• A couple of weekends ago my website host upgraded. My site was off for a while, but came back solid and a bit faster.

    But my statistics had changed dramatically. I had a fourfold increase in visitors. Some of the referring sites were most unlikely – grass track racing enthusiasts, insurance companies and a load of WordPress blog sites which were referring from the back office and not from blog entries. I did a whois check on some of these sites and found they were all hosted by my ISP.

    I imagine there is some sort of leakage going on between our sites. My users are being sent to pages about motorbike spare parts and a bunch of hairy bikers are learning all about Viking Vik!

    What’s also interesting is the search strings that people use to find my site. Many times they search google and add www. and .com at the end of their enquiries. I feel these people haven’t quite got a grasp of how internet addresses or internet search works.

    What makes someone enter www.allaboutshoorayner.com into a search engine? It’s a very unlikely web address and would bet much better results with spaces between the words. I get many variations of www.shoo.com and www. rayaner, things that look like web addresses that should go in the browser box at the top not into a search engine.

    I’ve taught a few absolute beginners on the net and they all have a preconcieved idea that Google is the net. That they have to type into Google to be able to get anywhere. I guess this is what is going on in my stats. Interesting.

    Meanwhile – appologies if you were hoping to buy some spare parts for your grass track bike!

  • Please still keep voting for me in the .

    You can win lots of lovely books if you do.

  • It’s always the same after I’ve done a major splurge of School and Library visiting. I get back home with the best intentions of getting on with some writing or illustrating. But I seem to spend two or three days being unable to do anything creative.

    There is all the business to sort out – the schedules to be revised and all those little internet things nagging away – the blog up dates, the website tweaks. I don’t know how a day goes by so quickly without seeming to have done anything.

    I suppose I have fixed the light in the kitchen that was driving my wife mad. And I picked up my Mum from the dentist and went to the bank and stuff. And I recorded a new Drawing School Video which is uploading at the moment. And I’ve sent a few emails and answered questions from Yellow Group in Year Two from Peel Common Infants and now it’s suppertime. Hey ho!