Month in Review - August 2008

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

It has been a busy week, so this review has been delayed. August saw a modest increase in content on this website. The first personal project has been added, resulting in a traffic spike for a few days. This has resulted in a number of external links to this website that were not created by me. One negative consequence of this increased visibility is hacking attempts. None of them have been successful, but hacking attempts have been a significant number of hits on this website over the last month. Likewise, spammers have started posting comments, forcing me to install a spam filter.

For those that are curious as to how much a low-traffic website can earn via Google Adsense advertisements, from this month on, I will be publishing the earnings. So far, I have earnt enough to buy an ice-cream. Alas, Google's minimum payout is $10, so I will have to wait an estimated 8-10 months before I can have that ice-cream. On the bright side, by that time I'll be able to afford a burger and fries too. With Adsense, it is important to remember that the earnings depend on a large number of factors, including traffic, the click-through rate of visitors, and the website topic. This is one of the reasons why Google does not provide earnings estimates and suggests that website owners simply try it out for themselves. 

Overall, this website has been growing slowly, both in size and in number of visitors. There is still much more to be added. Hopefully there will be more time available this coming month than last month.

The statistics for the last month:

One important thing to note is that Google Analytics only sees page-views on the public part of the site, whereas AWStats and Webalizer also log the accesses by me to the CMS pages that are used to maintain and update the site.

A snap-shot of visitor locations on 1 September 2008.

Comments (0) | 5 September 2008