you have a backup routine, to make sure you are covering everything. You might pick up a useful tip to do it more efficiently.

Read on for the full press release. (more…)

I got a pingback from Adrian Trenholm who has written a great piece, 10 tips for safe cycling, partly inspired by my recent accident. He lists

1. Wear a helmet.
2. Know the rules of the road and stick to them
3. Concentrate.

and more, each with a good explanation why. I’d like to add a couple more points:

Look after your bike. In the past I have found that a combination of worn brake blocks, stretched cables, and wet rims meant that I suddenly found nothing was going to slow me down!

Don’t run red lights. This is really part of Adrian’s number two item, but I suspect the single most annoying thing cyclists do to city motorists is ignore red lights. Or rather, not ignore them, but go through them anyway. I know it annoys me when I’m driving, and I never do it when I’m cycling. Just remember that those drivers you’ve just left at the lights will be passing you in a minute. Only now they’re annoyed with you. When you need to swerve to avoid that pothole, they’ll be much less inclined to give you the room you need.

Adrian also has a great discussion, “Never, ever get into a fight with a ‘bike-hater.’” in the same post. I couldn’t agree more. I sometimes shock myself when I react badly to a car ‘buzzing’ me, or to a beeped horn because someone thinks I shouldn’t be on the road. It’s easy to want to be aggressive when you are ‘bullied’ by a car, but as Adrian says…

Let’s be clear about this: you might be in the right, but your antagonist has over a ton of metal at his disposal. When a cyclist mixes it up with a motorist, the cyclist will always lose. Just let the motorist go.

Don’t let us put you off though. Cycling to and from work is a great way to get fit. My trip home takes pretty much the same time as public transport, so I’m not taking more time out of my day. Because it serves a purpose (getting me home) it’s much easier to stick with it than, say, going to the gym. When I had a gym membership it was easy to say to myself “I’ll leave it tonight and go tomorrow… or next week”.

Give it a try. Get that bike out of the shed and try riding to work a couple of days a week.