December 2009 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 11,295,850
• Total Files: 10,659,533
• Total Pages: 969,383
• Total Visits: 269,297
• Total KBytes: 44,774,958
• Total Unique Sites: 174,310
• Total Unique URLs: 21,043
• Total Unique Referrers: 32,179
• Total Unique User Agents: 7,386

December 2009 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 364,382 – Max: 444,751
• Files per Day: Average: 343,855 – Max: 421,241
• Pages per Day: Average: 31,270 – Max: 44,055
• Visits per Day: Average: 8,687 – Max: 10,084
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,444,353 – Max: 1,830,334

Note: Green denotes increase, Blue denotes no change and Red denotes decrease when compared with November 2009.

Previous month site traffic: November 2009

WordPress 2.9 has been released on the 19th December 2009. Here are some of the highlights of WordPress 2.9:

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).
5. We now have rel=canonical support for better SEO.
6. There is automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);.
7. Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
8. A new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework.
9. Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)
10. You can set custom theme directories, so a plugin can register a theme to be bundled with it or you can have multiple shared theme directories on your server.
11. We’ve upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
12. Sidebars can now have descriptions so it’s more obvious what and where they do what they do.
13. Specify category templates not just by ID, like before, but by slug, which will make it easier for theme developers to do custom things with categories — like post types!
14. Registration and profiles are now extensible to allow you to collect things more easily, like a user’s Twitter account or any other fields you can imagine.
15. The XML-RPC API has been extended to allow changing the user registration option. We fixed some Atom API attachment issues.
16. Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
17. When you’re editing files in the theme and plugin editors it remembers your location and takes you back to that line after you save. (Thank goodness!!!)
18. The Press This bookmarklet has been improved and is faster than ever; give it a try for on-the-fly blogging from wherever you are on the internet.
19. Custom taxonomies are now included in the WXR export file and imported correctly.
20. Better hooks and filters for excerpts, smilies, HTTP requests, user profiles, author links, taxonomies, SSL support, tag clouds, query_posts and WP_Query

At that time I was in Hong Kong and couldn’t upgrade this site at all. I came back yesterday and perform the upgrade today. Everything went smoothly, looks like not much changes that will break plugins compatibility as the current version of my plugins works fine as well.

I hesitated for the upgrade because I know WordPress 2.9.1 will be out latest by next week but nevertheless, I still proceed on with the upgrade.

I also updated my resume to reflect my final academic results and now the academic section of it is 100% completed.

November 2009 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 11,232,870
• Total Files: 10,594,601
• Total Pages: 907,322
• Total Visits: 252,818
• Total KBytes: 43,674,815
• Total Unique Sites: 158,597
• Total Unique URLs: 19,509
• Total Unique Referrers: 33,582
• Total Unique User Agents: 7,265

November 2009 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 374,429 – Max: 420,985
• Files per Day: Average: 353,153 – Max: 397,883
• Pages per Day: Average: 30,244 – Max: 42,058
• Visits per Day: Average: 8,427 – Max: 9,499
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,455,827 – Max: 1,815,226

Note: Green denotes increase, Blue denotes no change and Red denotes decrease when compared with October 2009.

Previous month site traffic: October 2009

Server Specifications
This site can be considered running on a dedicated server as it only host 30 other domains which belongs to friends and families of both Michael and I. This server is housed at M1 Connect (previously known as Qala). It has 1mbps guaranteed and 10mbps burstable bandwidth.

• Dell PowerEdge 860
• Single Dual-Core Intel Xeon 3050, 2.13GHz, 1066MHz front side bus, 2MB cache
• 2x 1GB ECC DDR2 667 SDRAM
• 1x 250GB & 1x 500GB 7.2K RPM SATA II Hard Drive
• CentOS Release 5

I also have a backup server provided by Vodien Internet Solutions which I will rysnc to manually every week.

• Dell PowerEdge 2950
• 2x Intel Quad Core Xeon E5420
• 16GB Ram
• 4x 300GB SAS RAID 10
• CentOS Release 5

If you are looking for web hosting, do check them out, their support response time is fantastic!

WordPress Theme
This theme is developed by me and hence it is not available to the public as I want to keep it unique. I am using Facybox to display single images in a modal window. Yes, I am using jQuery as well. For some of my feeds like my Twitter feed and WordPress Plugins feed are retrieved and parsed using SimplePie which is included in WordPress.

There is also a iPhone version which is optimized for iPhone viewing, just visit this site in iPhone and it will redirect you to the iPhone version.

Most if not all of the pages in this website is validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

WordPress Plugins
I am a WordPress plugins developer however not all the plugins I developed are used on this website as I think plugins like WP-Ban and WP-PostRatings are not necessary as I don’t wish to ban any people from my site or getting my post rated.

I modified only one plugin which is the Breadcrumb plugin by Dan Peverill to have my plugins’ breadcrumbs such as WP-Email and WP-UserOnline displayed using it.

There are also two plugins which I created personally for this website, lesterchan.net Plugin houses several of the functions used in this website and WP-GalleryViewer powers my Gallery. Both of them are not available to the public as it is highly customized to this website.

• Akismet
• Breadcrumb – Modified
• Digg Button
• Google XML Sitemaps
• lesterchan.net Plugin – Not Available
• WordPress.com Stats
• WP-CommentNavi
• WP-DBManager
• WP-DownloadManager
• WP-EMail
• WP-GalleryViewer 1.00 – Not Available
• WP-PageNavi
• WP-PluginsUsed
• WP-Polls
• WP-PostViews
• WP-Print
• WP-RelativeDate
• WP-ServerInfo
• WP-Stats
• WP-UserOnline

Full Details on my Plugins Used Page.

Tracking
I am using the following statistical tools to track and analyze my site traffic.

• Webalizer
• Google Analytics
• WordPress.com Stats
• Extreme Tracking (Depreciated)

URL Shortener
I am using lc.sg as my personal URL shortener and it is powered by YOURLS which is initially developed by me but now, it is developed mainly by Ozh himself. Ozh if you see this, thank you!

Others?
If I missed out anything and you wish to know more about it, do leave it in the comments and I will try my best to add it in.

I am not a guru when it comes to SEO, what I know about SEO is from what I heard from my friends and forums. I also do not believe in paying thousand over dollars just to get a good SEO because most of the tools are free!

Just would like to share the stuff I did on this website to improve it’s SEO:

• Age of domain does matter, I bought lesterchan.net way back in 24th January 2004 which makes this domain close to 6 years old.
• I am using Google XML Sitemaps to send sitemaps to various search engine.
• Post title always appear first in the browser title bar before the domain name or website name, eg “Site Traffic October 2009 « Blog | lesterchan.net”.
• I allow bots to crawl my whole website using <meta name=”robots” content=”all” />
• From a user perspective, I always think what search term might the user Google for and I use that as the post title. eg “Windows 7 Pricing in Singapore” or “SingTel iPhone 3GS Price Plans”. All these post has become my most viewed posts.
• Produce content that users really want in order to get them to link back to you. Example, my highest viewed page is my WordPress Plugins Page.
• Register your website with Google Webmasters Tools.

Tools used to track my website:

• Webalizer
• Google Analytics
• WordPress.com Stats
• Extreme Tracking (Depreciated)

Feel free to add in more SEO tips in the comments.

October 2009 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 11,689,658
• Total Files: 11,018,107
• Total Pages: 974,268
• Total Visits: 255,532
• Total KBytes: 46,133,578
• Total Unique Sites: 156,167
• Total Unique URLs: 19,650
• Total Unique Referrers: 40,161
• Total Unique User Agents: 7,102

October 2009 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 377,085 – Max: 426,525
• Files per Day: Average: 355,422 – Max: 401,470
• Pages per Day: Average: 31,428 – Max: 49,795
• Visits per Day: Average: 8,242 – Max: 9,374
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,488,180 – Max: 2,527,577

Note: Green denotes increase, Blue denotes no change and Red denotes decrease when compared with September 2009.

Previous month site traffic: September 2009

September 2009 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 11,514,395
• Total Files: 10,832,441
• Total Pages: 881,091
• Total Visits: 234,920
• Total KBytes: 43,696,408
• Total Unique Sites: 160,044
• Total Unique URLs: 18,486
• Total Unique Referrers: 33,504
• Total Unique User Agents: 7,675

September 2009 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 383,813 – Max: 426,493
• Files per Day: Average: 361,081 – Max: 405,169
• Pages per Day: Average: 29,369 – Max: 40,079
• Visits per Day: Average: 7,830 – Max: 9,390
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,456,547 – Max: 1,690,368

Note: Green denotes increase, Blue denotes no change and Red denotes decrease when compared with August 2009.

Previous month site traffic: August 2009

August 2009 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 11,487,833
• Total Files: 10,711,544
• Total Pages: 918,191
• Total Visits: 237,324
• Total KBytes: 44,732,224
• Total Unique Sites: 167,558
• Total Unique URLs: 20,287
• Total Unique Referrers: 34,270
• Total Unique User Agents: 7,288

August 2009 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 370,575 – Max: 434,458
• Files per Day: Average: 345,533 – Max: 405,993
• Pages per Day: Average: 29,619 – Max: 62,980
• Visits per Day: Average: 7,655 – Max: 8,560
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,442,975 – Max: 1,840,247

Note: Green denotes increase, Blue denotes no change and Red denotes decrease when compared with July 2009.

Previous month site traffic: July 2009

July 2009 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 13,017,194
• Total Files: 12,118,199
• Total Pages: 892,110
• Total Visits: 245,909
• Total KBytes: 50,145,139
• Total Unique Sites: 175,508
• Total Unique URLs: 21,045
• Total Unique Referrers: 36,102
• Total Unique User Agents: 7,331

July 2009 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 419,909 – Max: 526,326
• Files per Day: Average: 390,909 – Max: 486,750
• Pages per Day: Average: 28,777 – Max: 38,911
• Visits per Day: Average: 7,932 – Max: 9,152
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,617,585 – Max: 2,183,182

Note: Green denotes increase, Blue denotes no change and Red denotes decrease when compared with June 2009.

Previous month site traffic: June 2009

June 2009 Total Traffic

• Total Hits: 12,353,277
• Total Files: 11,498,846
• Total Pages: 928,925
• Total Visits: 238,957
• Total KBytes: 47,913,285
• Total Unique Sites: 174,547
• Total Unique URLs: 20,253
• Total Unique Referrers: 36,590
• Total Unique User Agents: 7,286

June 2009 Daily Traffic

• Hits per Day: Average: 411,775 – Max: 543,863
• Files per Day: Average: 383,294 – Max: 509,580
• Pages per Day: Average: 30,964 – Max: 101,269
• Visits per Day: Average: 7,965 – Max: 12,416
• KBytes per Day: Average: 1,597,110 – Max: 3,532,779

Note: Green denotes increase, Blue denotes no change and Red denotes decrease when compared with May 2009.

Previous month site traffic: May 2009