While the site has been busy during October the statistics is somewhat misleading. For instance the "official" Newsletter figures record 7,941 pageviews during the month - but I happened to notice two exceptional days when a rogue site in the Ukraine notched up about a thousand views in what was clearly a computer generated "attack" of some kind. For what it is worth the total official pageviews since the Newsletter was started is expected to reach 200,000 during November
The main site recorded 18,503 visits when I would have expected about 22,000 but the difference is mainly due to the server being off the net for about 4 days. As the overall figures for the year are fractionally down the four day loss may be enough to mean we don't hit the 250,000 visitors target for 2014.
In one area the statistics is dreadful. In the last 15 weeks there has only one donation to support the mentally ill in Hertfordshire which means, in effect, that the site has been raising less than £0.005 an hour (gross - not allowing for any time spent, subscriptions and other overheads).
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This failure to attract charitable funds raises an important issue. One of the longer term problems is that the master web site (which is used to generate the online version) currently has about 12,000 pictures and 5,000 text pages although not every picture or page is online. The site is powered by the Microsoft package FrontPage (support stopped in 2002!) and in technical terms is way out of date - and processing on my old computer can grind to a halt when it decides to update the internal indexes. Clearly the site needs a major upgrade but it would clearly be a waste investing time and money in improving the site when I could raise far more money for the charity in other ways - especially as there are other important calls on my time (see next post).
Tests in October show that FrontPage will not run under Windows 8 so for the time being I will keep the old system running (under Windows XP - now no longer supported) simply to handle updates to the site, and complete the move of all other activities, including emails and running the Newsletter, onto a much faster modern computer.
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This is the newsletter for the Genealogy in Hertfordshire Web site. Comments on this blog are moderated and may be transferred to the web site where appropriate. If you have a local or family history query you want answered you must use "Ask Chris" - See box in right hand column. Anonymous comments cannot be answered.