danyul.net

danyul.net

My very first post on danyul.net was published on the 28th May 2008 , which means that 2009 was my first complete blog calendar year. I am a sucker for any type of top 10 /100 list that reviews a year (or decade) or a review of the year type article so here is my guide to danyul.net through 2010.

I changed my WordPress theme in 2009 to the Streamline theme from StudioPress and I have been making various little tweaks all through the year. Our spring flowers started to appear in February 2010 and we visited Stanton House in the snow in the same month with some friends. The weather may have been cold and but with great company we had a really good time while enjoying the Japanese second hand goods sale. March 2009 saw us take our first karate grading of the year and we both took a fairly substantial step forward as we both successfully succeeded in gaining our brown belts (3rd kyu).

April was a lean month in terms of blog posting although it did see the post that generated the most search traffic to the site as I solved a technical problem with the FTP service on my server (more on that subject later). May 2009 saw myself and MiniMe continue our karate training by attending the JKAE Spring Course, where we really enjoyed the training led by Osaka Sensei. I can well believe that people travel long distances to have the pleasure of training alongside Osaka Sensei and his joy of karate and teaching shone through the whole course. I would love to see Osaka Sensei return to either the JKAE Spring or Summer course in 2010, where I would try to persuade Mrs danyul that attending all the course days does not make her a lonely karate widow.

July was a busy month for karate as we attempted to grade to 2nd kyu on the 3rd July, where MiniMe picked up a temporary pass instead of a full pass, and then two days later we were both competing at the JKAE National Champioship. I had no issues with MiniMe not passing his grading completely since his karate mojo had started to wane through 2009 and this was very much reflected in the quality of his karate both in training, in grading, and in competition. When we first started our karate training, our goal was not to race to a specific belt or win medals, but rather to train alongside each other in a martial art that MiniMe would find beneficial immediately (physical fitness, discipline etc) and also in the future (self defence). We had a great time competing at the Nationals and I am sure we learnt a lot more about our karate through the act of just being there rather than winning any medals.

August was a busy month as we took a family holiday to Cornwall where me and MiniMe developed a love for surfing and body boarding while Mrs danyul took to exploring the Cornwall coast and enjoying the hotel spa facilities. The JKAE Summer Course rounded off the end of the month as we returned to Guildford again to train alongside visiting Sensei’s from Japan and familiar friendly faces. In September 2009 we descended on Spitalfields market in London along with 30,000 other people for the first Japanese Matsuri. The 2010 event is already scheduled and firmly in our diary to attend once more, where we hope to see the stalls branched out even further across the market to accommodate all the visitors. The end of the month saw another karate grading although this time it was just MiniMe by himself to successfully clear the previous temporary pass gained at the 2nd kyu grading. I did not grade since it was never my intention to race ahead of MiniMe and it is fair to say that the colour of your belt does not necessarily reflect a persons dedication or skill in karate.

October saw me and MiniMe both get a year older although it’s not something that I blogged about (no idea why!) so instead we had to settle for attending the JKAE All Grades Course and for me fixing a technical problem with the VoIP system used at work. I have strong hopes that our office BroadWorks platform will be replaced in 2010 with the company standard platform and I can finally lose responsibility for our office phone system.

November saw a family outing to Brighton as I competed in the Brooks Brighton 10k and I hope to run the same event in 2010 as well as some other 10k and half-marathon events. Finally we reach December, which was another busy karate month as we attended a fun Brown & Black Belt Course and then both successfully graded to 1st kyu before heading off to Japan for a much needed family holiday. We are still visiting family in Japan as I type this and I haven’t made any Japan posts yet but so that will have to wait until early January 2010.

The most significant personal event of 2009 for me, the unexpected death of a friend and business associate, did not get a post but like a boulder dropped into a pond, the ripples are still fanning out into 2010. Our karate progress is also getting snagged onto some political maneuvering so it looks like changes are afoot in the year of the tiger.

So as a final look back at 2009 let’s have a look at the most popular parts of danyul.net. I use AWStats and a WordPress Stats plugin to analyse the logs of who visits my site although unfortunately the WordPress Stats plugin is only something I have recently installed so I will have to just rely on the AWStats report for the 2009 review. Here we go…

There were approximately 3,950 unique visitors to danyul.net in 2009 which was made up of 6,347 visits (1.6 visits per visitor). This equates to 23,988 pages visited (3.77 pages per visit) with a total of 74,550 ‘hits’ (11.74 hits per visit). A total of 1.37GB of data was transferred (226.17 KB per visit). July recorded the highest amount of unique visitors (401) and the highest number of visits (805) and the highest amount of pages (4,273). The highest amount of hits were recorded in March (10,752) as was the largest amount of bandwidth used in a month (166.30 MB).

The 10 top level visitors were:

1. Unknown (IP address only)
2. Commercial (.com)
3. Network (.net)
4. United Kingdom (.uk)
5. Non-Profit Organizations (.org)
6. Japan (.jp)
7. USA Educational (.edu)
8. Poland (.pl)
9. Israel (.il)
10. Germany (.de)

The top 10 visiting browsers were:

1. MS Internet Explorer
2. Firefox
3. Mozilla
4. Safari
5. Opera
6. Unknown
7. Google Chrome
8. Netscape
9. Curl
10. LibWWW

The top visiting operating systems were:

1. Windows
2. Macintosh
3. Unknown
4. Linux
5. Symbian OS
6. RISC OS
7. Unknown Unix System

Finally, the most interesting stats of 2009 (to me anyway!) were the top 10 search keyphrases used by visitors to find the site via a search engine. I have tinkered with the list a little from its original listing since a few in the top 10 were identical topic searchs but the keyphrases were slightly different:

1. proftpd fatal socket operation on non-socket
2. spring flowers
3. san agostino beach resort
4. hot 3ex
5. danyul.net
6. sensei eric pich
7. kumite
8. gary stewart karate
9. minime
10. sensei