Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Site statistics

Even with two significant technical hiccups in the month, with visitor numbers dropping below 100 per day while the site was closed, site traffic for the month was substantially up on September, with more than 16,000 unique visitors. The missing days did however drop the publishing rate - we published 23 new articles in October, from 28 in September, and 887 comments, from 991 in September. We didn’t publish 21 abusive, content-free or incomprehensible comments, and 12 under the 5-post rule - C Parsons and Jay White accounted for almost all of the latter. Total intended for publication and not published 33/920=3.6%.

As a result of the hiatus, we have a small backlog of articles to post, and have already published 7 in November so far. We'll keep publishing two a day until the backlog clears.

Finances

Income in October was $170 in donations and $201.77 from ads: total $371.77, versus expenditure of $569.81.

Site troubles

As noted during the month, we lost comments for a couple of days, fixed by a MySQL database repair: apologies that my having gone troppo in the Daintree without leaving the keys to the DB prolonged that beyond the hour or two it would normally be before it got fixed.

As also noted, the more major outage was actually caused deliberately by our hosting provider: and, since they hadn't told us they were going to do that (or that they had done that), we wasted three days trying all sorts of fixes to things that weren't broken. Once their support line deigned to reply to our repeated requests, the problem was fixed within a few hours, and a drupal module was enabled that will optimise the DB every 6 hours, hopefully banishing the underlying problem. Despite my dummy-spit during the aforementioned three days, this was not in fact a problem with drupal, and with hindsight it is a remarkable testament to the robustness of drupal that the site had functioned essentially without maintenance or or optimisation from December 15 to October 27.

We are obviously unhappy with the performance of the host over this, but the prospect of moving has been put in abeyance while Margo and I explore the possibility of sharing certain technical and commercial back office aspects with another drupal-based site - a positive first meeting was held on Friday, and we'll report more as it progresses.

Margo

Even though it was in November, we have to report for those that missed it that Margo dipped her toe back into the Webdiary water for a few hours yesterday afternoon, learning how the editing system works. She may drop in again from time to time when she's feeling up to it.