From spam to mod_alias - finding resources
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-01-05 06:31:57 - Graham EllisNine articles on Spam and seven articles on scams ... ninety eight resources that mention spam and twenty five resources that mention scams, out of over fourteen thousand resources on our web site. It's amazing how our site has grown over the years. Looking at some more technical, you'll find 52 resources that mention mod_rewrite (53 when I post this!) of which 17 are primary resources. Add 29 on mod_proxy, 21 on mod_jk, and a handful on mod_alias.
Resources aren't limited to text, either; I don't know what you'll see presented to the left of this block as it's just one random image out of thousands.When I wrote my first blog jottings in the summer of 2004, I mused as to whether I would be able to keep it up - to some extent, I started because it was the fashionable thing to do, with little expectations that it would be running by that Christmas (178 resources), and with severe misgivings that it would be a flash(69 resources - it's a techie thing) in the pan. Yet it has kept going - why?
People don't just walk up Spa Road in Melksham huge number of resources), turn into our hotel (over 1000) and think "I'll go on a Lua Course today". They need to find us - and find us quite early, as we can be far more helpful as people initially learn than when they've been studying Lua (or Ruby or PHP) for a few months. And thus the technical resource that our web site has become.
Between 26th and 30th November last year (2008), our daily web traffic dropped by 50% - in just four days. From a log file of over 35 Mbytes to one that was less that 18 Mbytes. And I'm delighted. Because that was from a midweek peak to a weekend trough, it's part of a regular cycle that we see, and it confirms to me that a high proportion of our traffic is real, human visitors and furthermore that many of them visit us during their working week. By 3rd and 4th December, our traffic was back over 35 Mbytes per day again, with hundreds of people (literally) finding pages such as the one on MySQL joins and reading about how to upload an image via a web page and store it in a database. Of these visitors, the majority won't be interested on coming on a public course, and the majority will in any case me from "far far away". Looking back at yesterday - a Sunday, which is an awful day to analyse, only 16000 out of 90000 impressions were sent out to UK based IP addresses. But it's sales and marketing and it helps people be aware of us.
Conventional marketing looks at "conversion rates" - the number of flyers that are sent out per sale made - and our rate is truly low. Let's face it, if you're looking for code to add a PRINT button to a web page or to resize an image to fit the browser window, you're unlikely to want to travel to a different continent and go on a course for the purpose when key facts are available to you. But you will rememeber - perhaps bookmark - the site and come back. And the conventional "conversion rate" measure isn't quite so important, since the cost per visit on the web is extremely low (I have issues with the Google AdWords 'pay per click' method of marketing and feel it's not well suited to our approach - we could easily spend a lot of money on low quality traffic because of our resource-lead approach!)With good technical content being so critical on our site, it's also important that it's updated from time to time. Articles such as this one, with the data in it date related, clearly WILL age, and age gracefully, but some others need revisits and updates from time to time which is important but not urgent behind the scenes work. And the downtime over Christmas and the New Year - such is there significance that the cyclic access pattern breaks for a couple of weeks - is an excellent opportunity to do much of this work and also to put new, and underlying, algorithms for gathering popularity rankings and filtering material in place. And that's where I started with my counts of scams and spams ... and we are now making a tuned sitemap available to Google and Yahoo and others, telling them not only about the URLs that we would like to share with the world, but also giving them a relative ranking as far as we're concerned.
At the nuts and bolts level, lots of pages have been added / updated too - far, far too many to list - but I will encourage you to have a look through the following (and I'm fully aware that the "you" I may be addressing, deep in this post, is a search engine!). So - some new or refreshed pages that I haven't previously mentioned:Quotation for Meeting and Training Room hire
Hotel FAQ
Command Central
Web site Visitor Maps
Bowerhill Quiz
Latest News
Portrait of training course author and presenter
An introduction to C
And an introduction to C++
Christmas Quiz
Phishing not fishing - identity theft and other scams
Melksham Resources