Happy New Year with Three Years of ch-athens
This weblog has turned three. Three years of more or less lazy or busy "blogging". There's again more visitors, but not as dramatic an increase as I had in 2006. There's also me slacking a bit more, with the post frequency sometimes going down to a post every 3 or 4 days. I think the passing December was the worst month in that respect. I'm not going to worry or put pressure on myself there, when I have something to write, I'll unslack enough. But let's have a look at the passing year...
The last two years I've posted about the year that passed from the point of view of the weblog, this has turned into some kind of mini-tradition for me. You can compare to the January 2006 and 2007 posts if you want.
Number crunching
While I reported about 97571 pageviews and "almost 40000" visits for 2005, in 2006 I had roughly 243000 pageviews and 107000 visits. The 2006 numbers were a bit rough, because there was some downtime and some time where the stats weren't updated. And 2007? In 2007 my site clocked in at 342704 pageviews and 172383 visits. That means about 3-4 times what I had in 2005, or about a 40 - 60% increase compared to the last year. It's also almost 1000 pageviews per day.
All those numbers are just statistics, there's a certain amount of error in there, as some spammers and scrapers manage to get themselves counted, but it does not count in search engines like googlebot or most of the known spambots. It's also not counting just the weblog, there's a lot of traffic on the rest of my site too. While the weblog just turned 3, my site exists since 2002 as betabug.ch and since about 1997 or 1998 in some other incarnations on a providers site and on the Super Dimension Fortress.
Thinking back to 2007
Again there were some stories about little travels in 2007, but it was the first year in a long time that I didn't go to Limnos :-( still can't believe it. I also moved to a new appartment. Waited an incredible 4 months to get ADSL (for that waiting time I have to thank the state telecoms monopoly OTE and the "new telecoms biz" Vivodi in a joint fuckup). I finally got ADSL in the new appartment. In related news, I've got new flatmates too. Again we have an international mix, which makes for really good company.
On the computer and community side, this year I was trying to get a foot on the ground with HelMUG (the Greek Mac user group), where I'm a member of the board. It hasn't always been fun and there certainly wasn't happening very much, biggest exception for me was probably my PGP talk. I had much more joy with my contributions to Zwiki (a wiki software for the Zope application server). Since February I started to contribute little bits and pieces, which is very rewarding. Lots of little posts on the blog about that. Speaking of Zope: A few people doing Zope in Greece gathered during the year, with me occasionally dropping a post about these events.
One Zope related change to this weblog is the "Other Weblogs" list in the sidebar, it changed to the new MiniPlanet format. I'm enjoying this very much, as I can use my own blog as a feedreader now and maybe some other people (like Wu) find it useful too.
For a long time I had switched the blogs comments to being moderated. Finally I did some changes and amongst others I incorporated the use of the Akismet and Project Honeypot (using HoneyPotBL) services, so now I can leave comments open for a much nicer commenting experience if you as a visitor here feel inclined to say a word.
What are they looking for?
People come to my site looking for stuff (most often through Google, the other search engines are marginal). Some of the prevalent searches are people with stuck iPods, and people looking for dirty words in Greek. A new trend is people looking for "Greek Moves". The guess is that they are looking for "Greek Movies" and both fail to spell properly and find anything on my site.
The news... bad news
2007 was of course the year of big summer forest fires here in Greece. I wrote about what little I saw and little about all that I felt during the hard time when it happened. I was very quiet for some time afterwards. But unlike the news and the politicians, I will not forget.
As for the news: I was featured twice there. Once a paper here wrote about a bunch of foreign bloggers in Greece, then a Canadian TV station interviewed me (by webcam) about the fires.
Going on to 2008
I've spent new years eve together with the gf in Germany. We went to a friends place, where I showed off my l33t swiss Fondue skillz by melting 1kg of cheese and fooling the others to drip bread into it. After being well fed (and some people being overfed, those German's can't really eat very much it seems) we went out to drink with some more friends and then on to see the fireworks from a bridge. They do a lot of noise and fireworks here. I'm not such a big fan of fireworks, ever since I've experienced how much it scared my dog and cats. But being there in the midst of it and looking at it was impressive.