4 years

Today marks 4 years of this blog.

PSA: Emirati blogroll thoughts?

Would be interested to hear people's opinions about the addition of an 'Emirati blogs' blogroll. It is very disappointing to only be able to name a handful of blogs written by locals that cover local news/politics/opinion and the list would be open to both English and Arabic language blogs. Hopefully it might provide an easier way for local bloggers to stand out and get some readers.

(blogrolls are the lists to the left of the page <<<)

Feed changes

I have placed the RSS/atom feed for this blog through feedburner, hopefully everything is ok, if anyone has any problems with the feed let me know via comments.

Also if you'd like any services etc added to the feed feel free to comment.

If you don't use feeds for blogs then everything should remain the same.

PSA: Blog redesign

Starting tomorrow anywhere from 8 AM-2 PM I will be ditching the current design of this blog and moving to something that will look more like this (finally found a template that looks as similar as possible from here)

This design change has been on the tables for a long time (since the new blogger design platform was introduced) and is finally going to be implemented. Although I will try to move all the old design elements to the new design, some things will be left behind until a later date.

During this time the blogrolls will be inaccessible until they are manually copied over to the new blogger format.

Posts and comments will remain accessible during this time and shouldn't be affected; in any case all posts have been backed up along with the old design.

The advantages of the new design are as follows:

• what will hopefully be a clearer, faster loading webpage
• cropped blogrolls that only highlight the 5-10 most recently updated blogs (this means more page views for you)
• much easier blogroll management (this means faster blogroll additions/editing)
• easier integration with web 2.0/3.0 content (twitter, youtube, facebook, etc etc etc
• more of a compact/streamlined design that means no more scrolling down 4 pages all through the blogrolls
• faster loading, easier navigation and better everything (hopefully) for mobile/blackberry etc users.
• blogrolls will no longer serve advertisements when used

What will be different:

• stricter no-advertising/SEO due to the high-traffic nature of the blogrolls

NOTE: Due to electricity outages in my area the upgrade is a little behind schedule

Statistics update

In January of this year this site passed 1 million page views and 600,000 unique visitors (compiled without any data from the first year because there is none)


(A view of traffic since August 2006 until today)

Here is an update of some statistics I last shared in April 2008 (unfortunately google analytics HTML code changed so there was a bit of information missing from those, in any case it should be pretty averaged out)

Blog creation date: 16th August, 2005 (running 1287 days as of the 23st of February 2009)
Blog members: 308 (up from 291)
Total number of published posts: 2838 (up from 2575)
Average number of posts per day: ~2.2 posts per day (down from ~2.6 posts per day)
Number of blogs linked to via blogrolls (according to blogrolling.com): 326

Total Page loads: 1,035,621 (up from 649,470) (source: statcounter)
Total Unique Visitors: 626,086 (up from 371,279) (source: statcounter)
Most visitors on one day: 31st December, 2008 (4,812 views, 3415 unique visitors according to statcounter) up from: (14th January, 2008 3532 views, 2082 unique visitors according to statcounter)

Technorati authority rating: 77 (up from 73); ranked 65,900 out of 133 million blogs (up from 123,627 out of 121 million blogs)
Number of blog reactions (according to technorati): 474 (up from 373)

Most popular page (is still): http://uaecommunity.blogspot.com/2005/10/dubai-then-and-now-1991-vs-2005.html (1.01%, down from 1.10% of page views) (source: google analytics)

Average time spent on this website: 2 minutes and 39 seconds (source: google analytics)

Highest traffic countries:

• United Arab Emirates 60.30% (down from 60.58% of traffic)


• United States 13.37% (down from 13.53% of traffic)


• United Kingdom 5.39% (up from 5.26% of traffic)

Number of countries having accessed this site: 195 out of 195 countries (up from 183 out of 193 countries)

(This section takes only UAE-based visitors into account)

Most popular browsers:

• Internet Explorer 65.01% (down from 65.53% of traffic)


• Firefox 24.90% (down from 25.76% of traffic)


• Safari 6.83% (up from 5.79% of traffic)

Most popular operating systems:

• Windows 89.33% (down from 90.50% of traffic)


• Macintosh 10.21% (up from 9.02% of traffic)


• Linux (stayed at 0.31% of traffic)

Screen resolutions (never published this previously):

• 1024x768 = 44.06% of visitors


• 1280x800 = 21.26% of visitors


• 1280x1024 = 9.43% of visitors

Random tidbits:

• 35,823 or 7.74% of people have accessed this site more than 201 times (down from 8.52% of people)


• 6 people people have accessed this site using a playstation portable (compared to 3 previously)


• 0.05% of visits were from an iphone

Comment moderation

Starting today, all posts more than 30 days old will be subject to comment moderation; this is being used to curb the increasing amount of spam (i.e. stock market spam, world of warcraft gold spam, viral video spam, proxy-bypass spam, prescription medicine spam, new-fancy-social-networking-site-about-dubai spam etc) that is finding its way onto older posts on this blog.

Sorry for the inconvenience it may cause.

UAE community blog design change

I'm thinking about moving this blog to a more modern blogger platform (this does not mean away from www.blogger.com); we currently use a prehistoric plain HTML design with blogrolls that are located on an external server (blogrolling.com)--this alone increases load times dramatically.

At the moment the design is looking quite stale and isn't up to date with regards to video on the internet, and web 2.0 etc, I would like to make this blog into a more modern website.

The list on blogrolling is also difficult to manage, and due to the fact we have something like 200 links on this page showing at once, we must constantly rid the list of outdated links.

Unforunately, the current design would disappear because it is impossible to move it onto draft.blogger.com, and 3-column designs are impossible using the newer blogger designs; this could make space quite cramped.

I've made a small example of what this blog could easily look like (http://testuae.blogspot.com/; the list on the right titled "My blog list" is what could be done with the blogrolls. It is possible to list the 25 most recently updated blogs using this list, among other things this would...

• decrease loading times


• attract more attention to bloggers who regularly update (as opposed to listing a few hundred blogs)


• actually provide users with an accurate method to determine which blogs have been updated, blogrolling is notoriously inaccurate at reading when the blog has last been updated

Using the newer blogger platform we can also create image/video streams (this would enable sharing of photographs/video taken by people who post them to appropriate channels/lists).

Please share your opinions/ideas about this in the commenting section.

Miscellaneous Statistics

For anyone interested:
Blog creation date: 16th August, 2005 (running 979 days as of the 21st of April 2008)
Blog members: 291
Total number of published posts: 2575 (3123 including drafts)
Average number of posts per day: ~2.6 posts per day
Number of blogs linked to via blogrolls (according to blogrolling.com): 326

Total Page loads: 649,470 (source: statcounter)
Total Unique Visitors: 371,279 (source: statcounter)
Most visitors on one day: 14th January, 2008 (3532 views, 2082 unique visitors according to statcounter)

Technorati authority rating: 73; ranked 123,627 out of 121 million blogs
Number of blog reactions (according to technorati): 373
Most used tags on this blog, in alphabetical order (according to technorati)
abu dhabi, animals, bloggers, cars, dubai, horseracing, horses, human rights, information access, labour, news, police, traffic, uae, arts and culture - dubai, censorship, construction, construction accident, construction site accident, du, dubai architecture, eid, internet censorship, proxy, rta, salary, salik, sheikh mohammed, telecommunications regulatory autority, uae driving,

Most popular page: http://uaecommunity.blogspot.com/2005/10/dubai-then-and-now-1991-vs-2005.html (1.10% of page views) (source: google analytics)
Highest traffic countries: United Arab Emirates (60.58% of traffic), United States (13.53% of traffic), United Kingdom (5.26% of traffic)
Number of countries having accessed this site: 183 (out of 193 countries)

(This section takes only UAE-based visitors into account)
Most popular browsers: Internet Explorer (65.53% of traffic), Firefox (25.76% of traffic), Safari (5.79% of traffic)
Most popular operating systems: Windows (90.50% of traffic), Macintosh (9.02% of traffic), Linux (0.31% of traffic)

Random tidbits:
8.52% of people accessing this site have accessed it more than 201 times.
3 people have accessed this site using a playstation portable.

PSA

There was a bit of a backlog on the blogroll additions list, I have now sorted this out.
A few notes:

• If starting a new blog, I seriously suggest the title of your blog and the URL are identical or as close as technically permitted; the number of blogs I managed to confuse within seconds of reading their information was astounding.
• No blogs with absolutely no relevance to the UAE will be added; if you live in the UAE (or in some cases have lived in the UAE), or blog about the UAE, your blog is welcome. There were several requests for obvious spam-blogs to be added to the blog rolls and these were ignored.
• It's quite helpful that when requesting your blog is added to the blogrolls you include an address for the blog in question, there were at least two people who left anonymous messages asking for their blog to be added.

Also, On the first week of March I will be going through the entire blogrolls reviewing each blog, if you have not posted at least once in 2007, your blog will be removed.