That’s my blog up to date and a new theme applied.

So far the new theme : Suffusion is looking good.

I just need to have a look at all of the customisation options now.

Monday – Radio Scotland

The excellent Radio Scotland program Get It On is a theme based program where you can suggest songs that match the theme. On Monday, not only did Brian Burnett play a song for me, the whole program was based around a theme that I had suggested: Happy Then Sad.
Then, to top it all off, my song suggestion on his blog prompted some great donations to my fundraising page http://www.JustGiving.com/26Miles4CHAS for CHAS – Childrens Hospice Association Scotland.
A HUGE thank you to Bryan and all the listeners !

Tuesday – Instant Karma

I managed to finish work a little early on Tuesday so I headed home to avoid the usual M8 congestion.
I pulled off at Junction 5 – Harthill to phone home. Pulling into a little side street to use the phone safely, I realised too late that the road was thick with ice and muddy puddles and I got stuck fast.
A HUGE thank you to the kind gentleman who took the time to help me get my free.
Less than one minute after freeing my car and continuing my journey, a car was coming towards me with flames coming from under and around his engine compartment. I managed to flag him down, he had not realised that his car was on fire.
Neither of us had a fire extinguisher! As I had just been stuck I had my shovel handy. A few shovelfulls of snow and the fire was out.
I dread to think what the consequences would have been if my altered journey times and kind samaritan had not happend just as it did.

Thursday – Winner !

Since restarting my jogging at the start of the year I have been a huge fan of the ParkRun concept, a weekly free 5k timed run, especially my local Glasgow ParkRun in Pollok Park.
I found out on Thursday that I had been selected as February’s SweatShop monthly prize winner. SweatShop are one of the fantastic sponsors of ParkRun that help make this fantastic free event possible!
The weird thing was, on Monday I was considering buying a new pair of running shoes so that I could get them broken in in time for the Edinburgh Marathon on 23rd May!
Karma strikes again!

Friday – Bandwidth Issues

Walking to work on Friday morning I got an E-Mail on my Blackberry from PlusNet, my ISP and website host.
Due to my website using considerably more than my allowed bandwidth my website had been taken down.
I had no idea as to why this was, I expected a spike on Monday following the publicity on Radio Scotland but had no idea why the spike happened on Thursday or Friday.
It turns out that Real Radio were running their Bring £1 To Work Day campaign. Part of this included them spending the day at Rachel and Robin House and soing a broadcast from there.
Some intrepid Googling turned up an mp3 that I had on this site of when Emma went to Real Radio with her friends from Rachel House. I have removed the file from my site and this is what casued the bandwidth problems. If you would like a copy, email me and I’ll find an alternative file host.

photo credit: Mexicanwave

More soon !

Twitter

I have invested a lot of content to Twitter this year.
This is primarily due to the convenience of the platform racking up almost 1200 updates in the year here.

Flickr / Photography

I can’t find a way to get stats for the year so here are my top five photos:

Web Site / Blog

By far the most popular post on the site was the photos page here.
Second most popular page is the “About Me” page here.
As for the blog entries themselves they rank at:
1 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Conditional Prompts
2 – Crystal Xcelsius – Filtered Rows From A Filter Component
3 – Modelling Change In Your Dimensions
4 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Change Data Tracking
5 – Dimensional Modelling – Facts
As you can see here the site only really started getting traffic last January so that gives me 17300 page views.

Personal Stuff

Obviously the biggest news of the year was the passing of my daughter Emma.
Celebrating the Life of Emma Berry Goodman
And the year ends on another low point with the passing of another member of my extended family.
George Miller – Footballer | 1939 – 2008

History

I used the wp-upgrade addin to automatically upgrade, no errors, but no visual editing.
I then did a fresh install, on the same host, using the same database, just with a different table prefix. Everything worked fine.
I then backed up all of my files, deleted the old site, copied the new one in it’s place. I then copied the relevant folders back from my old site, wp-content.
Same result, no visual editor.

I have re-enabled this functionality in case anyone needs it, I know that I prefer to log in this way !

I had no problems with the upgrade process at all.

The onmy thing that I have noticed is that the OpenID plugin has stopped working, I’m the only one using it at the moment so I have disabled it for the moment until I get a chance to investigate it.

In creating this post I have noticed that my Flickr and Photo Dropper plugins are also not working.

photo credit: pbo31

I recieved an e-mail from PlusNet the other day informing me that my site had exceeded it’s traffic allocation.

I should have known better, I had not even investigated what the limit was until that point!

It turns out that Plus Net give you 250Mb/Day.

Fairly generous thinks I, using the stats generated by the WordPress plugin, I am averaging about 40 visits per day, 181 is my best day ever. Using the WordPress stats it was quite difficult to see where the usage had come from. It was then that I remembered that PlusNet give you access to Webalizer statistics as part of the hosting.

The day in question was the 3rd of April.

WordPress told me 34 views

Webaliser told me:

Hits : 8900
Files : 8400
Pages : 7800
Visits : 330
Sites : 118
Meg : 392 !!!

So, question 1, why the big discrepancy between the WordPress stats and the Webaliser stats?

Question 2, which is correct?

The good thing about the webaliser stats is that they allow be to look in detail at how my site is being accessed and where from.

It turns out that the problem lay in 2 visitors from Greece who in two visits send 10000 hits and downloaded 469 Mb from my site.

The page generating the traffic was my Photos page, here I link to all of the Flickr photos and the groups that I access. I can only presume that one of the groups had a “large” photo on their page, which was then mapped onto my page.

For the moment I have removed my group photos from the page to appease PlusNet.

I’ll now have to keep an eye on both sets of stats and see which I believe most.