DougWeb – Doug's home on the Web

Tweaking the look of these pages in the past has always been hard, because I’ve had to change some code, upload it to the server, refresh page, write more code, upload it, refresh page….and anything that broke would have also broken for someone trying to visit the page. Because of this I took a very cautious approach.

That’s been because all my previous attempts to get Apache (web server), PHP (programming language) and MySQL (database) working together on my machine at home ended in failure. Thanks to my discovery of XAMPP^[1], this is no longer a problem, so I’ve been able to make more extensive changes to things without fear of inconviencing anyone else. My 404 error page is snazzier as well, including a reference not only the page that you tried to access, but a time-wasting narrative as well (try it!). It now works for the blog as well.

I’ve also managed to beat into submission most of the remaining Internet Explorer bugs on the site – the only one I’m aware that remains is the fuzzy header on the sidebar

^[1]XAMPP is combined installer for all of those web tools and more. The best part being that all of the necessary configuration is perfomed automatically.

As of 4pm today, DougWeb is hosted by Site5 rather than Lunarpages. Not only are they cheaper ($6.95/month) – I get more hosting for my money, as well as a zippier site. And Site5 are willing to pay off old hosting contracts (within limits!), so I haven’t lost out by switching.

It’s not that I was upset with Lunarpages – they’ve been fantastic. But Site5 are offering a fantastic deal that anyone would be hard-pressed to beat. Thanks to Doron Rosenberg for the recommendation.

Everything should be fully transferred over, but please do let me know if you spot anything is missing!

I just spent most of yesterday revamping the available site statistics – I’m fairly sure I’ve eliminated all the referal(sic) spammers (apologies to anyone who really did find my site on maturewomen-nude.net, dangerousdongs.com or cheaptexaspoker.com – you aren’t counted anymore )

Benefits include a more accurate view of which countries my visitors are coming from, Firefox version detection and more detailed stats for the individual resource centre parts.

The resource centre is 1 month old today (31 days). Since launch, I’ve added more programs on an irregular basis (e.g. Crew2Profiler), and updated a few pages (e.g contribution guidelines).

The thing I find most amazing is that in the 30 days it’s been up and running – it’s clocked up an astounding 2119 visits!

It’s also dawned on me what the problem with the per-program stats was (I was using DVDFolks to test the stats with, and since the download links still pointed to the OLD location, expecting to see some downloads from the new location was expecting a bit much )

The feedback to this has been amazing – I’ve had offers of web space, guideline suggestions as well as numerous suggestions of various tools.

I’ve just uploaded a bunch of new stuff, and will add more as I get time.

The individual statistics will be available as soon as I figure out what isn’t working with them – in the meantime, the main page stats do contain this information.

As well as rejigging my code, I’ve also just launched the DVD Profiler Resource Centre. The idea behind this is to provide 1 place to find all of those nifty things that get announced in the forums, are praised as good ideas, and then sink into obscurity because no-one can ever find them again.

It’s labelled as a beta, for a few reasons – I haven’t added all the programs to the main page yet, I haven’t gone through and looked for errors (both HTML and spelling/grammer) and because I plan to implement per-resource download statistics. All the downloads are tracked, and will show up on the main site stats, but per-resource stats will be nice for the authors.

Please check it out (DVD Profiler in the menu bar), and let me know what you think.

At various times over the last few days, any attempt to access the site would have lead you to a black hole in the Internet.

Should be fixed now…

Since this site has outgrown it’s DVD-list-only past, I decided it was time to get a domain name that reflected that fact. You can now find the site at dougweb.org. The old address will carry on working until mid-March, but you should really update your bookmarks before then…

I’ve been looking over my statistics for the last few weeks and have noticed a couple of issues.

The first is that about 20% of my visitors appear to be some porn site sending a bot to my site (but using about 200 different urls for the referrer!) I noticed this because I like to see where my visitors have come from!

In English – I know if you came from Google etc, because Google’s URL was attached to your visit to the page. I had 200 different URLs that had apparently sent visitors to my site, but they all refered to http://blue.sexer.com/. All URLS that point to that site are now blocked from showing in my statistics (reducing my visitor numbers by about 40%).

Another thing I’ve noticed is that someone out there is visiting my page on a semi-regular basis using Netscape 4. This is an incredibly old browser that is virtually useless IMHO. If you visit my browser comparison page you can find a screenshot of Netscape 4 in action. Prepare to laugh!

I’ve recently been playing around with some visitor-tracking software with the site, the results of which are now available to you all. The software only got enabled on the 7th, so the results are not even 3 weeks old yet (and subject to change). So far this month (excluding myself)

• 182 unique people have visited my site.
• Saturday is the most popular day to visit.
• I have more South African visitors than UK ones! (The site is at the bottom of my posts at various web forums, but still!)
• I also have visitors from Holland, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Norway, New Zealand, Germany, France, Belgium, Finland, Austria, Sweden and Brazil.
• 6 different search engines have been to my page.
• 2 people have found my page using Google, and 2 using Yahoo.
• 78% of people leave after less than 30secs!
• but 5 people spent over 30mins (with 1 spending over an hour!).
• 96% of you use Windows (XP has an 80% share).
• 88% of you used Internet Explorer to visit my site, with a worrying 7% of you not using the latest version. Please visit my browser comparison page, and then get a newer browser!
• 1.6% of you used Firefox (my browser of choice). More of you should try it.
• Most people have a screen resolution of 1024×768, although 10% still use 800×600.
• 5% of you added me to you favourites/bookmarks.
• 81% have Adobe Reader installed.