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This site passed an interesting milestone last month - the first month that over one million page views were recorded. That's just silly. Broken down, however, it becomes a little more reasonable. Around 370,000 page views were from feeds alone, with RSS page views accounting for two thirds of that figure. Cheat sheets accounted for the next largest chunk, with around 300,000 page views, including both articles and the sheets themselves (which made up around half of that number).

And visitors were, of course, a much lower number than views, at 300,000. What's interesting though is the browser statistics for this site for October. Last month was the first month that visitors with Firefox accounted for more than half of all visitors with 52.2% (up 6.1% from 46.1% in September). IE's percentage was down by an almost identical proportion - from 36.4% to 31.2% (down 5.2%). (Aside: The rest of Firefox's gain was at the expense of Mozilla and niche browsers. Opera was also up 0.5%.)

Another point of interest was that there are people out there using browsers that I would have thought died many years ago. Netscape 0.97? 3 visits. Netscape 1.2? 57. Netscape 4.0 is still clinging on with 1002 in the month. Msie 3.02? 44. Msie 4.0? 1884. And even more surprisingly, there are apparently people still using Firefox 0.1! 566 using Firefox 0.10 and 947 using Firefox 0.10.1! If any of these people using these ancient or early-version browsers are reading, I'd love to know why they choose these particular browsers over more recent alternatives.

So, why post this? With the release of IE7 and Firefox 2 in November, these statistics will be changing, and should give an idea of the rate at which designers and developers are "upgrading" (inverted commas because I'm not convinced that IE7 is actually an upgrade rather than a "sidegrade" yet), and more importantly if IE7 is stealing back share from Firefox. At the moment, it appears to be doing so - mid-month stats indicate IE is regaining ground.

A few months ago, I had intended to create a website by the name of Arguing Origins, intended to be a blog about the ridiculous "Creation vs Evolution" non-issue. I even went as far as to hire a cartoonist, the brilliant L.J. Dopp, to illustrate a satirical cartoon poking fun at the creationist point of view.

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons (mostly that the creationist movement seems to have, thankfully, stalled), the site is now unlikely to ever be launched. However, several of the cartoons have been completed and I thought some of you might enjoy having a look. The ideas came from both myself and L.J., and L.J. was responsible for the brilliant visuals.

Read more and see the cartoons.

Work today raised an interesting question: what is the collective noun for users? (In case you didn't already know, a collective noun would be "herd" as in "herd of cows"). There were a few suggestions from around the office:

• a muddle of users
• a panic of users
• a hatred of users
• a wrecking ball of users
• an incompetence of users

Any thoughts?

Paul Dixon is a UK-based web designer, and emailed me a little while ago to let me know about his latest venture, The Flyer Wall. To put it in Paul's own words, it's "a new take on an old form of advertising" - flyers on the net. Well worth a look.

Bloglines had a little surprise waiting for me this morning:

BOFH not available in feeds
Thanks for your interest in the Bastard Operator from Hell. Simon Travaglia, the author of BOFH, has asked us to remove links to his articles from our RSS feeds. We will not restore the BOFH RSS feeds without his permission.

Huh? You what? I keep - or rather kept - up to date with the antics of the BOFH (a regular feature of The Register, a UK tech news site) through the feed (the feed is not full text - it just lets me know when a new post is up). The only reasons I can think of that Simon Travaglia has decided to remove the BOFH from feeds are:

1. He's not very smart.
2. He hates people who read what he writes.
3. He's making a stand - refusing to allow the BOFH in feeds unless the full posts/articles are allowed.

I'd love to know which it is! (And if anyone can think of any reasons I might be missing for this mysterious action, feel free to share!)

I have been looking for a way to convert the BBC weather feed for my area to iCal, so I can subscribe to it. It's date-based, after all, and RSS never seemed to me to be an appropriate format for subscribing to weather information. iCal always struck me as being "better" for that purpose. Of course, the BBC only have an RSS feed for local weather. What I needed was a converter.

After some hunting, I discovered that Dean Sanvitale had written a PHP script to convert RSS feeds to iCal format. However, his site (codent.com) appears to be long since abandoned and the script is no longer available from there. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine did have a copy. Dean originally released the script under a Creative Commons License which, fortunately, allows me to make the script available to download from this site (note: the script is available from this site under the same license).

So, if you're looking for a way to convert an RSS feed to iCal, this PHP script will do the job. Thanks Dean!

Source: rss2ical.txt

One thing you'll notice reading almost any blog (or site running blog-like software) is that articles and posts vanish quickly. For some sites, it is a matter of days - for others months. The end result is the same - after a period of time, good posts vanish into the ubiquitous "site archive" - where posts go to die, often never to be read again.

Some sites have started to use a footer linking to popular posts, or author's choice posts. This is a reasonable solution, however is not ideal. An ideal solution would be to create a system that allowed for easy site navigation - to make it extremely simple for a user to find things they might be interested. I'm not interested in re-inventing site navigation, but I am interested in your opinion as a website user.

What works for you? Date-based archives? Topic-based archives? Tag-based navigation? If so, have you found any sites where these types of navigation made it easy for you to find interesting articles or posts? Are there any other options? Do you use site search engines where available? How do you use them? Are there sites that don't work? Do you ever move beyond the latest post in your feed reader?

There are a million questions I could ask, but I guess if I had to sum them up in one go, I would ask - how do you like to find interesting things to read on a site?

I have implemented Good-Looking Tooltips, using the excellent technique by Robert Nyman.

There were a couple of small issues along the way - a bit of code I added to the site's JavaScript when I was experimenting with XHTML was causing some trouble, and < and > were being treated as HTML rather than as characters. Robert kindly helped me work out the kinks though, and now it's all up and running. For an example, hover over this text.

A nice tool from Thomas Baekdal - convert your website to DNA art. Here's AddedBytes.com's DNA and the Flickr group.

Use Bloglines? You're not alone. Have a huge list of feeds in your sidebar, and never read anything because it takes too long? Once again, you're very much not alone. Find keeping up with Bloglines is taking up all of your time? You're one of millions. However, all is not lost. A few simple tricks will make your subscriptions easier to manage and less of a burden.

Folders

Bloglines supports folders, into which you can delicately place your various feeds, grouping them together by topic. If when you look at Bloglines all you see is a massive, unmanagable list of feeds, folders should be your first stop. However, when you create your folders, put some thought into how you set them up - once they're set up, changing them later is going to take time, and most people don't want to have to go through the process again. Also, don't name them just "Topic" - name them "01. Topic" instead - give each folder a number at the start and you'll be able to order your folders any way you like, ensuring similar topics are always grouped.

Folders also allow you to spend less time on Bloglines. Keep your personal feeds (yes, including comics) separate from your work ones. You can view the work ones at the office, without being distracted by Dilbert, and keep up to date with friends and pictures of cats when you've got the time. Keep your important folders at the top of your folders list and the task becomes even easier, as you'll avoid having a tempting folder in the middle of the more serious work-related ones.

Re-Name Feeds

Website feeds are listed automatically using the name given by the website owner for the feed. For some this may be a problem. For example, I am subscribed to a feed from an Apache blog, and the default name for this is simply "feather". While that might be what their blog is called, it's no use to me - a few months after I've subscribed, I'm going to have no idea what "feather" actually is, and will end up ignoring it. However, I've renamed it "Apache Feather Blog" - far more helpful to me.

Only Show Updated Feeds

Once you've got all of your feeds organised, you may find that Bloglines loads rather slowly. When you've got several hundred subscriptions, that can be a real problem. Fortunately, Bloglines gives you the option to only show feeds with new items - updated feeds. You can enable this under Feed Options in your Bloglines account settings.

Well, I've just about recovered from d.Construct 2006 (a great evening finished up at around 3:30 this morning, when Paul, Chris, William and I finally made our ways home), and what a great day (and evening) it was. Several hundred designers and developers descended on Brighton for the day, and enjoyed excellent talks from the likes of Jeff Barr, Simon Willison, Paul Hammond, Jeremy Keith, Aral Balkan, Derek Featherstone, Thomas Vander Wal and Jeffrey Veen. The follow-up evening involved much drinking, and was a great chance to meet plenty of like-minded people. For more, check out blogs talking about d.Construct 2006 on Technorati and Bloglines, photos on Flickr, the backnetwork or check out the podcast.

Twas a day very much like this one - warm and sunny - in August 2003 that I started this site. Three years ago today, in fact. The last year has been rather entertaining. Traffic around here has gone up rather substantially, as a result of the cheat sheets and a few popular articles, which has meant plenty more comments and so on - which is kind of the point.

It's also, as ever, Jack Daniel's birthday this month (the whole of September) ... so stop sitting there reading on the internet, and go and enjoy what's left of the weather!