Broadsheet is two today so it’s time for my yearly round up*.   All the stats have been pulled from Google Analytics so should be pretty reasonable.  You can read my post about last year’s stats if you want some extra context.

Broad strokes 

First off, some year on year details:

• Visits up 234% (10,378,376 vs. 3,105,424), with an increase of 142% in unique visitors (2,693,084 vs. 1,112,596)
• Served up 253% more pages (23,128,367 vs. 6,544,165)
• 75% of our visitors are repeat viewers

It’s been a year of tremendous (and consistent) growth. The addition of Cloudflare to the server setup has really taken the brunt of the increased traffic. There’s still intermittent issues, but certainly not as common as they were in the previous year.

Traffic is still growing so hopefully next year I’ll be commenting on similar growth – something I wouldn’t have expected last year.

Number One With A Bullet

I love lists (the ‘Top 100 x’ shows Channel 4 used to do were complete catnip for me), so of course I’m going to do a couple of Top Tens.

Top Ten Posts

• Meanwhile, At The Smithfield Horse Fair
• The Cast Of TV3′s ‘Tallafornia’
• Let Kate Have The Final Word
• Poznan: Thanks For The Mammaries (NSFW)
• The Story of Kate Fitzgerald
• Mario Balotelli: What A Legend
• Vincent Browne Vs Troika: Video And Transcript
• Have You Seen This Insect?
• For Whom The Bell Trolls
• Dundrum Shopping Centre Flooded

The Garda/horse pictorial was a thing of absolute beauty. The pictures were submitted by a reader, thrown up and within hours had spread all over the internet. It may be crude and gutter humour but people are a sucker for the humiliation of others – especially when a figure of authority is involved.

The flip side of that though is the interest shown in the tragic story of Kate Fitzgerald. While it would be easy to put it down to morbid curiosity, I do think people were genuinely moved by it and annoyed with how the Irish Times handled the situation.

Recycle, Reduce, Reuse

The reason for all our traffic has been the 11,936 posts with 154,748 comments. In the last year, there’s been a few recycled post titles.

• Ah Here (97)
• Finally (66)
• Where Is This? (65)
• This Week’s Le Cool Dublin Cover (39)
• Today’s Imponderable (28)
• Oh (23)
• Meanwhile, In Cork (20)
• Hello You (18)
• Fair Play Though, In Fairness (17)
• Eh (15)

Top Ten Search Terms

Once again, Google is the only search engine worth talking about as Yahoo and Bing only accounted for 2% of visits from search terms.

When it comes to the phrases used, the actual top ten is dominated by people lazily typing in ‘broadsheet’ (or some variant thereof – it’s 7 of the top 10) into a search box so I’ve excluded them to get at the more interesting terms.

• tallafornia
• kate fitzgerald
• niamh horan
• mario balotelli
• crackbird
• yootube
• jean byrne
• balotelli
• axl rose
• eoin mckeogh

Jean Byrne is the only term from last year, so the list is a reasonable approximation of what people’s obsessions were in the last year.

During the Dundrum Shopping Centre flooding last October, there was a huge spike of incoming searches (jumping from about 6K to 15K). While the number of visits have been building we’ve still to beat this with an average of about 11K visits a day at the moment.

Facebook > Twitter > Reddit > Google+

Facebook continues to be the single biggest referrer outside of searches, maintaining the healthy lead on Twitter with more than twice incoming visits (~2.3 million vs. ~1 million).

Twitter on a rare occasion will send more traffic but that’s usually down to someone like Dara O’Brian retweeting a story (a recent case was the prank call to the TV3 psychic).  What’s nice these days is that the extra traffic tends not to cause the site to lock up.

After the two sharing behemoths, the social referrals drop off very quickly.  Reddit comes in a distant third, providing about 80K visits.

Google+ does practically nothing for the site in comparison to the other social networks – so much so the button was removed to save on the extra Javascript it needs.  It barely even scrapes into the top ten social sources. You can understand why it has been called a network for Google employees and Amazon employees who want to Google employees when you see how little traffic it generates.

The top five referrers were:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Reddit
• Boards.ie
• Google

Browser Battle Royale

Google are claiming Chrome is the most popular browser and it certainly king of the hill for Broadsheet jumping from 3rd to 1st accounting for 30% of visits.  Firefox dropped 6% to 23%, Internet Explorer is down to 19% and Safari stays at 15%. I point blank refuse to talk about Opera.

The IE 6 death match nears the end with only 0.7% of visits from the decrepit browser.  This drop off was helped by the fact that the version of WordPress used doesn’t support it.

Beauty and the Beast

Microsoft might be losing the Browser Wars, it still is the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to what people are running on their machines with 62% of devices running some sort of flavor of Windows. There’s still people using Windows 98! Apple comes in with 20% of devices using some version of OS X.

On the mobile side, iDevices still rule the roost with 11.5% of visitors compared to Android’s 3.7%. I keep on hearing about Android’s supposed dominance of the smart phone market but any time I’ve seen website stats it’s been trailing. Maybe next year but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

One minor thing to note is that the Windows devices include the Windows mobile numbers (albeit in tiny numbers) while the Apple’s doesn’t. I can only assume if there’s a big uptake of Windows Mobile 7 and 8 in the coming year they’ll be separated out.

An oddity that surprised me is that there are the people out there still using OS/2 and SunOS.  I can only assume they’re self-flagellants (or just messing with the user agent field to mess with my head).

And We’re Done

That’s all I’ve to say for another year.  If you’ve any comments or questions, let me know and I’ll try and answer them.

Addendum

Since people have been asking about a geographical break down, the top 10 visitor locations (with number of visits) are:

• Ireland (7,551,080)
• United Kingdom (1,117,594)
• United States (519,110)
• (not set) (120,021)
• Australia (118,150)
• Germany (101,340)
• Canada (93,057)
• France (72,971)
• Netherlands (72,412)
• Belgium (65,618)

*If you saw this post a month ago it’s because I can’t tell the difference between a 6 and a 7 in a date…

I got a massive blast of nostalgia this weekend when I discovered that that one of the old Dizzy games has been released on the iPhone. It brought me back to the glory days of the C64, the puzzle platformers and the massive walkthroughs in Commodore Format and Zzap64.  I used to buy both of these religiously while I was in secondary and I was always in awe of the people that sat down and hand drew maps as guides to games.

So in the spirit of these, I present you with a walkthrough for ‘Dizzy – Prince of the Yolkfolk’.

One assumption before we start – whenever you come across a star or a cherry (there are 20), pick it up.

Pick up the bucket of water, the match and the leaves.  Move to the door and drop the leaves then, the match and lastly the bucket.

Move left until you meet the troll.  Pick up the pick axe.  Go back the way you came and jump up onto the first platform then across to the next platform and finally across to the bard.

Continue right, ignoring the rolled up carpet and pick up the fluffle cage (the crate).  Continue past the lion until you come to the tunnel.  Use the pick axe on the rock and enter the cave.  Follow the cave, pick up the gold nugget and exit.

Going left again, continue on until you meet the Grim Reaper.  Give him the gold nugget.  Keep on going left ignoring the MP3 player until you meet the Fluffle.  Drop the fluffle cage.

Jump up to the platform beside the cloud and jump onto the cloud.  Keep jumping across the clouds until you come to one with the ACME bridge building kit.  If you drop off the cloud and fall into the water you’ll be returned to the platform you started on.  Pick up the ACME bridge building kit and go back to the wooden platform.

Jump up two platforms and at the sign that tells you can’t jump the gap and use the ACME bridge building kit. Cross the bridge and go as far right as you can on the platforms.  When you get to the end, you can jump across to the clouds and on to the castle from there.  Drop to the bottom of the tower and pick up the angelic harp.

Return to the platforms and get to the leftmost platform 2nd from the top.  Jump onto the cloud and keep jumping to the left until you meet St. Peter.  Give him the angelic harp and take the cheese.  Go back to the fuffle, put the cheese in the cage and pick it up.  Bring it to the troll and use the cage so he runs away.

Enter the castle and get the outboard motor.  Bring it to the Grim Reaper and swap it for the old metal scythe.  Return to where you got the angelic hard and cut down the thorns.  Follow the corridor.  Pick up the horn and continue down the corridor.  Ignore the flask of liquid.  Go up the next level and continue on ignoring the metal spanner for now.  Take the platform to the next corridor up and follow it to the end and pick up the tweezers.

Return to the lion and use the tweezers on him and take the thorn from his paw.  Pick up the thorn.  Go back to where the metal spanner is in the right-hand castle and drop the thorn to the right of the trapdoor.  Get to the button in the corridor above and let the zombie Dizzy run into the thorn.  Go back and pick up the metal spanner.

Return to bard and give him the horn for the funny joke book.  Continue to the left castle.  Go up the lift to the first level and continue left until you come to the winch.  Use the metal spanner on the winch to lower the drawbridge.  Leave the castle via the drawbridge and continue left until you meet the princess.  Give her the joke book for the flag.

Re-enter the castle and make your way to the flagpole at the top.  Use the flag on it and the king will appear and make you a prince.  Drop down one level and pick up the key to the right.

Go all the way back to the right-hand castle to the last moving platform.  Take it all the way to the top and jump across to the locked door.  Use the key to open the door and move to beside the bed.

Daisy will wake up and as long as you’ve collected all 20 cherries you’ll ‘find’ a ballon in your pocket.  Off home you fly!

It’s been a year since Broadsheet.ie and launched and it’s been a rather interesting year to see it grow with such limited resources.  I’m going talk here about some of the bits and pieces that have interested me.

Obama > Queen > Stephen Ireland

For the last three months, Broadsheet has done over 1 million pageviews a month, which accounts for about half the total since it started.  Considering the site started off on shared hosting and is now on a vps, it’s pretty good going.  For caching, the site had been using WP Super Cache but it seemed to struggle somewhat (this, in fairness, could be down to being misconfigured).  I switched W3C Total Cache and that seems to have improved things.

The first standout post the site was one about Stephen Ireland’s house.  It was one of those posts that caught people’s imaginations and spread like wildfire across the net.  It reappears every so often on football sites, usually to howls of incredulity.  It remains the second most popular post on the site.

There’s been a couple of outstanding days where there’s been a general surge in traffic, most notably during Obama’s (78,041) and Queen Elizabeth II’s (69,154 64,735 55,199) visits.  The nice thing about days like those is that there’s generally a little extra boost to traffic afterwards.

However, despite all that, the most consistently viewed post is a silly screencap of a Yahoo question.  It ended up on Stumble Upon and people are still coming to the site nine months later for a cheap giggle.

Something that surprised me was the number of people that viewed the previous posts pages.  There’s a huge drop off from those that view the second  compared to the first page and continues to drop off rapidly.  The fifth page has less than 1% of the views of the first.  So the moral of this story is content dies very quickly.

The top five posts of the last year have been:

• Greatest Yahoo Answer. Ever.
• Slide-Show EXTRA! Inside Stephen Ireland’s House
• The Bridesmaid In The Rubberbandits Video Is Madeline Mulqueen. You’ll LIke Her
• Tuesday Is Gary Busey Day*
• Slide-Show: Here Come The…Student Teachers!?!

Facebook > Twitter > Google+

Traffic from Facebook has been pretty consistent, being about 1/3 to 1/2 more referrals than from Twitter.  That said, the site has been taken down via links from Graham Linehan and Charlie Brooker’s twitter streams.  Google+ is yet to have an impact, with barely a trickle of incoming links.  Both Boards.ie and Politics.ie both provide a steady supply of views, usually for the politically charged stuff (and pictures of Irish models, of course).

The top five referrers were:

• Google
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Stumbleupon
• Boards.ie

Dirty Old Goats

The growth in traffic from Google has grown steadily since launch with some notable spikes (Bing and Yahoo provide so little traffic they’re not worth talking about).  Brian Cowen hungover on the radio and then the sketch on Jay Leno was the first example of search traffic spike.  Neil Prendeville and his misadventure though is the king of spikes, adding 4.7K visits to a baseline of under 1K at the time.

But the queen of keywords is Madeline Mulqueen after her appearance in that Rubberbandits video.  Plenty of dirty beggars out there looking for more photos of her and who are we to disappoint?

Six of the top ten searches bringing people to the site involve ‘broadsheet.ie’ (mostly because people are too lazy to switch to the URL bar), so excluding them the top ten is:

• madeline mulqueen
• gary busey
• neil prendeville
• alison o’riordan
• jean byrne
• dominic hyde
• sarah carey
• jay leno brian cowen
• damo and ivor
• brian cowen drunk

I wonder if Alison is happy with her internet fame?

IE6, why won’t you die?

Firefox rules the roost, with 29.98% of the browser share.  IE follows with 24.70% but Chrome is snapping at its heels with 23%.  Safari lags behind with 15.74% (which would include both desktop and mobile versions).

8.72% of all visitors still came via IE6.  The only glimmer of hope is that this month it’s fallen to 7.88%.  One day, it will be ground into the dust and be forgotten about like a bad dream.  But that day is not today.

Android accounts for about the same amount of traffic as iPads and iPods combined but is still 1/3rd of the traffic from iPhones (and if there wasn’t an app it would only be higher). After that there’s there usual suspects of Blackberry/Nokia/Samsung (in that order).

Tonight I’ve been mixing up my second proper batch of homebrew (the first doesn’t count as I never bottled it). This time I’m brewing Coopers Brewmaster India Pale Ale.

The kits are pretty easy to get going.   Adding spraymalt instead of sugar and a better strain of yeast produces a very drinkable pale ale last time round so I’m trying that again.  I did get some hops to throw in but I decided to leave them for the next attempt.

I’ll be leaving the beer in the barrel for about a week before transferring to another barrel for another week.  After that it’s the bottling process which can be a bit of a pain in the nads.

This brew should be ready for New Years so here’s hoping for another success!

Let’s try this bloging lark once again, shall we?