Rambling from Ogden Point

New Card Pages August 1 2007

2007-08-03T01:39:00.001-07:00

I posted some pictures from Playfair Park in Victoria BC, in the June 2007 new cards, from July 1 2007 Canada Day celebrations in the July 2007 new cars, and a large group of pictures from a trip to Port Alberni and area in their own folder. The pictures in this group were taken during a visit to Port Alberni on Vancouver Island. The trip included visits to Bamfield via The Lady Rose (the mail boat), Long Beach and Tofino, and the McLean Sawmill Historic Site via The Alberni Pacific Steam Train. Click the links below for these new card pages.

June 2007 Pictures.

Port Alberni and area pictures.

July 2007 Pictures.

More Windows Opinions

2007-03-21T00:58:00.000-07:00

The day after my last post in which I referred to Windows ME (Millennium Edition) as the worst version of Windows ever produced, I received the copy of a newsletter I subscribe to in which the author confirmed my thoughts.
Click Here For The Article.
He does have some different views on Windows 95 and 98 than my experience. He refers to Windows XP-sp2 as being almost a different version of XP than the original. I agree with that sentiment.
I think Windows 98SE (Second Edition) was an equally new operating system in its time. He says Windows 95 was a 32 bit operating system - almost. Windows 95 and the first edition of Windows 98 installed themselves using the FAT 16 file system by default and were for all intents and purposes 16 bit systems that supported 32 bit programs and drivers. Windows 98SE installed itself using the FAT32 file system in a "Clean Install" and was the first system in my experience to really perform as a 32 bit system. If you Win98SE installed as an upgrade, it duplicated the Fat 16 system of the system it was replacing and had to be converted to FAT32. (The original version of Win98 could also be upgraded to FAT32 by running the conversion utility.) I had several computers in my direct control in the time those operating systems and every one of them ran much better on Win98SE than they had on the first edition.

More Rambling

2007-03-15T01:32:00.001-07:00

I could have continued this from the bottom of the previous post. I decided to do it separately after the two disastrous attempts to get the 2006 summaries on line.
As much as 2006 was a hard year to predict visitor demographics for Cards From Ogden Point, 2007 is starting off even more unpredictably.

www.ogdenpoint.ca has had 421 visits and 839 page views at mid March. http://www.ronmclean.bc.ca/ has had 328 visitors view 529 pages, and www.photoserver.ogdenpoint.ca sits with 367 visitors and1464 page views. Those numbers are all better than the 2006 totals at the same point in time so those sites appear to be getting a few more visitors. The PhotoServer page count suggests that someone may have actually looked at a full slide show or two.

www.cardsfrom.ogdenpoint.ca (Cards From Ogden Point) got off to a really slow start in January. Then February made up for the slow times. By Valentines Day at the mid point of February, there had been more visitors to Cards From Ogden Point than in any month in the site history. The previous visitor count records were held by May 2005 and December 2005 with 1,957 visitors each, and December 2005 with 26,394 page views. February 2007 ended with 2,786 visitors and 22,657 page views. That leaves it clearly as number one for visitors and a close second for page views. That represents over 4 visitors per hour and 33.7 pages per hour for the month. My Compaq in the corner was purring along wonderfully through all that. The reality is that a lot of the traffic came between the 11th and 15th with 5 consecutive days with over 100 visitors each and over 1000 page views each. Those 5 days are the busiest 5 day period in site history and represent 1,867 visits and 15,766 page views in less than 120 hours. The averages are 15.6 visitors viewing a total of 131.4 pages per hour.

The site won the CardMaster competition that was running for Valentines Day -- it was a strange win however because the 28% of the votes I got actually only amounted to 31 votes.

March 2007 is back to a much slower pace. If the first 14 days are an indication of the projected traffic, it will be a slow month. Easter comes at the beginning of April and Easter 2005 and Easter 2006 were busy times so March could just be slow in starting and get just as busy at the end of the month as February was. (I hope.)

The one other significant thing that is happening is that I am getting more feedback from Porn Sites, On Line Casinos, and "Pharmacutical" Suppliers than I am from visitors. I don't count the Spam that is picked up at my inbox as part of what I am talking about -- there is lots of that too. I'm talking about actual feedback and Guest Book signings that are being done by people on behalf of the Spammers. My feedback forms and guest book entry pages are Posties from the site. They need a human to fill them out and send them. Either Spam is very profitable, or some folks must have a lot of time on their hands.

2006 Year End

2007-03-15T00:14:00.000-07:00

This is actaually my third try at this post. The other times Blogger didn't save it despite my request to save it in draft form. If you see the posting it means that I finally got the post completed. I am giving it the old "Three Strikes" treatment. If you see this the third strike was a hit not an out.

2006 was an interesting year for my web sites.

http://www.ogdenpoint.ca/ had an increase in the number of visitors and a decrease in the number of pages that were viewed from 2005. The 2005 visitor count was 842 visitors viewing 3237 pages. The 2006 count was 1197 visitors viewing 2686 pages. That amounts to 3 visits per day and 7.4page views per day.

http://www.ronmclean.bc.ca/ saw the visitor count from 2005 drop in 2006. The 2005 count was 1463 people viewing 9949 pages. The 2006 numbers were 1219 visitors and 2771 pages. The numbers are quite close to those for http://www.ogdenpoint.ca/

http://www.photoserver.ogdenpoint.ca/ is the Index Page for my PhotoServer which runs Cards From Ogden Point. The index page gives access to my photo albums and webcams as well as links into the various other sites the computer runs. The PotoServer Index and subpages saw a moderate increase in traffic from 450 visits and 2177 pages in 2005 to 1441 visits and 5533 pages in 2006. That gives it an average of 3.9 visitors per day and 15.43 pages per day. The average visitor viewed 3.9 pages. Access to my WebCams and photo albums would be included in these totals. When one considers that the "Recent Photo Album" contains 200 pictures that are generally updated more than once a month, the numbers reflect a rather low visitor count. One visitor arriving through the index page and viewing the full slide show would add over 200 hits to the counter. Obviously not many people viewed the whole slide show, let alone the others on the site.

Those three sites probably get more of my time in keeping them up to date than they get visitor time during the year.

http://www.cardsfrom.ogdenpoint.ca/ (Cards From Ogden Point) is quite another story. It gets much more traffic and saw a 50% increase in both visitors and page views from 2005 to 2006. The 2005 count was 9,028 visitors viewing 100,278 pages. The 2006 count was 14,111 people viewing 157,693 pages. That represents 1.6 visitors per hour, and 18 pages per hour for all 365 days of the year - 24/7. That is a lot of traffic when you consider it is being "Served" from a computer sitting in my living room.

The most interesting part of the Cards From Ogden Point traffic for me was that the busiest times all year were the last three days in September, and the first three days in October. On September 30, 6211 pages were viewed -- making that day the busiest in the site history. That 6 day period was busier than Valentines Day, Easter, Christmas or New Years Day. There were no contests running, and there were no holidays until Canadian Thanksgiving nearly two weeks later. December 2006 was much slower than December 2005. (Not to mention being slower than January, February, April, September, and October 2006.) There is certainly no predicting traffic patterns and prospective visitor dates. Christmas 2006 ran a distant third behind Valentines Day and Easter. -- Mother's Day, Father's Day, and Thanksgiving were quite uneventful.

The year end statistics also give some demographic information about computer use. Almost exactly 5 years after Windows XP arrived on the scene, 77.75% of my visitors were using XP. 89.45% were using some form of Windows including 14 visitors still using Windows 3.1. The biggest disaster in Windows history as far (as I'm concerned) Windows ME was represented by only 20 visitors while Windows 98 was used by 988 visitors or 7.2%, and Windows 2000 was used by 522 visitors or 3.8%.
The Mac operating system was represented by 311 visitors (2.26%). Linux showed up 43 times for less than one percent of the visitors.
80.65% were using Internet Explorer, 13.95% were using a Mozilla based Browser -- mostly Firefox and Safari, and 4.1% were using Netscape.
From my reading of various on line services, those results are quite typical.

It will be interesting to see if Windows Vista has 77.75% of the operating systems 5 years from now. When XP arrived 5 years ago, most Internet access was by dial up and computers were slower, less powerful, and more expensive than today. What will the next 5 years bring?

October 17 Just Rambling Again.

2006-10-17T12:41:00.001-07:00

Web site building is somewhere between a hobby and an obsession for me these days. I've spent a lot of hours and midnight oil sitting at my keyboard plunking away with my one fingered typing.
The visitor counts to my Cards From Ogden Point site tell me that I must be doing something that people like. At noon on October 15 which is the middle of the month the way I see it, the visitor count for October 2006 had passed the full month totals for March, June July and August. The total page count for the site for 2006 passed the 2005 total in August, and the total visitor count for 2006 passed the 2005 count in September. The site is getting busier -- and remember it is run from a computer in my home, not from a web service provider.

I did major updates of the whole site to sort out page loading and optimization over the last few weeks and I had some fun putting together a few Halloween cards. Check the links lower on the page for the Halloween stuff.

I also tried a little test of human nature in all of this. I sent out about 50 of my cards to friends and acquaintances for Canadian Thanksgiving which was on October 9 this year. The cards were animated and got really good responses from several of the recipients. The interesting thing in all of that was that to see the card, the recipient had to scroll down the page past a very bright and obvious area on the card receipt page asking them to vote in the current CardMaster competition. The voting notice is similar to the one at the bottom of this page. Only four of the fifty recipients voted. This result parallels the general results for the site where for the card receipt count October at half month, has passed the counts for 8 of the previous 12 full months. I have had about 400 visitors view 700 cards in October. I have 12 votes in the contest including my test vote to see that the voting link worked. The interesting part of all that is that most if not all the 400 visitors didn't even notice the voting box despite its dancing Halloween graphics. It becomes what I refer to as "Furniture" -- a room has to have furniture and unless you have a reason to remember it you don't even notice it. A Web Site has backgrounds and layout things (even advertising on most) that have to be there. You may remember a particularly comfortable sofa in a particular living room. In most living rooms you just expect the sofa to be there and don't pay attention to it. In an office you expect a desk -- you may notice a particularly clean one, or a particularly messy one and in 90% of the offices you visit you don't even notice the desk. We have become used to picking out what we want to see on a Magazine or newspaper page and/or a Web Page without noticing anything else on the page.
The challenge every Web Site Creator (and for that matter every shop keeper, artist, sales person or anyone who wants something to be seen) is to create a noticeable attention getter without it being obnoxious. The reason people come to Cards From Ogden Point is to send Cards, not to vote for the site. My "hook" or attention getting device is the Photographs. They must be pleasing because more and more people are coming back to use them. The "hook" also includes the ability to use the Photos in a Posty because if it were just the pictures, my other sites would be getting the attention. The contest brings people to see the site whether they vote or not, and that is why the contest is run. The contest benefits the whole Posty "family" because it brings people not just to my site but to the whole system.

The Halloween Pages let you add Ghostly figures like these ones to your Posty:

The Halloween Cards
The Great Pumpkin Patch

October 1 -- Welcome to the new Visitors!

2006-09-30T21:47:00.001-07:00

Welcome to all the new visitors to my various web sites. Cards From Ogden Point has had visitors arriving in record numbers for the last few days and they seem to be finding things they want to see as they are staying around the site for a while. The average visit to the site has been 15.8 pages today and 12 pages for the month of September.
September started off as a slow month for visitors with total visitor and page view counts continuing the steady pace of the summer. The first 27 days of September saw 687 visitors who viewed 5,924 pages. That is an average of 25 visitors per day and 8.6 pages per visit or 219 pages per day. Those numbers are consistent with the earlier months of the year when months with "Card Occasions" like Valentines Day, Easter, and Mother's Day got larger totals, and other months received similar numbers of visitors to what September was seeing. It looked like September was going to see similar statistics to March, June, July and/or August.
Then on September 28, the dam broke with 71 visitors viewing 1,258 pages. That is almost 3 times the average number of visitors per day for the first part of the month, and over 5 times the average number of pages viewed per day compared to the first 27 days. That was only the beginning. The 29th saw 243 visitors view 3,525 pages. The 30th saw those totals eclipsed by noon. By 8pm, September 30 had established itself as the second busiest day for visitors in the history of the site (second only to the huge influx of visitors that came from being listed on www.langa.com in May 2005) and the busiest day for page views in the site's history leading the 3,801 page views on Valentines Day by 150%. The final counts for the day show 384 visitors and 6,211 page views. The final 2 days of the month took September from being an average month to the fourth busiest month in site history witth 1,386 visitors viewing 16,918 pages.

Those numbers may not be competitive with major commercial web sites on an Internet backbone system -- they are amazing for a site that runs from a computer that sits in the corner of my living room running on an ADSL connection.

So if you are a new visitor to my sites, WELCOME! Please do two things:
1) let me know how you react to my site using the feedback or guest book links, and
2)please come back often.

In and amongst all that influx of visitors I was also doing some things I feel will improve the site. I edited the HTML code that the visitor's computer "reads" to show the pages in their browser. That exercise amounted to a "tune-up" as there was lots of code that I was able to make easier for the browsers to load, and I cleared out some things that would have caused pages to load slowly, and/or cause the viewers' computers to work harder. I also found and installed a script that checks that the card is properly filled out before the sender is allowed to move to the next step in the card creation process. It specifically identifies what is missing on the card and asks the creator to go back and add the information. I'm sure it will annoy some visitors (who would have gotten a rather ugly error page from the system sooner or later anyway and/or may have sent a card that was never received). That process took some time, and parts of the system were updated as I went along -- the last update involving the transfer of 16,888 files to my server.

I added Autumn Splendour and Thanksgiving Cards to the index for the site and entered the Fall Holiday Contest from the MyPostCards Network on September 30 to be in time for Canadian Thanksgiving on October 9.
The Autumn Splendour Page
The Thanksgiving Card Page
The Fall Holidays Contest
The contest is scheduled to start on October 1. If the link does not go to the Fall contest, please check back later.

July 21 General Rambling

2006-07-21T00:01:00.001-07:00

I'm back after a couple of months and a lot of miles. During June I visited family in Manitoba and Nova Scotia. I've added pictures to the Albums in my PhotoServer, and new cards to Cards From Ogden Point. The links are at the bottom of this page.

The joys and challenges of running a web site and keeping computers running haven't been forgotten. During the time I was away, Microsoft "did everyone a favor" and had one of the Windows Automatic Updates reboot any computers that downloaded and installed the update. My server computer stalls on a reboot because it recognizes that there may be other people logged on to the computer via the web page. It just sits there half way through the reboot -- after it shuts down the server program. Fortunately my house guardian was able to do a forced reboot and put me back on line. Thank you Christine for the help. My webcams were a casualty of the reboot since they have to be manually restarted. Cards From Ogden Point was in the middle of the Father's Day Contest, and was being used for Father's Day cards at the time. Fortunately that site returned to service after the reboot and went on to place 5th in the contest.

Since returning home, my main computer has lost its video card due to failure and was subjected to a Browser Hijacking and a Virus. The computer is physically separate from the server computer -- it is however where I edit and compose all the web pages that get uploaded to my various web sites. So nothing got edited nor especially uploaded while there was any chance of file contamination. Then the backup computer which is used to move the files from the main computer to the server, and which contains various backup copies of the web site files literally "went up in smoke." It is currently in hospital awaiting surgery. It went to the shop one week short of the end of the one year of warranty. I expect it will need a new motherboard if it is repairable.
And to add insult to injury, my internet connection has started acting up. My history as a Telecoms Technician tells me that the "repairs" that were done last October were temporary at best. The cable feeding telephone and internet service to my home is old and very likely it has taken on water at one or more points along its length. One major difference between this cable and the ones I experienced in my days in Manitoba is that this one is not subjected to being frozen each winter. Ice expansion often makes the damaged areas of overhead power and communications cables much easier to find as the ice will break open the protective insulating jackets. (It doesn't make breaks easier to find in buried cables -- the one in question is partly underground and partly overhead.) My fear is that there will be more temporary repairs before the offending cable eventually gets replaced.

Cards From Ogden Point continues to be used and continues to grow in popularity. The visitor count for 2006 has grown from 5,605 at the time of the last posting to 7,277 two months later, and the page view count has grown from 71,287 pages to 91,849. There has been a steady input of encouraging guest book signings from all over the world for 2006 as well.
In July the most common entry page to the site has been the card pickup page. That is very pleasing because it says that people are not just visiting the site, they are visiting because someone sent them a Card From Ogden Point. The pickup page was the second most accessed entry point in each of the first 6 months -- often with half or possibly two thirds of the number of entry hits that the Welcome Page got.
So far, in July, 31% of the people who visited Cards From Ogden Point have come because they are picking up a Posty. Thank You to those people and to those who sent them a card.

Click the links for the new card pages:
May 2006 pictures page 2.
June 2006 pictures.
July 2006 pictures.
July 1 2006 fireworks pictures.
June 2006 Maritimes Pictures.

Click here for my recent pictures album.

May 15 More Statistics.

2006-05-15T21:34:00.000-07:00

When I re-read the previous post from earlier today, I realized I had missed some of the major statistics I get from the AddFree Stats service.
Cards From Ogden Point has had the following numbers of visitors:
2004: 1023 Visitors Viewing 14874 Pages
2005: 9028 Visitors Viewing 100278 Pages
2006: 5605 Visitors Viewing 71287 Pages
-------------------------------------------
Total: 15656 Visitors Viewing 186439 Pages

May 1 to 15 2006 has had 629 visitors view 9790 pages.
Those included:
284 visits to the Preview Page
151 visits to the Card Sent Page
The difference indicates the number of times senders went back to edit cards after seeing them in the preview..
283 visits to the Card Pickup Page
The Pickup Page will count the recipient every time they visit the page to look at the Posty. It will also count the sender if they visit from the "Your Card Has Been Received" notice.
The bulk of those cards are likely Mother's Day Cards.

In Contrast My PhotoServer has seen the following traffic despite its ease of viewing of all the pictures used in the Card Site (and more.)
2004: 209 Visitors Viewing 1136 Pages
2005: 450 Visitors Viewing 2177 Pages
2006: 455 Visitors Viewing 2067 Pages
----------------------------------------
Total: 1114 Visitors Viewing 5380 Pages
...ron...

May 15 Statistics.

2006-05-15T14:58:00.001-07:00

While deciding whether to leave the Card Master Top 50 Button & Link on my site I went through my site visitor statistics in some detail.
I have a variety of counting tools on my pages that count visitors to my site in various ways.

I described the Visitor Maps in some detail on a previous posting in this Blog so I won't repeat it here.

I use individual Site Meter counters like the one on the left side of this page to track visitors to specific areas in my sites. For instance there is a separate Site Meter for the Card Preview Page on Cards From Ogden Point. I can use that to tell me quickly how many visitors have gone to the preview stage of creating a Posty. That service uses cookies to track the visitors.

I have some counters from Extreme Tracking like the one on the Welcome Frame on Cards From Ogden Point. It uses a Java Script to record the visits without cookies. I use it to see if the visitor counts are different without cookies -- just to verify if I am losing visitors because of the cookies the other counters use. So far if I lose any visitors the count is not noticeable.

My primary counting device is AddFree Stats. It is a free service (as the others are) which allows different trackers for different pages within a site. I currently have 150 individual trackers on the various pages in Cards From Ogden Point. That may seem like a lot until you realize that there are 4109 individual pages in the main site and 101 in the backup site. The "trackers" count groups of pages because I have the same tracker on each page in various groups. For example, all the Mother's Day Index Pages share a tracker and all the Easter Index Pages share a tracker. So I can't tell which index page was viewed but I can tell if someone visited an Easter Index in a particular visit. The Slide Shows (Random Posty Pages) are all on index pages and they change pictures by refreshing the page. So if someone leaves the May 2005 Index Page open on their computer to watch the slide show, the 2006 pictures index tracker will increment its count every time the slide changes.

So what do I know about my visitors in 2006?
These stats are from the AddFree Stats Counters on Cards From Ogden Point for the first 135 days in 2006.

The Most commonly Viewed Pages:
The Valentine Indexes with 6589 views,
followed by the Main Index Page with 5565 views,
and the New/2006 Pictures Indexes with 4866 views.

The Most Common Entry page:
The Main Welcome Page with 1885 visitors entering there.
Next was the Card Pickup Page with 1443 people entering the site by picking up a card someone had sent them.

The Most common exit page:
The Card Pickup Page with 1187 visitors picking up a card and not staying on the site.
This is not something I want to happen LOL -- I'm trying to keep visitors. The number of people who stay at least long enough to send a Thank You Card has actually improved my visitor retention numbers -- before the "Thank You" links were added, even more people left immediately after picking up a card. The options of saving, printing, and emailing the card have added to the numbers of visitors who stay. With 1187 of 1443 people leaving, that is obviously a target audience I have to work on.

It would almost appear to me that there are three types of visitor -- those that come to browse the pictures, those that come to send a card, and those that receive cards. It would also appear that there is a distinct group of people who send cards, and that the people who they send cards to either don't reply or don't send cards (at least not from Cards From Ogden Point).

The visitors referred by search engines are growing.
The first 135 days of 2006 showed 576 Search Engine Referrals
(an average of 4.3 per day):
Yahoo: 268
Other: 172
Google: 119
MSN: 6
Excite: 3
Netscape: 2
AddFreeStats 2
AOL 2
Dogpile 1
Lycos 1
("Other" would include the MyPostCards Network Search.)
The whole year 2005 showed 599 Search Engine referrals (1.64 per day):
Yahoo: 333
Google: 207
MSN: 24
Other: 16
Netscape: 7
AOL: 7
Lycos: 2
Dogpile: 1
Webcrawler 1
Altavista: 1

231 of the 576 Search Engine Referrals in 2006 were in May. That tells me my efforts at Search Engine Optimization and the process of submitting Site Maps to Yahoo and Google is working.

There are 64 countries represented in the 2006 totals, and visitors used browsers with 9 languages other than English.

The majority of visitors in 2006 Use Windows XP:
Win XP: 4343 (79.59%)
Win 98: 488
Win 2000: 243
Unknown: 216
MacOS: 125
Win NT: 24
Linux: 10
Win ME: 7
Win 95: 1

The majority of visitors in 2006 use Internet Explorer:
MSIE: 4751 (87.06%)
Mozilla: (Firefox) 510
Netscape: 160
Unknown: 26
Opera: 9
KDE: 1
I build the site using Microsoft Office Front Page and check it for Browser compatibility in both Internet Explorer and Netscape while editing the pages.
I view the pages in other browsers on other Windows and Mac computers and correct any viewing discrepancies that occur in the various combinations. Strangely one of the most difficult browsers to satisfy is Internet Explorer on my Mac Computer. Things that show up and work in Safari, Netscape, or Firefox on the Mini Mac some times don't show up in Internet Explorer on the Mac despite being optimized for IE on Windows. Anything using Sun Java just hums on the Mac even if it drags on a Windows Machine, and Active-X does not run in any form on the Mac, even IE. The only pages that poses problems on Cards From Ogden Point is the Slide Shows with Music. My webcams on the PhotoServer have alternate pages for Java and Active-X so they can be viewed from either system.

The majority of visitors in 2006 use screen resolutions of 1024 X 768, followed by 800 X 600:
1024x768: 192 (48.00%)
800x600: 111
1280x1024: 25
1152x864: 9
640x480: 3
1600x1200: 1
1400x1050: 1
Unknown: 58
My Posty Pictures in Cards From Ogden Point are for the most part 640 X 480 pixels. That means that for the 3 viewers using the old VGA standard of a 640 X480 Browser Window, the cards and pictures will not quite fit in the browser window. I optimize the pages themselves for 800 X 600 viewing and check them in 640 X 480 so they will load and show properly in 99% of the viewers browsers and with minimal scrolling in the other 1%.

May 15 Site Revisions

2006-05-15T13:09:00.001-07:00

Mother's Day has come and gone with a reasonably good visitor count on my statistic counters.
There were a few less visitors than last year in the 8 days from Sunday to Sunday ending with Mother's Day. This year's visitors viewed more pages -- in fact more than twice as many.
2005 visitors: 496 page views: 3534
2006 visitors: 456 page views: 7116

The Mother's Day card pages in 2005 were the first pages that included any kind of slide show of the pictures available. They included a random rotating selection of some of the cards available in the Mother's Day group -- not all the cards -- just some of them. Since that time as I developed the site I have made every photo card available from the slide shows that run on the index pages in each card category and from slide shows and "Rotating Q's" that are linked from the various pages in the site. The experience in Mother's Day 2005 had indicated an interest in that type of presentation and the counters a year later show that more cards are sent by clicking the pictures in the "Random Posty Slide Shows" than by searching through the index pages to use the thumbnail pictures.
The counters also show that there are a lot more people who visit the site to browse through the slide shows than there are people who visit to send a Posty. I created the site to share the beauty I have seen through my camera viewfinder so those guests that view several hundred pictures in a sitting are equally as gratifying as the ones who come to send one special picture to someone they care about.
The attention the site gets has grown steadily through its life. The addition of the slide show feature added to the average number of pages viewed by each visitor -- by almost double.

The idea of adding Posties -- or some form of E-card to a site to attract new and returning visitors to a web site has been successful in my case. My PhotoServer has all of the pictures that are on the Cards From Ogden Point site available in various formats -- many of which are easier to navigate and quicker to load than the cards. For example click here for My Recent Pictures Album. The PhotoServer gets 2 to 3 visitors per day, Cards From Ogden Point has averaged over 40 visitors per day in 2006. The 2 sites are optimized the same way and submitted to the same search engines in the same way. They have been submitted to all the same listing services in the same manner. They are in the same physical place and in the same "cyberspace" on the internet. In fact Cards From Ogden Point is actually "inside" the PhotoServer navigation wise.

Cards From Ogden Point is listed in only one place -- The MyPostCards.com Network -- that the PhotoServer is not listed. That service is responsible for directing a large percentage of the higher traffic volume to Cards From Ogden Point -- either from the contests running on the http://champs.posty.com/contests or from the searches for cards from visitors to the network's search page. I pay to use the card sending and receiving service from the network, and the network provides that service and traffic to my site.

For 6 weeks ending today Cards From Ogden Point was also listed in the Card Master Top 50. That service is free and it bills itself as a service that will refer visitors to your card site. In April and the first 15 days of May 2006 it referred a grand total of 3 visitors to my site. I guess I got what I wasn't paying for. I removed the badge and the links from my pages today.

May 8 Mother's Day Contest.

2006-05-08T15:08:00.000-07:00

The Mother's Day CardMaster Contest was started on May 7 -- two days later than scheduled and a week before Mother's Day. It will be a short contest.

The process of entering the MyPostcards Network CardMaster contests has been an interesting experience to date. The contests are touted as a way for CardMasters to show their wares and be compared with their peers. They are also specifically intended to bring traffic to the entrant's sites. The contests have been run since 1997 and the winner's list has been published at the CardMaster Hall Of Fame since the beginning.

I created Cards From Ogden Point in 2004 and while I guess I had probably seen the information about contests as I signed up for the free service from MyPostcards.com, and upgraded that to the Pro Service without the system's advertising, I had not really paid any attention to the idea of the contests. My aim in creating the Card Site at the beginning was just to create a fun way for people who know me to have contact with me and each other by using my photographs in Posties. I had no thought of the site as it exists today nor the world wide attention it receives.

The following visitor map from Clustr Maps that I talked about in a previous post wasn't even a dream at that point.

There has to have been a couple of contests run between the time I went on line and when I entered the Easter 2005 contest -- if I got notification of the contests I didn't consider them. I did read the notification of the Valentine 2005 contest, and rather than enter it, I decided to watch it to see what the contest idea was all about.
I have had only one contact with anyone in the CardMaster community other than the sign up and payment correspondence from the folks at MyPostcards network.
That single contact was a nice Welcome Message that is in my Guest Book from a lady in Pennsylvania who went on to publish her own blog. Her "From The Hills" card Site shows up in the Hall Of Fame several times. Her site is not on line any more -- but it was a fun and interesting site using her artistry for some different and fun cards. The sort of site that worked well with mine as we offered completely different types and styles of card.
So with that little bit -- (really with that complete lack) -- of knowledge, I watched the Valentine contest unfold -- saw that the contest could bring visitors to the site, -- and I signed up for the Easter 2005 Contest and several contests since that date. The results have been gratifying as I have showed up in the Hall Of Fame 5 times in the past year and have received good feedback in the contests and directly in other communications.

As I said at the top of this page, the contests are designed to bring traffic to the sites (and the system) and to showcase the sites.
There are definitely three distinct groups in the contests:
1) the "amateurs" and "newbies" like myself who are in the contests for the exposure and the feedback
2) the sites that host various forms of advertising -- they seem to be entered regularly without getting many votes -- but the clicks they get must make their entries worthwhile.
3) The site in which the Posties/Cards are part of a larger site and the Posties are added as a feature to create returning traffic to the main site. Some of these are businesses and some are charities.
That grouping is a generalization I realize and some of the sites fit in the middle of the generalization. A number of the small sites have some advertising that is in most cases an attempt to generate some income to offset the cost of hosting the site. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it is up to the visitors whether they consider the various sites to be an advertising site that has E-Cards or an E-Card site with a bit of advertising -- the line between the two is a continuum not a dividing line LOL.

The contests have brought traffic to my site. The Spring/Easter contest showed up as the second largest source of visits to the site during April. The Valentine Contest was the largest source during February. So entering them meets the contest's stated intent and I will likely enter more of them as time goes on. The other large source of visits to the site is the MyPostcards Network itself. Those visits either come from my updated listings in the system's New Listings as I keep adding new content to the site and/or from searches for specific types of card within the system like the Easter Card Search. Being part of a "Network" does work in this case. The system does have advertising on it so the system benefits from the visit. The referral is from them to the various Card Sites. If the sum and total of the sites weren't worth visiting, the system wouldn't get the visitors it does. I like to think that sending "A Card From Ogden Point" is one of the reasons people return to the network.

Other potential sources of referral are not always as successful -- the CardMaster Top 50 system I referred to last month saw me as being in the range of 40th to 50th their "Top 50 Sites" most of April and brought me a grand total of 3 entry referrals for the month. Either that system's multitude of pop-up ads got more from my links to them than I got from them or the links benefited neither of us. Once Mother's Day is over I'll review whether or not the links to that system stay on my site. I'm not going to risk breaking links to pages within my site the week before one of the busiest card days in the year. Every piece of code I put on the page adds to the complexity and loading time for the site and the pages in it -- so I can only keep those elements running on the pages that I find useful or of benefit to the site.

May 1 Update

2006-05-01T22:28:00.000-07:00

The Spring Easter contest ended over night on April 30. Cards From Ogden Point ended up in 5th place with 31 votes.
The contest itself didn't create as much interest as previous contests. The Easter season however did create lots of traffic for the site. The final count for April was 1709 visitors viewing 17,533 pages which is #3 for both visits and page views in the site's history.
The site showed up in the "Top 40" on the MyPostcards Network 6 times during April and again on May 1. The highest position was #17 on April 11. The traffic on the previous day determines the ranking.
The site rose into the top 50 on the Cardmasters Top 50 ranking on April 9 and fluctuated from #44 to #47 for the rest of the month.
The final step in the process of Site Mapping wound up on May 1 when all Site Maps were completed and resubmitted to Yahoo and Google including the April month end changes.

April 26 Site Maps and Other Changes.

2006-04-26T23:58:00.001-07:00

In the earlier Postings dated April 2006, I talked about how I planned to use this Blog to keep people up to date on changes to my web sites and to "ramble' about what went into making them work.
I got some feedback that not everyone who subscribed wanted the details about the site -- some of the subscribers just wanted to know when I posted new pictures and especially new cards on Cards From Ogden Point.
In order to satisfy that interest I created a second Blog with its own Email notification service from FeedBlitz.
The Update Blog is called Cards From Ogden Point Updates.
It can be seen by clicking the link and it includes the information about my new Spring Feature Cards that I posted there yesterday.

In continuation from the efforts to bring more visitors to the site that I talked about in the earlier postings, I changed the Titles and descriptions on every card page to make the cards more distinctive and I redid the indexing and crawling instruction code to make the whole site more search engine friendly.
I read articles about how to make and submit Site Maps to Google an Yahoo so that their "robots" would find and catalog more of my pages. I tried a few free site map creation tools that worked well on the smaller sites like
www.hug.ogdenpoint.ca or http://www.ronmclean.bc.ca or www.ogdenpoint.ca.

Some worked on slightly larger sites like: www.backup.ogdenpoint.ca (The Backup Site For Cards From Ogden Point.)

However they balked at the huge www.cardsfrom.ogdenpoint.ca -- Cards From Ogden Point site and especially http://www.photoserver.ogdenpoint.ca -- The PhotoServer.
(which includes Cards From Ogden Point.)

I found one that handled the whole proces quite well -- for regular HTML (Web Page) site maps -- for the Text Site Maps Yahoo wants -- and especially well for the XML Site Maps that Google wants. The site is called AuditMyPc.com and the site map creation page can be seen by clicking their logo:

The Cards From Ogden Point Site Map has 4008 HTML pages listed and the tool found 7494 other types of files -- mostly jpeg's - the pictures used for the cards and the thumbnail pictures used on the index pages.
The PhotoServer Site Map lists 4627 HTML pages and 19,143 "others."
The site map creation tool "crawls" through the site from the internet connection -- just like the "Googlebot" would so if the Site Map Tool found the pages, everyone on the Internet can find them.
It probably goes without saying that it took more than one try to get it to that point. It took a lot of work -- all of which should show up as more visitors find better and easier navigation.

Visitor Maps and Thanks to ClustrMaps

2006-04-12T21:31:00.001-07:00

I created this Blog on April 5 by copying the various postings from a web site I had on line that nobody ever found. It was called News From Ogden Point. I had linked the page from my various other pages and submitted it to listings and still no one seemed to find it.

I copied the information from the various pages on that site into this blog in sequential order with the original dates as page titles. Once the Blog has been running for long enough to archive some of them they won't all appear on the opening page.

The results of using this more public forum were immediate -- I started getting hits on my counters, referrals to my other pages from here, and subscriptions to the update service. People are finding the BLOG.

The very first "Comment" posted to the BLOG was within hours of the first posting. It was from the ClustrMaps Team who administer the visitor map system on my site. Click here to see the Comment. I would like to thank them for the comments and the upgrade. You can see the results in the thumbnail map here. The thumbnail map is the one from the Cards From Ogden Point site and if you click it, it will take you to the ClustrMaps map for that site. If you click on the various continents on the map, you can see the zoom effect. The map itself shows where my visitors come from. I am very happy with the map service -- and I am also very happy to see all the red dots on the map -- from all over the world. (Remember that the site runs from a computer in my living room -- it isn't a major commercial WebServer.)

Click here for the posting they refer to. (Complete with the comments.)

Click here for my Map Index with the other maps for comparisons.

I am also adding a ClustrMap to the left panel of this BLOG on its own account. It will take a while for the map to fill up like the Cards From Ogden Point one is.
If any webmasters are interested in the ClustrMap for their own sites, either contact me or contact the folks at ClustrMaps directly I'm not the least bit afraid to recommend their service.
Click here for some customization I have done to that page.

If you want a comparative service, the folks at gvisit.com have also provided me with good service -- for a different style of product.
Click here for the gvisit map.
Click here for some customization I have done to that page.
I have added a map and a link from them for this page too.
Click here for the gvisit map for this BLOG.

The reason I have done the custom displays is so that I can see the numbers of visitors who visit the maps for my sites along with the rest of the pages in the site.

April 9/06 Slide Show.

2006-04-09T22:59:00.001-07:00

I'm trying the Flash Slide Show out to see how posting active content works out on this BLOG. This little slide show includes some of the pictures in the April 2006 card group at Cards From Ogden Point. It is similar to the Flash Easter cards on the site.

Click here for the Easter Card Index.

Click here to send Posties (E-Cards) using these pictures.

The competition and the work submitting the links for Cards From Ogden Point to various places described in my earlier posts seems to be paying off with more traffic to the site.

April 9 was a good day for visitors with 189 visitors viewing 1689 pages.

In addition the site made it into the Cardmasters Top 50 Database at Number 46 and the "Top 40" of the 4822 sites on the MyPostcards Network at number 37.

...ron...

April 7 2006

2006-04-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

In conjunction with creating this BLOG, I have added an email update feature from FEEDBlitz and an Atom/RSS feed from FeedBurner so that people can subscribe to receive updates from the BLOG.
I will keep updating the BLOG as I make changes to my various Web Pages and as signifigant things happen with them.
The major benefit I hope to get is more traffic to the various sites. Currently people either had to check the individual sites or the Newsletter to know if I had made changes. This way they can be notified.
I also listed a group of links at del.icio.us that includes links to my various pages.
This is how del.icio.us describe their service:
"What is del.icio.us?
del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. Use del.icio.us to:
Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web.
Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.
Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite - they've already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.
Where do I start?
Anyone can browse del.icio.us and see what others find interesting."
Essentially by keeping my list of pages there I allow more people to know about them and access them.
Within hours of listing pages, I was getting hits on my counters showing people coming from the del.icio.us. I am in the process of adding an RSS feed from that service too.

My Web Site List

2006-04-05T19:53:00.002-07:00

April 5 2006

I created this Blog to replace
Newsletters At Ogden Point as a way to keep everyone updated as I make changes to my various web sites, and to let more people know about my sites. I also hope to use the blog to completely replace the newsletter so that I can reclaim the server space it takes up.

My sites are:
http://www.ronmclean.bc.ca
http://www.ogdenpoint.ca
My PhotoServer
My WebCam Index

The Hug Page:
http://www.hug.ogdenpoint.ca

Cards From Ogden Point:
The Cards From Ogden Point Index Page
The Cards From Ogden Point Welcome Page
The Cards From Ogden Point Backup Page
The Cards From Ogden Point Card Pickup Page

...ron...

Cards Site Awards

2006-04-05T19:13:00.003-07:00

Cards From Ogden Point

Has Won Some Awards.

2nd Place in the Valentine 2006

Cardmasters World Championship

1st Place in the Christmas 2005

Cardmasters World Championship

6th Place in the Autumn 2005

Cardmasters World Championship

5th Place in the Mother's Day 2005

Cardmasters World Championship

4th Place in the Spring Easter 2005

Cardmasters World Championship

2005 & 2006

Thank You To Everyone Who Voted For My Site.

Visit the Cardmaster Hall Of Fame

April 2006 News

2006-04-05T16:36:00.001-07:00

April 2006
The Spring/Easter CardMaster Contest started on April 2.
I added 32 pictures from Finnerty Gardens at the University of Victoria to the contest page.
I also added some Flash Cards to the Easter Page to see how they are received.
The Contest.
Visit the Cardmaster Hall Of Fame
*******************************
Visit The Easter Pages Here.
Visit the Pictures From Finnerty Gardens Here.

March 2006 News

2006-04-05T16:35:00.001-07:00

March 31 2006
During the month of March I spent a good deal of time improving the Card Pickup Page for Cards From Ogden Point. The task was made more difficult because the page is not hosted on my servers, it is a composite page that loads the various parts of the Posty onto the MyPostcards Network Server for delivery to the viewer. I design and lay out the page and upload the centre of the "body" of the page into a form on the system server. I do not have access to the "head" areas of the page normally used for scripts and other "Meta Data."
In March I added a system to send a "Thank You Posty" direct from the face of the received card. The "Thank You Posty" preloads the names and addresses into a Posty that has space for the recipient to optionally add a brief "Thanks For The Posty" message. The process takes two mouse clicks from beginning to end.
I also was successful in creating buttons for a "Print This Page" function, a "Close This Page" function, a "Save This Page" function (to allow the recipient to save the Posty to their computer), and an "Email This Page" function (to let the recipient either forward a permanent copy of the Posty to themselves or someone else by Email). The "Email This Page" function uses an outside service called www.jkn.com which seems to work very well. The "Print," "Close," and "Save" functions were definitely complicated by my only having access to part of the "Page." Unfortunately, the buttons don't all work in all browsers and on both Apple and Windows platforms. They do work well using Internet Explorer on Windows machines. (More work remains lol.)The "Email" function took a lot of searching and follow up to find an external service I trusted with the visitors (and my) email addresses. I was not able to find any script that let me provide the function directly without the external third party service. I was pleased to find the eternal service at www.jkn.com with no advertising and a very good security policy.
My sites had a regular flow of traffic for the month -- nothing spectacular -- just steady.
Cards From Ogden Point averaged 21.5 visitors per day with a maximum of 36 visitors on the 28th and a minimum of 13 on the 19th.The total was 666 visitors for the month who viewed 8332 pages -- an average of 12.5 pages per visit.
www.ogdenpoint.ca had 64 visitors view 147 pages.
www.ronmclean.bc.ca had 91 visitors view 181 pages.
http://www.photoserver.ogdenpoint.ca had 77 visitors view 494 pages (including the photo albums).

www.hug.ogdenpoint.ca had 55 visitors view 97 pages.
It should be noted that the counters count my first visit on a particular day as a new visit on a new page. That means that if I visited one of the sites every other day, I would account for 15 visits and 15 page views. That can represent a major percentage of the visits in the less frequently visited sites.On Cards From Ogden Point, the maximum number of possible visits would be one per day for totals of 31 visits and 31 page views. That would not have a major impact of the numbers for that site.
March 1 2006
On March 1, Cards From Ogden Point got a new way of displaying my new pictures.
Rather than having a group of pictures on temporary display for a few weeks at a time, I decided to try putting a folder of 2006 pictures in the site with the most recent month's additions at the top of the list. That way the pictures remain available for the whole year.
Click Here For The 2006 Cards Index Page.
March also saw the clean up and overhaul of Cards From Ogden Point.
Here is a "Before" and After view of the site's composition.
The pages were also re-optimized so that most of them would open in less than a minute on a dial up connection. The ones that don't are the original pages and pages containing scripts such as the newly added flash cards for holidays.

And here is an idea of what it takes to make the site operate:

Cards From Ogden Point had 6836 individual web pages on March 21 2006. 46 of those pages were rated to take longer than 60 seconds on a 28.8kb dial up connection. (That would be 30 seconds on a 56kb dial up connection.) 355 were rated to take 45 to 60 seconds, 2633 from 30 to 45 seconds, 3171 from 15 to 30 seconds and 631 less than 15 seconds. All those figures would be halved for a 56kb connection, and less than quartered for a Light Cable or DSL connection. On a regular ADSL or Cable connection, the figures would be approximately 30 to 40 times faster. That would mean that the page that was rated to take 60 seconds at 28.8kb should take 2 seconds to load on an ADSL connection. The limiting factor in Page Loading Times is controlled by the time in which my server can deliver the pages to the internet. My connection gives upload times in the range of 700 to 800kb per second. that is approximately 25 times faster than the 28.8kb dial up and about half or less the download time of ADSL connections. That means that if you are viewing from a Dial up connection, or a Shaw/Cable Lite connection, my server can deliver the pages faster than your computer can download them and your connection is the limiting factor. If you are viewing from a high speed connection such as regular Cable or ADSL, your connection could download the pages faster than my server can deliver them. A page that is rated to take 60 seconds to load at 28.8kb will take approximately 2.5 seconds to upload from my sever to the internet. Then if you add any system delays from the internet and the delay from your computer, it will take whatever delay your connection may have to get it from the internet. The process happens simultaneously, so if you are using that proverbial 28.8kb connection, the page rated at 60 seconds should load on your computer in less than 65 seconds. If you are using ADSL, it can't load in less than 3 seconds.
If you are interested,You can check your connection speed to the internet here:
Internet Connection Speed Tests
You can check your connection to my PhotoServer here:
Ron's Server Connection Speed Tests

February 2006 News

2006-04-05T16:32:00.001-07:00

February 28 2006

Second Place Winner.
Valentines 2006 Event CardMasters World Championship
Visit the Cardmaster Hall Of Fame
**************
Read The Reviews for Cards From Ogden Point
Thank You To Everyone Who Voted For My Site.

The final visitor counts for February for Cards From Ogden Point placed it as the month with the second largest page view count in the site's history.
The final tally was 1,237 visitors viewing 19,074 pages. 5,401 of those pages were Valentine card index pages.
February 26 2006
From February 23 till the end of the month, I undertook a major overhaul of Cards From Ogden Point. There had been an number of outstanding "Bugs" in the various pages on the site that had to be cleaned up. The biggest was the "Options Pages" which had a number of grammar and punctuation errors in both the Headings and Signatures on almost every category of card.
I did a review of the "Hit Counters" on the various pages and found that the vast majority of visitors were not even finding the "Options" and "Text" Pages. The statistics also told me that people were not using the simplest pages -- they were opting for cards that allowed them some degree of creativity. I had tried some pages that were mixtures of the best features from the 3 card categories and those pages got the most attention in the Christmas, New Years, and Valentines card periods.
I then sat down and tried to create a page that can be used to create a "Simple" card if that is what they desire and that can incorporate the benefits of the "Options" and/or "Text" cards in that same card. To do this I made a card creation page that is a copy of the old "Simple Card" at the top of a page. That card can be addressed and sent in exactly the same manner as the previous "Simple Card". Then rather than using a different page from a different index page, I added a lower section to the cards that allows the visitor to scroll down and enhance the card. I put a link to a "Headings Suggestion Page" and a "Signature Suggestion Page." that contains the various Headings and Signatures that were on the "Options Pages." (That required editing two pages rather than the thousand or more "Options Pages" with the grammar and punctuation errors.)
The resulting site will be reduced in size to less than half its previous size because one card creation page replaces three. This will make editing and maintenance more straightforward.
A side benefit of the hybrid pages is that the cards that can be created from the Slide Shows and Random Posty Pages are now cards that can be fully enhanced. It also means far less effort for the visitor to be creative in their card preparation.
The results can be seen from the Main Index Page -- which replaced the old "Simple Index Page."
Click here for the Main Index Page.
February 16 2006
At 3pm on February16 the voting page for the CardMaster Championship was taken down and replaced with the winners list.
Cards From Ogden Point was on the winners list in the #2 position with 88 votes.
Second Place Winner.
Valentines 2006 EventCardmasters World Championship
Visit the Cardmaster Hall Of Fame
**************
Read The Reviews for Cards From Ogden Point
Thank You To Everyone Who Voted For My Site.
February 15 2006
Cards From Ogden Point was once again entered in a CardMaster competition.
The February Valentine CardMaster contest started on February 5 shortly after noon with 15 sites in the competition. The voting for all the sites started off quite slowly and never approached the numbers of votes cast in the Christmas contest.
The visitor counts gradually increased as Valentines Day approached. The 11th was the first day on which there were over 1000 pages viewed and the next three days saw increases in Visitor Counts and Page Views each day.
Valentines Day was a busy day for the site.
The daily visitor count for February 14 reached 205 visitors who viewed 3801 pages, making it the site's second busiest day --following behind the May 30 2005 "rush" that came with the site's appearance in the Langa List newsletter. Those totals added to the previous days in the month to show 831 visitors viewing 12,846 pages at the mid point of the month.
Cards From Ogden Point also reached the "Top 20 Sites" in the My Post Cards Network when it appeared as the Number 18 site on February 12 (based on traffic on February 11). That daily ranking is based on the actual cards sent and received on the Network's pages on the day before the listing. It is counted from amongst the 48221 card sites in the Network.
That was the first time the site made it into the Top 20, having been in the Top 40 a total of 3 times in January. The other sites in the system must have been equally busy on Valentines Day because Cards From Ogden Point did not show up in the "Top 40" on the 15th despite the traffic experienced by the site on Valentines Day.

January 2006 News

2006-04-05T16:30:00.001-07:00

January 31 2006

First Place Winner.
Christmas 2005 EventCardmasters World Championship
Visit the CardmasterHall Of Fame
**************
Read The ReviewsforCards From Ogden Point
Thank You To Everyone Who Voted For My Site

At some time during January, the hs2go.net domain was "parked" as the person who had sold me the HomeServer software I originally used for my first web site did not renew the DNS service for the hs2go domain when it expired in December 2005.
Fortunately I had expected this after I noticed that the support site and the home page for the software supplier had disappeared into Cyberspace in the fall during my disaster with my ISP.
I did still have a few links that "broke" when the service became unavailable -- they were reasonably easy to clear up. I shudder to think what would have happened had I not reworked my site in anticipation of this demise.
(You can read about the trials and tribulations of my preparedness in earlier editions of this newsletter -- particularly October 2005.)
I would not likely have wound up winning the CardMaster Championship if my site had disappeared mid-contest.
In addition to winning the contest, January has been an unexpectedly busy month for Cards From Ogden Point. The stream of visitors continued even after the end of the contest. By January 28 when Cards From Ogden Point showed up as number 22 in the top 40 card sites on the MyPostcards Network, January 2006 had become the second busiest month in the site history.
January 2006 statistics forCards From Ogden Point:
Daily unique visitors for January 2006: 1364
Page views for January 2006: 16,571
Number of countries represented in the January totals: 48

The busiest day was January 26 with 143 visitors viewing 2257 pages,January 1 was second busiest with 132 people viewing 1885 pages.
The large visitor counts on and around the 26th were a surprise as they came from www.welcome.ogdenpoint.ca which is the welcome page. It is not listed in as many places as some of the other pages.
The statistic counters for January 2006 say that:665 visitors entered through the Welcome page53 came through the CardMaster Contest page69 came through direct links to the index page.(The index includes any from the CardMaster Hall of Fame.)
January 18 2006
The winners were declared for the Christmas 2005 Cardmaster Championship and Cards From Ogden Point won First Prize with 582 votes. The second prize site had 403 votes.
This was the "payoff" for all the effort and optimization that went into improving the site in 2005.
The high visitor counts from the last months in 2005 continue in January 2006.
Cards From Ogden Point has had 720 visitors view 7628 pages before noon on January 18 2006.
This made January 2006 number 5 in page view and visitor counts in the life of the site with 12.5 days remaining in the month.
The busiest page until this time was the New Years Cards with 991 "hits".
In addition to the great numbers of visitors to the site, on January 1 Cards From Ogden Point had sufficient cards sent and picked up to count as number 27 out of 48221 sites on the "My PostCards Network". On January 10 the site showed up in the "Top 40 Sites" again at number 25. This count only takes into account actual cards previewed, sent, and/or picked up on the system server, not the visitors who view the card composition pages and index pages.
The Valentine Cards are ready for the next major card event.
Click Here For Valentine Cards.
The Jigsaw Puzzle page has been reorganized and a thumbnail type index page added so that visitors can see what all the puzzles are rather than just seeing one on the index page with an alphabetic text listing.
Click Here For The Jigsaw Puzzle Index.

December 2005 News

2006-04-05T16:17:00.001-07:00

December 31 2005
The large visitor response to Cards From Ogden Point continued to the end of the month. The page count for the year passed the 100,000 mark at approximately 6PM on Dec. 31.At month's end over 26.3% of the yearly page views were in December.The number of visitors tied May at 1957 visits.The December visitors viewed 26,394 pages while the May visitors only viewed 14,123 pages. The final counts for December were very satisfying.
The extra traffic from the contest moved Cards From Ogden Point into 27th place in the top 40 sites of the 48221 sites on the MyPostCards.net system on January 1 2006.
This ranking is taken from the activity on the server on which actual cards are sent and received. The statistics below are the traffic to and from Cards From Ogden Point whether or not the visitor sends or receives a card.
December 2005 statistics forCards From Ogden Point:
Daily unique visitors for December 2005: 1957
Page views for December 2005: 26,394
Number of countries represented in the December totals: 71
Different languages of site visitors for December 2005: 21
Total visitors for 2005: 9028
Total Page Views for 2005: 100,278

There was one visitor from hydro.mb.ca in Winnipeg who visited 242 pages on December 28. That was the only person to visit over 200 pages after the 23rd. There were a number who viewed between 100 and 200 pages.
December 27 2005
In response to a very good suggestion from a voter in the contest, I created and added thank you cards to the Cards From Ogden Point line up.
Click Here For Thank You Cards From Ogden Point
In the afternoon of Dec. 27th the page view counter passed 20,000 pages for the month of December.
The voting in the CardMaster competition continues and I am extremely pleased with my performance there. The MyPostCards Network claims to have 48,221 sites in their system and several of the sites in the contest are in the "Top 40 Sites" on that system. I have no idea how many visitors those sites get. I do see that one of the other sites that is not in the "Top 40" has over 4,000 visitors and 14,000 page views per month every month this year.
The ranking for the "Top 40" is based on the MyPostCards server traffic which is just the sending and receiving of cards. The visitor and page view numbers for the site are the people who visit the site whether they send a card or not. One has a direct bearing on the other as you can't send a card without visiting the site but things like my puzzles and slide shows may entertain the visitors and keep them on the site for longer visits but that won't change the MyPostCards ranking unless the visitor sends a card. My estimates for December is that one card is sent for every 45 to 50 pages viewed. There is no way to correlate the number of visitors to the number of cards sent as 100 cards sent by 200 visitors could indicate that half the visitors set one card each. It could also indicate that 2 visitors sent 50 cards each and the other 198 didn't send any cards. My sense from the other counters on the site is that in December a number of people used the site to send several cards each. There is no way to quantify that. I also think that in other months the ratio would be less cards per visitor. At Christmas and The New Year, it is more likely that an individual visitor will send more than one card. At other times like birthdays etc, a visitor will not have a list of recipients -- they will want to send one card.
December 23 2005
By 10 AM on the 23rd Cards From Ogden Point had 351 votes in the CardMaster Championship -- more votes than the site received in any previous contest.
December had also become the site's busiest month. On the 22nd the number of page views in December exceeded those in any previous month.(The total count for December 2005 had also exceeded the total views and visits for all of 2004 by this time.)At 10 AM on the 23rd, there were 16074 pages viewed by 1108 visitors in December.This is an average of 14.5 pages per visitor.The previous high month was May with 14123 pages viewed by 1957 visitors(an average of 7.2 pages per visit.)
May had the large influx of visitors at the end of the month from my listing on the Langa List as well as Mother's Day earlier in the month. The visitors on those days didn't visit nearly as many pages as those at Christmas are. The number of pages per visit has been steadily increasing since the additions of slide shows and puzzles in the fall. December has no "big days" like the ones at the end of May, it has had a steady stream of traffic all month that is growing as Christmas approaches.
The large visitor numbers on the 23rd included one particular visitor who increased the counter readings all by themselves. A visitor from Warren Pa. watched the slide shows for nearly 5 hours while they viewed 1434 pages.
They aren't the only visitor this month who viewed large numbers of pages. Other "major visits" include:
A visitor from Calgary on Dec. 15 who visited 476 pages.
A visitor from Warren Pa. (maybe the same person) on Dec. 12 who visited 333 pages.
A visitor from Ottawa on Dec. 10 who visited 466 pages.
A visitor from Winnipeg on Dec.4 who visited 524 pages.
December 20 2005
The Winter holidays contest started well with Cards From Ogden Point ending up at the top of the listing page.
The combination of the contest and the exposure the site has had all year are providing more visits than I would have imagined possible -- especially a year ago.
Shortly after noon on the 20th with Christmas Day and New Years Eve still to come in the month, the visitor count hit 700 visitors who visited over 10,000 pages during the first 19.5 days in the month of December.
The contest runs till January so the winners are far from being decided.
Click here to see the votes received by Cards From Ogden Point.
Click here to see the Cardmaster Hall Of Fame.
December 1 2005
I added Christmas, New Year Cards, and pictures of the Victoria BC Santa Claus Parade to Cards From Ogden Point for the holiday season.
Click Here for the Christmas Cards.
Click Here for the New Years Cards.
Click Here for the Parade Cards.

November 2005 News

2006-04-05T16:16:00.001-07:00

November 30 2005
The fall CardMaster contest ended with Cards From Ogden point in 6th place, just 4 votes behind the 5th place site.
Click here to read the votes the site received.
The largest number of pages viewed by a single person during the contest was on November 18 when a visitor from London England Viewed 531 pages.
The contest period saw a total of 1,064 visitors who viewed 15,776 pages during October and November.
The majority of these visitors arrived via the following routes:
By picking up and/or viewing a card: 303 visitors.
From the Contest Page and/or the Autumn Page: 228 visitors.
From the New Card Listings and/or Welcome Page: 191 visitors.
From the Index Page -- (search engines and bookmarks): 84 visitors.
November 11 2005
From November 4 to November 11 I optimized all my web sites and added more Jigsaw Puzzle cards to Cards From Ogden Point. I also added just the puzzles to the Games Page on http://www.ronmclean.bc.ca/
I also created a slide show for http://www.ogdenpoint.ca/ that I ended up placing on the site as one big slide show and 4 partial slide shows for users on slower connections. I sent a few of the slide shows as Posties to some friends. They were well received so I added the possibility of sending the slide shows to Cards From Ogden Point.
I put the puzzle cards and the slide show cards into the backup site because they need nothing from the PhotoServer. That makes the "Backup Site" a sizeable card site in its own right. It contains the ability to use internet pictures and upload your own pictures for an infinite array of cards, and contains the ability to create over 120 standard Posty type cards, over 50 puzzle cards, and two different variations of 5 different Slide Show Cards.
Click here for the Puzzle Cards Index.
Click here for the Slide Show Cards Index.
Click here for the Backup Card Site Index.
Click here for the slide shows with no cards.
Click here for the Puzzle Index with no cards.
I also did the preliminary work for a Christmas Card Page that will be on line shortly.
November 4 2005
On November 4 2005, I uploaded an entirely new version of http://www.ronmclean.bc.ca/ with a tabbed index page that works properly on more computers and in more browsers than the sliding index on the main home page. The sliding index works well on Windows computers with Internet Explorer -- it doesn't work well on Apple Computers or in Firefox and Netscape on Windows Machines. In some cases it loads as a table at the top of the browser screen and in some cases it does not load at all. The new tabbed index seems to work on most if not all major browsers on both Windows and Apple Computers.
I also finally got all of my web pages running using proper DNS Addressing rather than direct addressing. That makes them less vulnerable to various changes that may come from Telus ( my ISP ) or for that matter any future ISP that I may use. You can read about all the hassles I had with a wet cable on my incoming telephone service from Telus in the October 2005 Newsletter.
I also integrated several Jig Saw Puzzles from http://www.jigzone.com/ into both my Games Page and into Cards From Ogden Point.
Click here for the Games Page.
Click here for the Puzzle Cards.
Cards From Ogden Point is now set up with a full backup site. The normal entry pages from
http://www.welcome.ogdenpoint.ca/
http://www.cardsfrom.ogdenpoint.ca/
and
http://www.pickup.ogdenpoint.ca/
all will work with or without the PhotoServer and if the photoserver is not responding for some reason, the visitor can go directly to the
Backup Welcome Page
or the
Backup Index Page
from links on the entry pages.

October 2005 News

2006-04-05T16:14:00.000-07:00

October 31 2005
Ron's Fall Rant.
The other editions have been sorted with the newest entries at the top because each entry was sort of independent from one another -- this one starts at the top and progresses to the end of the month at the bottom because it carries on in sequence.
October 11 2005
The beginning of October wasn't a good time for Cards From Ogden Point.
My web pages had just sort of evolved into a mixture of properly created web pages interspersed with lots of pages that were not really well constructed from a technical stand point. I had started by using a number of photo sharing systems so that family and friends -- especially those at a distance -- could enjoy some of my pictures. My move to a new home that is 2000 miles from my previous location meant that I couldn't just take a photo album along to visit and share any more. At the time I was experimenting, the picture sharing services that were available were not as good as they are now or I might never have decided to build my own photo sharing sites.
I started with a software package called HomeServer which I purchased and downloaded from a service that started as "home2all.com" and evolved after a software upgrade to "ip-hs2go.net" It was specifically designed to run on my own computer and was intended primarily for sharing digital photographs. I run that software on a computer in my living room. That computer acts as the server for my various web sites. You can see the home page of that server at My PhotoServer I created Cards From Ogden Point using that server as the source for the photographs for the greeting cards. The "Card Site" wasn't really a site -- it was just a bunch of randomly created web pages that were done up differently from page to page and were linked together by some poorly constructed index pages.
When my visitor totals reached beyond any of my expectations in the first year of operation I realized that it was time to reconstruct the service into a properly constructed web site. I targeted this revised site to be on line on the first anniversary of the site's existence and it went on line on August 23, 2005 which was the first anniversary of Cards From Ogden Point's first appearance.
You can read more about that in the earlier newsletters.
During the conversion of Cards From Ogden Point to its new style and location, I found that the suppliers of the ip-hs2go.net service were no longer on line and that things like the help and support services that had been on their site were gone.
I began readdressing my various web services so that if the DNS service that finds my web site.
If you type http://ip-ronaldmclean.hs2go.net into your browser, that address has followed the software manufacturer into cyberspace.
The card site ended up being built with a mixture of addresses because of the uncertainty of the ip-hs2go service. I had spent the time after the "move" of Cards From Ogden Point cleaning up page addressing for all my sites and was about half finished that effort at the end of September.
I was at a point that was ripe for a disaster and that disaster came along.
On September 29. Vancouver Island got the first heavy rainfall since spring. That rain resulted in moisture getting into the cable that feeds the telephone and ADSL computer connection into my house. The moisture caused a ground fault on the cable that severely reduced the connection speed on my ADSL connection and by the morning of Sept. 30 the connection was running slower than a dial up connection. Since Cards From Ogden Point runs from a server computer in my home, the site was for all intents and purposes not accessible. That condition got worse as the situation continued.
My internet connection is a Business Connection that is designed to run at twice the speed of normal residential ADSL service and it is designed to support running a web site from the service. My web sites are a hobby, not a business -- the level of service I subscribe to is the minimum that supports hosting your own site. Theoretically as a business service Telus should give it appropriate levels of attention.
I first reported the poor connection to Telus, my ISP on Friday Sept 30 at about 9 am. I did this with much reservation as the Unionized staff at Telus have been on the picket line for a couple of months. (Mixed emotions for a retired Union Rep on this end to be sure -- however my service that Telus quite happily cashes my cheques for was not working. They promise service labor dispute or not.) My experience as a communications technician told me the first thing I would check would be the cables -- rain has a habit of finding the weak spots in a cable system. I specifically mentioned this to the first person I reported my problem to. I spent much of the early part of the day on and off the phone as various folks at Telus tried all sorts of things to get me on line that just got me further and further from being on line. By early evening, not only was my ADSL connection dead, so was my telephone despite calls to my Cell Phone telling me that all was repaired with my connection. The phone was restored Friday evening -- the ADSL didn't fare as well. I used dial up to put a single page on line that told people that my site was off line due to "Problems with my ISP".
By Monday, I had a very slow internet connection back that was not on the "fixed addresses" that are part of the service I subscribe to.
I used what connection time I had to hastily put backup sites on line for Cards From Ogden Point, http://www.ronmclean.bc.ca/ and http://www.ogdenpoint.ca/ and to put a temporary "site not available" page at the address for the PhotoServer. The ADSL service would work better for a short while after I called to complain and/or if the sun was shining and would drop back to its creeping speeds as soon as the rain started and/or the humidity rose. Finally on Thursday Oct 6 I got a person at Telus who sorted out my addresses (the old "fixed addresses" were long gone) and got me reconnected to new addresses. He was ready to hang up when I got a connection back when I suggested that we do a speed test since that was my original complaint. I did various tests and the results were predictably dismal. That started him on the right path -- finally -- and later in the day he phoned back to make an appointment for someone to check my connection the next day
The next day Friday Oct 7 I was visited by two representatives from Telus who told me that one of the wires on the cable feeding my house had a "ground" on it and that they would be sectionalizing the cable to find out where it was. They cleared the fault in the connection box on the pole outside the house where the wires running to the house connect to the larger cable that runs back to the system.
8 days after the first sign of trouble and 7 days after the first reports to the ISP, I finally had a normal internet connection again. The connection speed is slightly better than before the problem and it has been working since that time.
Getting an internet connection back was only part of the solution for my various web sites. My efforts in September to change the addressing on my web pages left Cards From Ogden Point in a situation where there was no predicting whether the photographs would display in the final cards. To make matters even worse, the cards would appear to be working properly as people checked them out as they prepared them to send.
I had no choice other than leaving the temporary site up and running as the only site until I checked every page and repaired the addressing of the photographs. That meant opening approximately 12,000 web page documents in my editing software and changing one line of addressing text in each. At 11 am on October 11, I returned Cards From Ogden Point to full service with approximately 10,000 pages edited. There are still 2250 that will work with their current address and still need to be finalized.
The whole disaster also pointed out how vulnerable the site was. I tried a number of possibilities and settled on small group of pages that are not on my HomeServer that act as the "Home Page" to the site. The Home Page will load whether the computer in my living room is connected to the internet or not. That way the Home Pages, the Card Pickup Page and the Backup Pages are permanently located at a more secure web location.
You can check out the final results at:
Cards From Ogden Point