The Artesea

Following on from Charlotte’s post here on her views from the Wikio stats, I’ve gone through MyBlogLog and extracted the top 10 LibDemBlogs based on click throughs.

There are some major caveats in the stats:
a) these are clicks from LibDemBlogs.co.uk, this doesn’t include people who use the RSS feed, those who have sites in their own RSS feed readers/aggregators, sites which are accessed via bookmarks or those linked from other bloggers.
b) I only checked the “top” 50 blogs, as the current method needs me to enter each url in to the MyBlogLog one by one, and wait for the results. This means that a long tail blog could have been missed.
c) Those who post lots will have more clicks to their sites, this doesn’t mean that they are more popular.

Yesterday afternoon I had to make a big decision. Whether it was finally time to stop working on LibDemBlogs. Attempting to read over 200 blogs every 30 minutes, every day was causing a massive strain on my shared server. I had already received some polite but threatening emails from my hosting company and knew without moving packages to at least a VPS it would continue. The problem being my bank account currently has no cash and the £300 upgrade fee it’s exactly small change. As my server also hosts a couple of local party sites, my blog, LibDig and some other random stuff, I decided that to keep those up and running I could no longer run the cron tab which updated LibDemBlogs in the background.
So I posted a message on LibDemBlogs informing people of what was happening, and asked for donations to get the site running again. In the last 12 hours I have already received 29 donation and three requests for my details to send a cheque (payable to Ryan Cullen, posted to 27 Gibbeson Street, Lincoln, LN5 8JP).
I have now received enough money to pay the upfront costs to host LibDemBlogs for a year and am waiting for the new server to be configured. Once this is done I can start the process of transferring all the files from the old machine to the new one. I hope to get most of this done over the bank holiday weekend.
The last step will be waiting for the DNS servers to update across the internet pointing everyone to the new site.
For the time being I will be making manual updates to LibDemBlogs through out the day.

Ryan

…content to the right, here I am, stuck waiting for the page to load as you’ve got some Javascript widget which takes forever to load and I give up reading your site.
It’s also really bad when trying to read your blog on a mobile* as you have to scroll past lines of links to blogs that I don’t care about just to read the punchline.
So if you are a blogger and are looking for a new template, make sure the sidebar is on the right and if you do insist on it being on the left, use CSS to ensure that the blog post appears in the HTML first.

*slight lie, with my new fancy phone webpages look the same as if they were on a PC but my wife still has the problem.

I’m just wondering, because when something goes wrong on LibDemBlogs, it seems that you no longer email me, but instead write blog posts. Which due to things going wrong mean I can’t see them!

I have now spotted the second “Am I banned?” post, which tries to make out that the blogger is a victim of a secret LibDem blogging conspiracy, whereas emailing me would have got the answer quickly.

Then when LibDemBlogs goes down because my webhosting company think it’s funny to display error messages instead whilst I’m busy at work, do bloggers think “I’ll just drop Ryan an email to let him know, I’m sure I’ve got his email address around here somewhere as I emailed him before about being added to the site”? Nope, instead they post on their blogs “Who has stolen LibDemBlogs”, or visit forums or cix and try to guess what has happen.

My email address and information about why your posts might go missing is included in the About (FAQ) section of LibDemBlog, I suggest some of you might want to read it.

The eagle eyed of you may have noticed the “Tweets” tab on LibDemBlogs. With conference now starting (I’ll be there tomorrow), it though it was time to let the latest project go live.
Liberal Tweets is a sort of LibDem Blogs for Twitter and hopes to cover the micro-blogging experiences of those both at conference and away from the venue.
It’s still in quite an early phase, but hopefully will hold out whilst I’m away from ftping for the week.
Feedback and suggestions in the comments.

Some of you may have noticed LibDemBlogs going down today. Turns out after two hours of code checking and finding nothing odd, I discovered that my webserver had run out of file space. This meant that the dump file of all the blog posts couldn’t be saved in full, and in turn made LDB look ugly.
Luckily for me I only needed to delete some rather large temp files to get my file space back to normal. Hopefully future service will be a bit more realiable.

I’ve spent the last month working on a new version of LibDemBlogs, most likely you are now reading this on it.

The most obvious change is the new theme, which is modified version of the Rainbow theme from Theme Lab. The old theme has been around for two years now, and didn’t actually work in IE6, so it needed replacing.

The newest feature is the Mute function, this allows you to hide/silence blogs that you don’t want to read. More info about this feature can be found in the about pages.

Some of you may have already seen the new version of the mobile site which went silently live a few weeks ago. It’s moved url to m.libdemblogs.co.uk partly because mobile phone companies shouldn’t try to adjust the layout, and also because the url is easier to type. (No need to update bookmarks as you should be redirected automatically).

On top of these front end changes the whole back end has had a refit. When I first started LibDemBlogs the project was set up to allow others to use my code, since then so many changes have been made that it got in quite a mess. For example all the blogs were stored in a text file. With only 20 blogs to edit it was quick and simple, now with a list 285 bloggers it was clearly time to move to mySQL with lovely indexes.

Now whilst I’ve had the site running in beta for a few weeks, I’m certain that something will go wrong, so please do let me know.
I hope you like the new design, but if you don’t sorry, I’m not changing it again for another few years.

Sorry for all you Blogger bloggers. I upgraded my webserver to PHP5 and didn’t notice that one of the scripts used in LibDemBlogs no longer worked. What this meant was that the site thought all your posts were made on the 1st Jan 1970 and so didn’t bother to display them.
I’ve now found the offending piece of code and hopefully everything should be back to normal by now.
I did wonder why it was so quite on the site, but I just assumed that everyone was in Crewe or Henley.

No, not Mark’s post from earlier, but the random Euro signs which have appear across LibDemBlogs today.
There seems to be a character set issue between my server and everyone’s RSS feeds, so when people used fancy curly quotes they just appeared as garbage.

The true problem will need to be fixed, however for the time being, I’ve just got a find and replace script instead.

With LibDemBlogs now in it’s forth year, I thought I would display some stats.

We started the year displaying 108 bloggers, and today we have 168.

The most popular blogs were:

1. Liberal Democrat Voice (5,284)
2. James Graham (1,523)
3. Jonathan Calder (1,410)
4. Jonathan Wallace (1,364)
5. Paul Walter (1,136)
6. Nich Starling (977)
7. Linda Jack (749)
8. Duncan Borrowman (741)
9. Jonathan Fryer (644)
10. Andy Mayer (573)

Most popular posts:

1. Sajjad Karim defects to Tories (124) – LibDemVoice
2. Team Clegg: in full scale meltdown? (110) – James Graham
3. Is Sajjid Karim as big a scumbag as he is being made out to be? (108) – Nich Starling
4. The verdict on Huhne and Clegg’s fuzzy polls (106) – James Graham
5. Lib Dem leadership update (100) – Steve Webb
6. Take it down, Chris (99) – James Graham
7. Nick Clegg up close (98) – Paul Walter
8. Shock candidate for Lib Dem leader (97) – Jonathan Calder
9. A new banner for Team Huhne (97) – Nich Starling
10. Huhne’s campaign turns negative (96) – Anders Hanson

The most popular days to blog:

1. 18th December (136) – Clegg wins, Steve Webb not real
2. 15th October (102) – Ming quits
3. 18th November (102) – Calamity Clegg-gate
4. 20th November (102) – Some disks go missing
5. 26th November (101) – Saj Karim defects

Days which had high posts to blogs ratios:

1. 18th December (0.8395) – Clegg wins
2. 10th May (0.7500) – Blair finally goes
3. 24th January (0.7170) – Campbell “Troops home by October”
4. 15th October (0.7034) – Ming quits
5. 21st March (0.6967) – Browns last budget

The quietest days:

1. 25th December (20) – See, even bloggers have lives
2. 26th December (20)
3. 2nd June (23)
4. 8th April (24)
5. 25th August (24)

Browsers:

1. Internet Explorer – 68.50%
2. Firefox – 24.35%
3. Safari – 3.85%
4. Opera -2.20%
5. Mozilla – 0.66%

Page stats:

• Visits: 148,760
• Unique Visitors: 25,591
• Page Views: 310,321
• New visits: 16.78%
• Visits to the mobile version of the site: 4,267 (1.38%)

Whilst most of the search referalls were variations of Lib/Liberal/Dem/Democrats/Blogs some which caught my eye were

• brian paddick latest leaflet (229)
• conservative half-price bus and tram travel (145)
• christianophobia (28)
• miranda piercy wedding (27)
• don liberali who (24)
• harry potter and the deathly howells (6) – I always thought their was something dodgy about that Will!

Some caveats, only the most recent 10 posts per blogger are shown on LibDemBlogs, so some archive pages might not contain all the posts on that day. The most popular blog is counted by the number of click-throughs to the main URL of a blog, it is excluding all links direct to blog posts. The most popular posts only count those clicked directly on the title of the post on LibDemBlogs, excluded is any links followed via the RSS feed, or people who clicked on the authors name.

Happy 2008!