Hello to all from Chennai, Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar, Mumbai, Mahape, Iwade, Kaizuka, Osaka, Higashiosaka, Sakai, Izumisano, Naniwa & Yuasa. We hope you enjoyed the blog.

Also: hello to our lone reader in St. Helier.

• Absolute unique visitors: 1010
• Pageviews: 3580
• Time on site: 00.04.41
• New / returning visitors: 57.27 / 42.73

Breakdown

The most popular post this month was Doug’s comment on the economic disparity between Johnson and Livingstone voters.  We have benefited somewhat from links through from Liberal Conspiracy and Tory Troll.  We are confident such things are mutual

Please do not feel obliged, we understand how little time the internet and life in general can leave the average contemporary denizen, but be aware that even the briefer comments are very much appreciated. They allow us to gauge the reactions of our readership and also prevent us from feeling as incestuous in constantly commenting upon each other in lieu of you, our readers, doing it.

An editorial e-meeting shall be staged in which we shall establish a proper comments policy but for the time being try to avoid anything illegal and it should probably be left. All spam, however, shall be treated to our Iron Fist.

• Absolute unique visitors: 839
• Pageviews: 2652
• Time on site: 00.04.05
• New / returning visitors: 62.99 / 37.01

Breakdown

Again, Vamp produced the most popular piece of the month - and it was mostly a lengthy pasting from the Daily Mail.  Content displayed in the recommended articles box has relatively high click-through rates, which is as we would hope.  A few visitors came through from Liberal Conspiracy.  Welcome.  Some others came via Google, searching mainly about Richard Barnbrook and the BNP.  We’re always glad to be of service.

It would have been quicker to get my Grandmother to count the Mayoral votes.

Just her. By herself. By hand. On her own.

What do these machines fucking do? Laminate each ballot and dip it in yoghurt?

From here.

• Absolute unique visitors: 1023
• Pageviews: 3849
• Time on site: 00.04.39
• New / returning visitors: 62.88 / 37.12

Breakdown

This month’s most popular article was Vamp’s piece on the first televised Mayoral debate.  Traffic arrived from Iain Dale’s blog (always welcome, of course!).  This said, it was a rather good piece and deserves April’s crown.  The featured article graphics in the sidebar continue to deliver traffic at a level lower than one might expect.  Investigations and experimentations may be made soon.

As an aside, Google Analytics provides data of nearly 400 networks used to access the website in the past month.  This has thrown up some interesting results, although I will refrain from publishing them.

Tweaks

The biggest change to the website this month has been the introduction of tabs to the feature box on the homepage.  This is an imperfect system, and might be subject to further development at some stage.  The main concern is over the use of Javascript, which some readers have not enabled in their default browser.  For those who are interested, the code has been cleaned up a little, too.

March Statistics

• Absolute unique visitors: 457
• Pageviews: 1954
• Time on site: 00.06.34
• New / returning visitors: 58.15 / 41.85

Breakdown

The most popular articles continue to be Fenby’s series on Scientology.  Those featured in the “top story” box on the homepage also get above-average hits.  A stable level of traffic continues to reach articles seen in the “features” section of the sidebar, despite those particular articles being at least two months old.  Perhaps it is worth changing that section to show the most recommended posts?  Your thoughts would be appreciated.

Issues

We are aware of continuing problems with formatting on the homepage, chiefly with bullet points and numbered lists not rendering correctly.  Images also seem reluctant to stay where they are told, despite everything looking nice and rosy on the individual post pages.  The reasons for these problems are known, but solutions are not.  Yet.

Tweaks

No major changes are the pipeline - we are pleased with how things are going as they are.  However, the latest release of Wordpress (on which the site is built) has just been released, enabling us to do some new things and some existing things better, so slight tweaks might come soon.

(The earlier liveblog module is embeded below. WARNING: there may be auio issues if you click to play this live blog back.)

• 1,098 Visits
• 643 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 4,485 Pageviews
• 4.08 Average Pageviews
• 153 Posts in 59 Catergories
  • Making an average of 4 to 5 posts a day

Of which:

• 52.46% Direct Traffic
• 32.51% Referring Sites
• 15.03% Search Engines
  • Including 18 hits from Google for “Respect Renewal Scribo Ergo Sum”
• 00:10:44 Time on Site
• 52.73% Bounce Rate
• 57.38% New Visits

From:

Browser     Visits     (%)
Firefox         715           65.12%
IE                 361            32.88%
Safari            18               1.64%
Opera             2                0.18%
Mozilla            1                0.09%

Not bad progress, overall, given that on average we received around 30 hits a month before the transfer. Hopefully you’ll forgive us if the January-February issue of the magazine is a little later than we’d hoped, then - but that should be done soon as well!

Thanks for everyone’s support!

The Editorial Team

What you need to know

Starts: 9.30pm, 21 January 2008
Ends: When everyone gets bored after the vote at about 10pm.
Rules: Anyone can participate, although high turnout is hardly anticipated. It is up to the administrator to decide what comments get published, although the administrator expects to publish all comments. The programme allows everything to be done in real time, so it should all be lovely.
Watch: You can watch the debate and vote live via the BBC Parliament feed.

You may have noticed some changes to the Scribo Ergo Sum website.  The slight modifications to the layout have been made to allow for easier showing of our new video content - Video Ergo Sum is coming soon!

The “What We’re Discussing” list of categories has been reduced to a drop-down box.  This has saved a lot of space from the sidebar; only a little over 1% of pageloads used the categories list, yet it was displayed on every page.

I notice that nearly 70% of readers use Firefox as their web browser.  Firefox tends to be standards-compliant, and generally superior to Internet Explorer, so renders pages differently.  I prefer the look and feel of IE, but use both as I see fit (meaning that I use Firefox whenever IE crashes).  It has been of slight concern to me that the typeface used on the site was more difficult to read in Firefox: given that an unusually large proportion of you view the site in Firefox, I have changed it to Arial which is less prone to distortion by Firefox.  Additionally, the font is now slightly bigger to facilitate reading.

When the website was reconfigured to include this blog (using the open-source Wordpress system) I ensured that all of the posts were categorised by the author, with the author’s name included in the URL.  A rationalisation of this has meant that a single account will be used for all messages from the Editorial Team.  This will keep the real content separate from posts such as this.  Also, every post now has a photo of the author in the top-right corner.  Hopefully this will help readers to identify the author quickly.  We will be linking the photos to biography pages very shortly (just as soon as we’ve written them).

On a different note, we are expecting some fresh work from fresh writers soon.  Watch this space.

As always, your thoughts would be appreciated.

Ali Gledhill,
Assistant Editor (Media)