Today has been mad with email spam. I've had around 250-300 spam mails slip past Spam Assassin. Thankfully I run Mailwasher Pro on my computer so this picks up and colours all of my obvious spam in a very bright red and I can delete it off the server before downloading the one or two real emails.

Doesn't seem I'm the only one noticing the spam today. Jason has also posted about it today, how his wife says it's just the right size!

Usually I would set up various filters to help block obvious words within the subject or body of the emails, however I'm an unfortunate position in that one of my major clients sells (genuine) swiss watches and another runs Pharmacy recruitment! I guess I can't really justify blocking 'watches', 'rolex' or 'pharmacy' from my incoming emails.

What frustrates me is that all this spam gets past the spam blockers, yet I tend to find my own emails get blocked on route to the recipient. Whether this is due to the mention of Web Development, or another obvious reason, who knows.

I think I'll spend the weekend building a filter list blocking every russian character I can find

We're all obsessed with statistics these days. What's your Alexa Rank, what's your Google PageRank, how many visitors do you get a day, how many feed subscribers do you have? When I first started building websites I would be lucky to get a visitor to my site who I didn't actually know. Those were the days of the free half a megabyte hosting from Tripod! (Circa 1996).

Statistics are used for all types of marketing. Advertising premiums are usually determined by the website's statistics, the recent spurt of blog sales, again the success of the site and subsequent price is measured on the statistics. Sure, we do need to have something to make our assumptions on, but just how accurate are those figures?

So let's take this domain (2 blogs plus a front end combination of the 2 – and no it's not for sale!) and see how the various stats offerings vary.

Alexa Rank

Is currently 76,201. Remember Alexa Rank is combination of your visitors and page views, but it's also a measurement of only those who have the toolbar installed. I have a client site that gets over 60 times the visitors to here and their Alexa Rank is around 140,000.

Compete

Apparently in the month of October this site had 4,299 visitors which averages at 143 a day. This is only an estimation of US traffic so I assume (although I could be wrong as I don't pay much attention to Compete) that this wouldn't include any other country's traffic.

AWStats

AWStats reports 5,727 visitors for October, just under 185 per day.

W3 Counter

This reports 2,794 visitors for October, which works out to 90 visitors per day.

So which do you believe? Personally, I believe W3 Counter is the most accurate as it seems to clarify what Feedburner and WordPress.com Stats tell me. How Compete determines its figures is beyond me, and clearly server logs are most likely over inflated by the increasing amount of spam bots and spiders we have on the loose these days.

Of course, all statistics can be gamed, but the above figures are accurate reports from each source, no gaming involved.

So next time you look at your stats just ask yourself, are they as accurate as you think?

After the long running saga, we've finally moved house! It's been a long week and an even longer weekend, and we've still got a lot to do, but at least the roof over our heads is now the new house. I've moved house a lot of times (30+ in all now) however I've never had this much stress. It's been a while since I had so much stuff to move, so I guess that hasn't helped, however we've also had a few issues with arranging various things.

On monday we got the keys for the new house. We headed straight up to see what would need doing and we also had a couple of boxes already with us. Unfortunately since viewing the house, the landlord and his wife had decided to decorate, leaving a lot of mess in the bathroom. So we set to working cleaning the bathroom as well as the kitchen, which was already planned regardless of cleanliness. It wasn't what I'd hoped for, you usually expect to rent a house out in a clean state to begin with. Anyway, we unpacked the boxes we had and then went off to a friend's for the evening.

On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we didn't actually return to the new place. Dave suffered with a bad back all last week (perfect timing unfortunately!) and I had so much work to get done that I decided we'd just spend the week working and packing, getting ready for the weekend. We then spent Friday moving more boxes up to the house, met the landlord in the evening briefly, and then on Saturday we had a van to do a couple of trips with the bulk of the stuff.

On Monday we found a BT line (British Telecom, main provider of telephone lines in the UK) so assumed we could get that reconnected and keep our ADSL, just moved over to the new line. However a quick call to BT later and we were told it would cost £125 to reconnect the line, we would also have the cost of enabling ADSL which is £50, so £175 in total. This compared to free set up with NTL/Virgin Media, 2MB broadband, telephone and the basic cable TV package for £20 a month. No comparison really! So we had the equipment couriered out to us on Wednesday and we set it all up on Friday.

Annoyingly the house currently has prepay meters for both Electricity and Gas. This means that we need to ensure there is always money on the meter else it'll just cut out. So you have the choice of having to put a lot of money on the meter or risk running out of credit in the evening when the shops are closed. Plus not many shops let you buy credit which is also frustrating (not to mention it's a more expensive system). We've already asked the supplier to change the meters, I hope it's done soon.

Another rant this week (it's been a long week!) is over the Royal Mail. In this country, if you move home you can pay to have any mail going to your old address to be redirected to your new address. Handy, especially with Christmas coming. However 'for your security' you naturally have to prove who you are and that you live at the old address. Well, despite having a car registered there, car insurance and house insurance, because I cannot provide a utility bill (electricity, gas, water or telephone) as they're all in Dave's name, and my bank details are at my business address, I therefore cannot get my mail redirected. So for my security my mail will continue to go to the old address and could be opened by anyone (being against the law doesn't tend to deter people if they don't care). Okay, so it's for security, I can understand that. What I can't understand is that once the redirection is set up, a letter is sent to the old address stating that redirection has been set up for those who have requested it and of course, if this is incorrect please contact them. So, erm, why can I not have my redirection as their final security check is the cherry on the cake anyway?!

Still, rants aside, I'm glad to have finally got out the other house. It's so quiet and peaceful here for a start off. Plus we're a short walk (up a hill) from an Observatory that, once you're up there, gives you panoramic views over the area and hopefully a few good sunsets too (providing the clouds go away!). It's also so nice to know where the car is (2m from the front door) instead of wondering if it's still where you left it, whether it's been hit, broken into or had a wheel or two stolen!

So we're settling in slowly. Still got loads of boxes to unpack, the bed to put back together, and a few bits still to get from the old house, but we're getting there.

I've finally had a chance to upload the photos from our visit to Chester Zoo a month ago. It was a beautiful sunny day which, whilst great for a day at the zoo, has washed out a few of the photos, however I've selected the best and added them to Flickr.

You can see my photos in the Chester Zoo set. I also recommend Dave's photos in his Chester Zoo set.

Have a good weekend. I'm off to move house

Anyone reading the typical AIS blogs will have come across the news about the recent changes to AdSense in the form of reducing the clickable area on the advert from the entire advert to just the title and link (if it's displayed) being clickable (see knupNET for the hotspot areas as an image).nnSo how has your earnings, or more accurately, your click through rate, changed? I've just done a quick comparison of the 1st to the 13th November, and then from the 14th until yesterday (21st). I've chosen the 14th as that is the day that JenSense announced the change so I can only assume it was in force at that point. The difference? Not much really. For the first 2 weeks of the month we had an average CTR of 9.55% and for the past week this has been 9.4%. So as you can see, the change hasn't made much of an impact this month so far. Compared to last month we're down 1% on CTR however we've been on a steady decline since we had to change the look of the ads back in September.nnAnyone else seen much effect after this change?