Where Past Meets Future
Thanks to Mia, I’ve just found out that Past Thinking has been misbehaving itself and displaying an error like a cat proudly presenting a dead mouse to its owner…
The problem was with the theme I have been using, so I’ve enabled an alternative as I won’t be able to fix the problem until Sunday. But people can now see then words, which is arguably much more important than the looks :-)
I’ve just been having a look at the statistics for pastthinking.com to get an idea of whether anyone is actually reading this, and the results are surprising. Web professionals know that putting an exact figure on the amount of people who have visited (either once or repeatedly) is tricky to get right, and that is backed up by my experience elsewhere. For that website, I use 3 statistical packages to monitor and log visitor information (SmarterStats, UrchinStats, and Google Analytics), and they all give wildly different results.
Although I use Google Analytics on pastthinking.com, I rarely look at it, as I prefer the simplicity of Analog, an open source and refreshingly basic website statistics application. I prefer to go on successful page requests rather than the hazy and often misused “hits” or “unique visitors”.
Last month (July 2006), Past Thinking served out over 35,000 pages of information, which, for a humble heritage-computing blog isn’t bad at all.
What are people using to browse this blog? Well, for a change, thankfully IE isn’t the dominant force here:
If you combine the open source browsers, they outnumber Internet Exploiter by a nice margin. It’s interesting to see Google’s feedfetcher making an appearance, but still not matched by the frequency of Technoratibot.
More analyses soon - perhaps some comparisons with those from Google Analytic.
Past Thinking has moved! Update your bookmarks!
Past Thinking can now be found at http://www.pastthinking.com/blog/
The newsfeed http://feeds.feedburner.com/pastthinking remains the same, so there’s no need to resubscribe (all 15 of you!).
With the move, a few things might have gone awry, such as broken images or strange plugin behaviours. If you notice anything, please leave a comment below and I’ll fix it as soon as I can. Thanks!
So, from plain old “goskar.com” to “Past Thinking at goskar.com” it’s off to the shiny new land of a proper domain name: “Past Thinking at pastthinking.com”. With a bit of luck, there will be a lot more blogging about when the past meets the future.
I’m not too sure what will be on goskar.com, but I’ll announce news on Past Thinking when I’ve made my mind up.
Thanks for reading,
Tom
(and yes, it’s hosted by Dreamhost!)