Today I was helping out a friend, looking into why his bandwidth had shot up since March, when there's been no difference in visitors, page views and hits. After a lot of trawling through AWStats I discovered 17GB worth of images being transferred, but I couldn't pinpoint which ones were causing the problem until I opened Webalizer.

Now I'm not a fan of Webalizer usually, the stats it reports seem inaccurate, it's very hard to read, it doesn't give you the good information that AWStats does, however for once it gave me exactly what I needed. After a quick look I found the top 10 URLs by KBytes, and this showed me the top bandwidth using file (at a massive 14GB) was an animated gif of 881kb! Change it to a static image and save it as optimised and that would reduce to around 20kb max, just 350MB bandwidth.

That's a big saving when it comes to bandwidth costs.

So Webalizer isn't totally useless.

I've been using Google Sitemaps on a few of my own and client's sites to monitor their rankings and visitors in the SERPs. Now I know Google has problems, despite what some say, especially as I'm watching one site drop from 2000+ pages to 2 and now just 1 page indexed! However on the other end of the bizarre, I'm finding that Google Sitemaps reports my Diet Blog to be ranking on average at number 1 for "pan fried lemon sole" (a favourite recipe of mine) yet when I search I cannot see it on the front page! I can even see that people have clicked on various similar phrases in my stats at Count Me Counter, yet when I view the page they were referred from I do not see my site on it.

I have a similar story with my osCommerce Templates site. According to Google Sitemaps, and according to Count Me Counter, I'm meant to have an average position of ninth and clicks from the first results page for the phrase "oscommerce templates", yet I can't find myself in the first 100.

I remember a few years back reading that Google displayed the results it thinks you want to see, also using your location to control your results too, so someone could see different results to you for the same phrase. I'm just wondering if that's becoming the case again.

After having my favourite of Chicken Fajitas, we went off to the cinema tonight to watch Mission Impossible III. After the let down of the Da Vinci Code I was hoping for a good film to take my mind off work. I have to say, it wasn't exceptional, but it was typical Mission Impossible. Explosive, suspense, action and good effects.

The story had its usual twists and turns, and at one point where Ethan Hawke (Tom Cruise) swings from one building to another, 200m up, is very edge of your seat type material. Suffice to say it's good on the big screen but I've yet to see a film that can justify the expensive cinema tickets these days, but perhaps that just me who used to pay £1 to go to the cinema!

Should we be hiding our WhoIs Details on bought domains? I've read over a couple of sites where people hide their details to protect their identity as the owner of various blackhat style sites, whether they're scraper sites or just use backhat SEO techniques. However how about your own legit sites? Let's say you set up a great site, throw up some adsense to help cover the costs of running it, but you once had or still have a couple of blackhat style sites running on the side to help with the income.nnIf those sites got banned would your legit site be banned? And is there honestly a way to search and see all of the domains you have registered?nnI have an option to buy a WhoIs Protect service at eNom, where I buy all of my .com and .net domains, however it's not free (okay it's only $8 so it's an option), but should I be protecting just my blackhat domains or all of them, or should I stop worrying and just carrying on building sites?!

Well so much for the rain this weekend. I spent all day on Saturday indoors expecting it to rain and it didn't. It would have been perfect washing weather (which we seem to constantly have piles of) but the forecast had predicted rain and I'm not a fan of running through the house to get the washing in when it starts raining. Yesterday however was right, the sun was out, it was quite hot and nice weather. Today it should be raining too. It seems overcast but I can't hear much rain.

Anyhow, so we spent yesterday in the garden again. I enjoy gardening probably because it's the only exercise I get at the moment! No where here is really within walking distance, and we've still not had time to get our bikes yet. So getting out into the garden means fresh air and exercise. So yesterday we popped to the shops, came back and made lunch. It was a nice afternoon so I pulled the cover off our new patio furniture so we could sit out, only to find an ants nest on the table A couple of kettles of boiling water later and it was cleared off but we figured there was an ants nest under the loose paving slabs that cover our 'patio', so Dave popped out for ant powder and some slug pellets too, as a couple have been found wandering near my lettuces.

So the men (that'd be Dave and Paul) moved all of the paving slabs off the raised patio which we have and it's now covered in white powder! In the mean time I dug over one of our empty borders that's going to be a vegetable patch when Paul gets around to growing something in it. For now it's half full of old potatoes to see if we can grow more. I found another 2 potato plants growing in the herb garden so those have been added to the other which is coming along nicely. My herbs, lettuces and raspberry canes are all doing well too. I'm quite impressed with myself to be honest as I've not really maintained a garden (or part of a garden) before let alone grown food.

However the downside with this garden is that it's been a lot of work as the owner and any previous tenants didn't care about it at all. We've dug up a stack (and it's a big stack) of bricks and roof tiles, there's glass and plastic bags / bin bags throughout the garden. There's a whole bag of clay which has been dumped in one part of the garden, and there's a natural base of clay in another part, so when it rains we have a swimming pool! Even the raised patio has just had the paving slabs laid on top with no fixing. Of course we're just renting so regardless of what we do with it, there's only so much we can take with us. The plants that can come will come, but I don't want to go spending out on a garden that isn't mine. Especially as what we've done to it has probably already added a nice value to the house which we'd never see. Heck we've been waiting for them to fix the dishwasher for over 7 months! But it's nice to have a garden to sit in (when the ants are all gone). We're still working hard on getting some decent grass to grow as the grassy area is pretty bad, the clay underneath doesn't help.

But all in all it's fun