Keyboard troubles

Reading the Town Mouse blog today reminded me of my own, usually impatient, efforts to clean my laptop  keyboard. Once, approaching the task with enthusiasm and a brand new yellow duster, I managed to remove half-a-dozen keys at a stroke. I never discovered a way to refit them but fitting a replacement keyboard was easy.

My present problem is much more irritating because this laptop is less than two years old and the problem started several months ago (but outside the guarantee period, naturally). Quite why T I O L and N should have been the first to wear away I don’t know but wouldn’t you think they could make a keyboard that didn’t do this?  I never saw this problem after many years of use on any of the typewriters that I owned, and they all got far more pounding than any computer keyboard.

Spam, page views, Twitter, etc.

I have received a little flurry of comments today which were classified by akismet as spam and none of which was in any way relevant to the subject of the post to it was directed. So I have deleted all of them. Two of them, however, contained intelligible messages and so, just in case they weren’t actually spam, I propose to reply here.
To the person who complimented me on the choice of title for this blog, thank you. To the person who wanted to know how to connect to this blog using RSS – which seemed to be the same author as the previous comment but coming from a different domain – I am sorry but I cannot help as I have no idea. I don’t understand RSS or how to use it.
By the way, despite my misgivings of a few weeks ago I have not abandoned entirely my use of Alphainventions and Condron for promoting this blog. There is no doubt that they encourage page views, if nothing else, and if that produces a few more visitors who stop to comment, so much the better.
I have since found another way to promote the blog – Twitter. You must have heard of it by now. It is the “microblogging” service which allows posts (or in Twitterspeak, “updates” or  “tweets”) of up to 140 characters. If that seems a bit limiting, actually it is quite a fun challenge and you soon get used to it. The idea is to find other “twits”, “tweeters” oe “tweeple” (think about it!) with similar interests and to “follow” them. Others in turn will choose to “follow” you. Thus you become part of a network of people who hold conversations by exchanging tweets. The people and organisations that I am following have included various links in their tweets that, quite frequently, have directed me to interesting newspaper and magazine articles and to broadcasts and video clips that I would have missed. It has been very worthwhile although it takes a little time to get used to it at first and I have a lot to learn yet.. You can send tweets to everyone on Twitter or direct them towards specific fellow tweeters, or send direct to other tweeters but privately.  The service is free on your PC or laptop but you can also use it on your mobile phone. I don’t know about this aspect but suspect that it could become expensive, depending on what sort of contract you have with your provider,  as tweets are treated, in effect, as text messages.
How do I promote the blog on Twitter? Simply by writing a tweet or two, including the domain name of this blog, each time I write a new post, especially if the post is on a topic that is a current news item such as The Gurkha Justice Campaign or the petition in support of the whistleblowing nurse.
I hasten to add that Twitter is not a substiture for a WordPress  blog. Twitter is a totally different animal. Come to that, nothing else is a substitute for a WordPress blog either, judging by the comments that follow each time WordPress introduce a new feature.

Twitter, the busker and the “lost generation”

 I have been signed up to Twitter for almost two months and it has been both entertaining and informative. This evening I spent some time sorting out a small pile of sheet music and it reminded me to look on Twitter for others with similar musical interests. This led me to various online stories and I couldn’t resist including links to two of them here. The first is about musical education in UK schools and it reminded me how lucky I had been. The second is about that brilliant violinist, Joshua Bell and I won’t say any more in case I spoil the story.

Condron.us

My recent posts about blog stats, Alphainventions etc. have touched on two distinct issues. The key question was about the precise nature of the 17,000 extra “hits” on my blog last weekend allegedly caused by Alphainventions. I am no wiser about this but remain convinced that only a minority of them were genuine unique visitors to my blog. Quite a few more might have been attributed to separate page views and still more to the so-called hits caused by pictures and links within posts, not forgetting the same people returning for one or more subsequent visits on the same day.
The second issue was the whole question of “hits” and how they are measured. There seem to be numerous ways of viewing the contents of a blog without actually visiting it and there are, apparently, various features of the contents of a blog that can generate more so-called “hits”, depending on who is counting. The only hit that really helps me to assess the growing interest in the blog is the “unique visitor”. I regard a unique visitor as one person visiting any part of my blog irrespective of how many posts they read, how many pictures and/or links are in those posts, and how many times they return on the same day. Having looked at WordPress stats and Site Meter stats for just three days it is clear that they are counting different things where I would expect them to be comparable. And as I have no idea what they are counting or why there are discrepancies, I am not able to interpret them in ways that would benefit the blog so there seems little point in paying attention to them.
It is disappointing that site visitor statistics seem somewhat less useful than I had hoped but it is not a big disaster. In fact I agree with a point made by Philip Gibb recently, when he said that the important thing about blogging is communication rather than statistics.
Even so, I am curious about another site, Condron,  that looks a bit like Alphainventions so I think  must investigate!

Twitter

If you have been wondering what  Twitter is all about, this article might help. I joined Twitter a couple of weeks ago (username is Justwilliams) and have been well entertained and far better informed ever since. The secret seems to be to ignore what “everyone” is tweeting, most of the time anyway. It’s impossible to keep up with it all anyway. Instead, pick the people you want to “follow” with care so that they are relevant to the things that interest you. There is a “people search” thingy at the top of the screen and a general search at the bottom. Beyond that I will say no more as it is quite easy (and completely free) to use. Comments from other users are welcome.

Alphainventions – a conclusion shortly

It is late in the evening of March 18th and I have received no reply to my email to Alphainventions dated March 14th and no reply (from Alphainventions) to my comment on their site on March 16th. It doesn’t look as if a reply will be forthcoming so I have removed the Alpha link from my blogroll. This is because, first, I cannot recommend a site whose webmaster doesn’t appear to have the basic good manners (let alone the PR savvy) to reply to a perfectly reasonable question and, secondly, the absence of a reply, in conjunction with posts and comments by several other bloggers on blogs and forums that I have read, reinforces my suspicion that Alpha’s webmaster would rather not discuss the nature of my blog’s recent statistics because he doesn’t want me (or anyone else) to know the whole truth.
On another topic, thanks to Peter Salmon’s site I have discovered SiteMeter and have decided to give it a try. It compiles statistics relating to site visitors, page views etc. and looks as if it could be useful. I am hoping that WordPress and SiteMeter stats might complement each other and enable a more realistic interpretation of what is happening than either of them alone. I have also added Feedjit to this blog because it is interesting to see, in real time, where visitors are coming from and when.
I may well continue to test Alphainventions for a while to see whether, in conjunction with the new additions to my blog, I can arrive at any clearer conclusions about the seemingly inflated statistics – if they won’t tell me what their game is then I will have to find out for myself.

Alphainventions -v- Clustrmap

I started this blog in 2007 but did little with it until March 2008. Clustrmap was added in April 2008 and was counting visits to the site from April 14th. By the time Clustrmap started counting I had accumulated no more than 200 views in my WordPress stats. Therefore, I expected Clustrmap’s “visits” and WordPress stats “views” to increase at the same rate from April 14th, 2008 but they didn’t. A few days ago, before all ths excitement about Alphainventions started, Clustrmap had counted around 5,000 visits, while my WordPress stats said 8,000. It seems that they have been  counting different things – so what’s the difference?
I now await another automatic update from Clustrmap to see what it has made of the weekend views/visitors, which have amounted to approximately 12,000 according to WordPress.
As I write this it is 10.15pm on Sunday and, so far today, there have been 3,732 views according to WordPress, of which 3,500 came before 10am. According to my WordPress stats only 2,811 views were referred by Alphainventions. This is a handsome figure by any standards, especially on a Sunday when things are quiet in the blogospere (at least in my experience). But it means that I have had 921 views which are not accounted for in  my stats – yes, they are included in the daily total etc. but I have no idea where they came from!
It gets “curiouser and curiouser” and I wonder whether any of these statistics from any of these sources mean anything at all.

More (and more) Alphainventions

Should I be excited, delighted, elated or just plain fed up? I don’t know.
Yesterday, almost exactly 24 hours ago, I published the post about Money for Old Cars and went to the Alphainventions site straight afterwards to do the business there, as described in my previous  post. Normally, by doing that, I could expect to get perhaps 40-60 additional views at this blog over the following 24 hours. Yesterday was different. Within about an hour I had 200 views, which reminded me that I had not yet written a post about Alphainventions though I had been using their service (when I remembered) for some time.
So I wrote and published the post there and then, again visiting the Alphainventions site afterwards to follow the usual procedure. During the next hour, up to midnight, a further 200 views were added to my total. Naturally I was pleased about all those views and hoped that some of the “visitors” would become regulars. Beyond that, I thought no more about it and went to bed.
Imagine my surprise when the numbers of views were increasing still, and into the thousands, when I looked this morning. Now, however, I was not so happy.
I have been blogging more or less regularly, but not especially frequently, for about a year. In that time my total views had arrived at 8,000, there were 110 posts, and 375 approved comments.  That was 24 hours ago. I now have 3 more posts (including this one), 2 additional comments (one from a new visitor) and, wait for it…    … 15,303 views.
What I would like to know is, why did well over 7,000 views produce only one comment? It doesn’t make sense. What are these “views”? Are they real people just like my regular visitors? Or did that amazing increase in views include some WWW wizardry of a sort that I don’t begin to understand (like “pings” and “RSS feeds” and the like) but which is not real visitors to the site at all?
I have emailed Alphainventions requesting an explanation. I hope to receive a reply soon and until then I will reserve judgement.

Alphainventions.com

I have no idea how or why alphainventions.com do what they do but I know how it affects my blog and it has therefore earned a mention here.
So far as I can work out the idea is that, as soon as you have published a new post, you should click across to Alphainventions and fill in a couple of boxes. As a result of this your blog will join a short list of others that will be displayed, one after another, in their front page until displaced by still more bloggers doing the same thing. The net result is that you will get a noticeable increase in visitor numbers to your blog.
On arriving at the Alphainventions website it is necessary to wait for about a minute while the “My Blog” box near the top of the page prepares for you. When it display http:// you should fill in the rest of your blog’s address. Then select a category in the next box to the right (a drop-down menu) – choosing one that is relevant to your new post, then click on the button (next right) “Notify readers about my blog” and on a couple of pop-up menus that follow. That is all I have done so far. On the days on which I have followed this procedure, I estimate that my visitors have increased by anything from 20-60 over what I would have expected without help from Alphainventions. I hope that some of them will become regular visitors – that’s what blogging is all about after all.
I have yet to look further into Alphainventions. Perhaps it is possible to pay for longer periods of “exposure” and it may well be a viable proposition for those running business websites. So far I am happy to benefit from the free service and to spread the word about Alphainventions in return. This is not a recommendation but if, like me, you like what it can do for your site, why not give it a go?

More software hiccups

Today I remembered that, contrary to what I stated in a couple opf comments following my recent post entitled “Software Hiccups”, there are a couple of other software problems in my Vista laptop. One is very similar to the Internet Explorer problem that I described in that post but it affects Windows Explorer instead, which simply stops dead from time to time, for example when files are being copied from one folder to another.
The other problem is that I am unable run Windows Live Mail. When I try to do so I get a message saying that msmail.dll could not be initialized and that Live Mail may not have been properly installed. So, for a long time, so long in fact that I had forgotten about the very existence of Live Mail, all my email accounts have been web-based and I am quite happy with that.
I am a little miffed, however, that the great Microsoft has supplied software which didn’t survive for just one year, and that the means by which such problems can be rectified (if any) are far from clear to me.