Gangleri - news

Automatic news

Roy — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 19:14:23 +0000

With a 'network' it is a lot easier to have a 'new on Gangleri' page. Now all new posts will be listed here on the right automatically without me having to do anything. I realise that this is not the perfect sollution, since you might have a feed subscription for this section to follow the whole of Gangleri.nl, but I am working on that Continue reading Automatic news

Security and anti-spam

Roy — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:36:33 +0000

I almost forgot to mention that when I was working on the complete makeover of this website, that I had to replace some security plugins and/or was suddenly able to use the latest version. Of one very extensive security plugin I was never able to use but a very old version and now I use the latest with many many features of blocking access and stopping bots.

Then in the old setup I found an easy way to block IP’s, referrers, hosts, etc. I am not completely sure if this still works, but you will know soon enough when you are on the blacklist

As far as I know this has not resulted in new problems with commenting of access to these pages. Should you experience problems, please visit the “website intro and contact” part to send me an email about this.

A few other things that I consider with all the spamming etc. going on is disabling or at least replace the “live comment preview” and the “subscribe to comments” (in the articles and book sections). Bots load the “live comment preview” files every time they stop by even when they are not able to do anything. The same goes for the subscription feature. Spam are caught, but the emails end up in my subscribtion list. Both cost server effort which is not really necessary. There are hardly any subscribers in the first place, but a preview before posting a comment is an almost obligatory feature.

Complete makeover

roy — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:14:44 +0000

WordPress 3.0 is available and this was not going to be a regular upgrade. 3.0 Has possilbities which will make the maintenance of this website a lot easier, but in order to be able to use it, I had to take down the entire website and then rebuild it. The website remained largely the same, there were a few things that I ran into that I cannot immediately solve, a few easthetic failures too, but for the larger part, you should encounter not too many differences. Should you run into something that just does not work (properly), be so kind to drop me a note at contact and you can come up with the rest of the email address yourself.

Now I am off to do something different, four hours were quite enough…

Stats

roy — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:18:57 +0000

I do not often look at this website’s statistics and when I do, it makes me wonder about the use of Gangleri.nl. When I look at last week averages (unique vistors per day, hits per day) this list is as follows:
Articles: 82/420
Bookreviews: 30/219
Filmreviews: 27/188
Musicreviews: 60/590

When you count back, that comes to respectively 5, 7, 7 and 10 hits per visitor. This seems unlikely to me. A visitor looks at five long articles, but also 7 short film or music reviews? This probably has more to say about how this website works on the background. Other interesting or less interesting things are that the Articles section gets tons of spam (probably caused by a few popular referrers which generate quite some traffic), the Filmreviews section has loads of referrer spam, but hardly comment spam and the Musicreviews section is constantly battered by the same IP (91.214.44.182, a spammer I asume).

Let us have a look at two previous daily averages based on the previous week: Articles 91 and 72 unique visitors in January 2010 and August 2009; Bookreviews respectively 41 and 64; Filmreviews 26 and 76 and Musicreviews 60 and 126. That is quite a drastic decline on most fronts. Of course, these are but numbers based on weekly stats. In a week with many new reviews, the number of visitors is likely to be up for a while, but still…

But of course, if 82 people a day learn a little something from my articles and 30 or 60 people a day read a review and learn something about a book, film or album, that is a nice thought, right…?

The use of it all

roy — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:51:26 +0000

I have had a website online for about 9 years. Since the beginning I have published music reviews and articles, later also book- and filmreviews. Much has changed in those years, especially with music and film. The music scene that I am mostly involved in was tiny in these days. A normal pressing of a cd was 2000 copies or so and the best way to learn about new music was to read (online) magazines. Nothing like that anymore. Nowadays, when you hear a bandname, you go to their Myspace to listen to their music, you have Last.fm to find similar bands and most of all, all kinds of places on the world wide web to listen to music legally or get it illegally. Is there still a need for a music reviews website? Personally I have never really known a website where I could read about music that I am interested in (after Funprox stopped that is) and I have moved along a bit with my time. When some distributor has a band that I do not know, I check their Myspace or try to listen to their music in some other way before I buy an album. Safer, sure. Would my music reviews section give people ideas for music (to download) or do people get their information in another way, such as fellow P2P user lists? When I check my statistics I see that my music reviews section is the most popular after the articles section, on average 60 unique visitors a day last week (997 hits). That is not so bad.
Similar thoughts apply to the film reviews section, my least popular section (26/524). When you learn about a title, you can watch the trailer on Youtube or whereever, but with films I do prefer myself to read a review before I watch it, but also here I do not really know a place to read reviews of films of my interest.
The close the line, the book reviews section comes at 41/246 in the last week and articles at 91/676, pretty high thinking of it that nothing really happens there, but I have a few popular articles that Wikipedia links to and that helps a lot.
There is no doubt in my mind about the articles and book reviews sections, but these are the slowest going and they require most effort and therefor these other two make that in most cases at least once a week something new can be read at Gangleri.nl and that can be a reason too to keep maintaining these two sections.

Tidying up

roy — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:38:12 +0000

I just deleted 123 posts just saying "new book review" or "new film review". I noticed that I have a variety of posts in the 'general blog' (where I hardly write anything...) which may get a bit more of attention again. Besides, a notificitation for a new post in another section does not need to stay here until kingdom come Continue reading Tidying up

Subscribe to comments

roy — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:12:11 +0000

Well that subscribe to comments function proves to be another extra job. My anti-spam measures might block spam comments, but not the spam subscriptions to comments. Not that these are of any use, but an automatic spam bot doesn't care about that of course. Since I don't expect ongoing discussions about music or filmreviews or newsitems, I disabled the plugin in these parts. If in the bookreviews and articles sections Continue reading Subscribe to comments

Spam'n'eggs

roy — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:33:00 +0000

A while ago I was notified about the fact that people had problems commenting, the problem was the antispam plugin that I used used some kind of Java that did not work for everyone. I replaced the plugin only to find out that I receive several spam comments every day. So I looked for yet another antispam plugin, hopefully it works better. Should you have any problems commenting, please to Continue reading Spam'n'eggs

Anti spam measures

roy — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:13:18 +0000

It seems that things like this have to happen from time to time. In a few days time I got two notifications of problems with commenting. One visitor was kind enough to contact me and tell me the error he got. It was a white screen with at the bottom giving not only the file which gave the error (hmmm, that is not a good thing), but also the line: “In order to prevent spam, you must manually copy the given number if you do not have JavaScript enabled. Please go back and try again.” I use two anti spam plugins, apparently both use some JavaScript, but the error quickly showed me which one gave the problems. I could not reproduce the error, but I hate the fact that some people do have problems. So I got rid of the plugin (that apparently is no longer maintained anyway) and replaced it by another. All works fine here, should you now or at any given time have problems with commenting, please go to the “website intro & contact” and see there how to email me. Please provide as much information as possible, what section (articles, book reviews, etc.) what browser you use, what error you get (a print screen might help), etc. I hope I have solved the problem for now, but like I said, it seems like this has to happen from time to time.

Stats and other news

roy — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:03:28 +0000

I do not often look at my statistics, but today I did. I do not think there are many changes since the previous time, but I noticed a few things. When I make a daily average for August, I come to the following numbers:
Articles: 72 unique visitors per day; book reviews: 64; film reviews: 76; music reviews: 126.
Hits are of course much higher and also feed-hits even when I don’t advertise feeds on the other sections than the news section. The film and music review archives have much entries at category archives with in music a high ranking for the “tag” Haus Arafna! Book reviews get more direct hits. Popular are Flowers’ Galdrabók, Mead’s Mysteries Of Mithra.
What I find interesting myself is how the articles go. Here’s an overview:
Battlenoise: 2321 hits in the last week
Christian Cabala: 1919
index: 1440
Rune Calendars: 1170
Nine Words In Nordic Mythology: 911
Occult Renaissance: 847
Angel Magic: 803
Johannes Bureus: 670
Rune Cross Of Johannes Bureus: 655
Papyri Graecae Magicae: 522

The Battlenoise book is awfully popular. Probably because the larger part of the print was destroyed and people still want to know about it, but 2321 hits in a week?!? How many potential readers would the book have in the first place? I find position 3 for the index surprising, perhaps there are still people who come there to see if there is anything new, while there rarely is. The “Christian Cabala” and “Rune Calendar” articles always come up high. The subjects have become popular shortly after I wrote the articles and the English wikipedia has links to my articles in both their articles (no I didn’t put them there myself). The same popularity has been there for the medieval/Renaissance magic articles and Bureus is a newly rising star. The “Nine Worlds” and “Papyri Graecae Magicae” are surprising, especially the first one.
Since my articles section is quite wide in subject, it shows a bit where the people’s interests go, which I find nice to see some time.

The last thing that I noticed is that there is apparently a new and rapidly becoming popular search engine bing.com. It is a beta, I find it way below the level of Google myself, but I get more hits from Bing than from Google recently.

To close off something completely different: apparently someone has found a way to avoid my anti spam measures. 3 Out of 5 sections get quite a lot of spam for some paid gamesite. The comments themselves are complimentary but the text doesn’t fit the posts they reply to, but the username is linked to all kinds of Wow Power Leveling websites, so they get an extraordinary high ranking from Google. I suppose this is exactly the point. I hope I have this spam flood under control soon, otherwise I may have to take some more drastic matters, such as no automatically publishing of comments.