Entries Tagged 'About us' ↓

I like to look in my stats to see what people are interested about, so I was surprised to see the Google search for my name with Ipswich. Not another employer. So I then went to look at the IP address 91.109.140.140. They’d originally been searching for Public Impact, an outfit I’d been less than complimentary about in the past for their practice of siphoning off public money for Labour campaigns. They then looked at the about page, then looked for james bridge ward news, after that showing some interest in Chris Moles’ expenses. After that they did my name search and looked for pictures of me through Google.

Sorry Labour ladies, I’m happily married. You weird and deeply disturbing cyberstalkers.

I’ve set up a Twitter account at https://twitter.com/bridgewardnews

Currently I don’t intend much activity.

I still can’t get comments up, so if you want to send any reaction to something I’ve said please email james@bridgeward.org.uk

They’re off yet again. It’s probably a theme change, but I can’t get them back on again.

It’s not deliberate.

I was inactive yesterday, sorry.

Any way there’s a new theme, to minimise bandwidth use (it’s less of a problem than it was at the beginning of the month, but I thought it would be a Smart move to lock things down before the election).

Comments are a problem at the moment, but I will try to sort this out.

Due to the attempted denial of service attack recently I’ve been a bit more jumpy about who’s visiting my site and that means I’m examining a good deal of IPs that show suspicious behaviour.  I’m starting to get a better idea of who reads this site (and there are a surprising number).

One that’s come on today is from the IP address 194.60.38.10 which belongs to the Houses of Parliament.  Which is nice, but I thought it would be a good little service to publish what they read.  Remember a lot of this will be from Chris Mole’s office but some of it will be other offices, especially those that came from Google.  There are probably other IP addresses registered to Parliament who read this site, so I’ve not got anything like the full picture.  There’s no real way of telling for sure, although the ones that tend to read about Ipswich Labour Party’s fund raising and campaigning have a fairly rare marker on their browser.  It’s backwards in time as the later stuff is the more interesting:

Today (10th March) there was a direct  hit on my site looking at the article about the Ipswich Labour Party fund raising / doorstep gambling operation as well as a quick look to see how my comments were doing (thanks guys, I didn’t know you cared).

Yesterday (9th March) the rare browser was looking at loads of things on the site, a bit about John Major’s speech but also about how the taxpayer funds the Ipswich Labour Party more than its members do and for some reason something about last year’s Lark in the Park.  On the 8th there was another trawl looking around the status of my comments section (you just need to say hello Chris) and about John Major’s speech.

Apart from a quick peek on the 4th March the previous visit was on 26th Feb.  There were three quick visits to the homepage on 26th Feb, one of them referred from Ipswich Spy.  The 24th and 25th of Feb also saw a lot of visits to my home page.  What were they worried about?

On the 23rd of March there was a bit of a rummidge around the site which started from a referral from Ipswich Spy (they like Ipswich Spy!) looking for information on Ben Gummer, Nick Herbert and Chris Mole’s expenses.

Chris Mole’s unwillingness to advertise Gordon Brown’s visit was read a few times on the 22nd.

On the 18th we only got one visitor looking for Sophie Stanbrook on Google.  I get in trouble when I speculate why people look for Sophie Stanbrook and not Ben Gummer, so I won’t.  On the 17th we had a visitor who came to read what one three year old on Maidenhall thought of Gordon Brown.

On the 13th Feb (a Saturday) there was a sole Parliamentary visit reading about Nick Herbert’s visit to Bridge, the same day it was posted.  On the 11th, there was a Google query on “Noise Action Group Ipswich”.  Was that Mr Herbert’s researcher?

The only activity in January was on the 27th when there was a little flurry of activity looking for information on Chris Mole his expenses and his stint as Transport under-under-secretary, including the evidence of divine displeasure when he was appointed transport secretary.  This is probably the first time that Chris Mole’s office looked at the site.

On the 10th of December last year we had a Parliamentary Googler looking ups some information on the Labour communications allowances beneficiaries Public Impact.  On the 2nd of December there was someone looking for information on John Cook, who had been selected for Norwich North a couple of days earlier.  Nothing in November.

On the 6th  October there was a Googler looking for “chris mole mp+railways+labour party”.  The statistics were put in on the 12th June so this was the first hit from this IP address.

So the Parliamentary interest in the Ipswich political blog scene is increasing, probably as a result of Ipswich Spy’s appearance.  Recently there has been far less Google traffic as a proportion of the hits I’ve got from this source, which as well as the increase in traffic shows that there’s more interest.

So if you want to get noticed, now’s the time to start a blog.

I’ve got the comments back, sort of.  I’ve installed a new comment system, disqus and I’m trying to integrate the existing comments in to this.

No, I haven’t turned them off (deliberately).

I have gone through various security measures to stop a denial of service attack that may have been aimed at taking this blog down, and while this seems to have been successful something I have done, or my hosting provider has done seems to have disabled the comments.  Please feel free to write a comment to see if you can get in.

Needless to say, I do want the comments up as soon as possible.  In the meantime please email me at james@bridgeward.org.uk if you want to add a comment and I will update the relevant blog post, or even start a totally new blog post.

UPDATE:  Still not a lot of progress.  I’ve reverted to the old theme and turned off all the plugins.  I’ve tried to change the link structure but this is stopping links coming in to me.  Doubtless it’s something that will be obvious in hindsight.

I’ve had a couple of polite emails from my hosting service that I’m almost at my monthly bandwidth limit as in the last few months the bandwidth usage has been creeping up and is now three times what it was a couple of months ago.  This has not been helped by the Israeli, Russian and South Korean users trying to leave messages on my site selling all sorts of goods that a site like this has no wish to sell, I also suspect my new theme has not helped.  However the constantly higher viewing figures are also an issue.

This may mean that I will need to find a way of monetising this site to pay for a better hosting package.  Any ideas?  I know Ad Sense is easy, but it’s not a particularly attractive addition to the site.

If anyone knows how to prohibit certain sites from using up my bandwidth by spamming my comments without seriously annoying search engines I’d like to hear them.  I quite like people looking for Seymour Road or Station Street coming on to this site, I’ve picked up quite a few regular readers this way.

I’ve spent some time when I should have been doing proper work updating the blog and finally putting a new look in.

If anyone has any ideas for a better WordPress theme then let me know.