In the last month or so a lot of stuff has been going on in the background at CLUAS. Below are just some of the developments that have taken place behind the scenes (just so you don't think we do be sleeping on the job, or something like that).

Biggest readership of a single CLUAS article. Ever. CLUAS writer / blogger Steven O'Rourke got his paws on a 3 days Super-Deluxe-VIP-Access-All-Areas-and-thous-shalt-avoid-the-portaloo-queues pass to Oxegen and in return for such a lavish gift from the Gods he wrote up a review of all three days of Oxegen 2008. What's more, diligent man that he is, Steve published his three articles (one per day of the festival) within 12 hours of the end of each day. They were picked up immediately by Google (and Google News) and the consequence? Google sent over 1000 visitors to the reviews the day after the festival ended and, by the end of that week, the reviews had been checked out by 2647 visitors. This was a record for the site, no gig we've covered has ever attracted so much traffic, this even surpassed the number of visitors Michael' O'Hara's (now legendary) review of REM in the Olympia got (which when you consider that his review was linked to by REM's official site it is really saying something).

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When I first launched CLUAS.com in 1999 I used Microsoft’s FrontPage to publish and maintain content on the site. While FrontPage was, er, cutting-edge back then it today is a massively out-dated technology (indeed Microsoft announced several years ago that they are retiring FrontPage and will no longer support it from next year on). So in 2005 I started looking around for alternatives to FrontPage out of necessity. I was acutely conscious that whatever choice I'd make would be vital for the site's future and so it took me over a year of pure procrastination to come to a decision on what technology I would deploy on CLUAS. In the end I went for an open source Content Management System...

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Back in October last year I predicted that within 6 months the Irish Times would remove its insistence on payment being required to access the vast majority of its content. Well, 6 months came and went and there were no such changes on ireland.com.

However it might be that my prediction was about six months out as, in the last week, there has been indications that the Irish Times is getting ready to restructure its online services, allowing free access most of its articles. The sooner they do, the better for them. And Irish web surfers.

But what about that other Irish pay-to-view website, Hotpress.com?...

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Back at the beginning of May CLUAS relaunched its email newsletter. The first newsletter I must say was a bit of a stab in the dark, considering it was four years since CLUAS had sent out its last newsletter and in the intervening period newsletters have fallen to the wayside a bit as a means for people use to get info from or on websites (especially with the rise of RSS feeds and social networking sites). Nonetheless, call me a traditionalist or whatever, I still think a newsletter can still play a valuable role for extending the reach of CLUAS. To get our newsletter out CLUAS is using the services of YMLP.com (Your Mailing List Provider) a well established and trustworthy third party for sending out newsletters (for those who wonder why we don’t just send it out ourselves using normal email software I should point out that a third party is really needed for newsletters...

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Two weeks ago I posted a blog entry about how Google had, all of a sudden, dramatically reduced the number of CLUAS.com pages it crawls in a day (it dropped from an average of thousand pages a day to about 25 a day, see the graph below). 



I put this down to be something to do with the fact that CLUAS stopped running Google ads for 3 weeks in April. I predicted that once the Google ads were back up and running (as they were two and a bit weeks ago) all would return to normal. A quick check earlier today in CLUAS.com's Google "Webmaster Tools" account and I saw that (for once!) a prediction of mine was on the money. Google is once again crawling a daily average of 1000 pages on CLUAS. Check out the graph below...

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Up to about 4 years ago I used to send out a CLUAS email newsletter every two or so weeks. It was very successful in regularly drawing to the site many visitors who would otherwise stop by very irregularly, if at all. The overall effect was that the newsletter helped drive traffic levels upwards. By the time I stopped sending the newsletter out it had about 3000 subscribers. However I had to stop sending it as emailing so many people simply got more and more difficult (as ISPs started, with the rise of email spam in general, to severely limit the number of emails one could send). But, after a bit of research in the last few weeks I today relaunched the CLUAS newsletter with the help of YMLP.com, an excellent and reasonably priced third party mailing list provider. In choosing a company to go with I was conscious of the possibility of ending up with a company that would turn out to be some dodgy non-EU, non-USA backstreet outfit that were in this game to harvest email addresses...

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(First up - apologies for my absence from this blog in recent weeks, I won't burden you with a long list of protracted excuses, suffice to say I'll be about this place a bit more often. So, moving swiftly along...) With thousands of its pages indexed by Google, CLUAS today receives a healthy chunk of its traffic from the world's leading search engine. The number of visitors they send our way can vary greatly from day to day, from week to week, but it is safe to say that we get a minimum of several hundred vistors a day coming from Google. Behind this fact lies plenty of interesting info and observations about how Google sees CLUAS, stuff I have been keeping my eye on for years but which now (cue collective groan) I am going to explore in a series of blog entries... Casual users of Google wouldn't be aware (nor do they need to be) of the fact that Google shares out, for free, considerable amounts of information to webmasters about how Google sees their website(s). They do this via their Webmaster Tools service...

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Back in 2004, as part of its 5th birthday celebrations, CLUAS ran a readers' poll to identify the top 50 Irish albums of all time. Over 1300 votes were cast by CLUAS readers, giving the poll some sort of statistical legitimacy and indeed the majority of the albums that made the final top 50 were clearly deserving candidates.

Nonetheless the final results were not immune to raising a few eyebrows especially now, 4 years later, when you look through the list. For example, a Frames fixation among a certain part of the CLUAS readership back then resulted in a voting bias that helped push one two three four Frames albums to make the top 20. Indeedy. It's also curious to see that 10 of the top 50 40 albums came from the Paddy Casey-Frames-Bell-X1-Mundy-Damien Rice...

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A month ago I surveyed over 30 leading Irish music blogs and websites in terms of how heavy they were when it came to the number of kilobytes visitors would have to download once they hit the site's home page. As you do, like.

The results showed a huge diversity across the sites: the slimmest (that'll be CLUAS) stepped in at a super-svelte 97 KB, while the heaviest (egocentric) was over 20 times heavier with its scale-busting 2.1 MB of data that each visitor had to download just to access its home page.

Alas, the truth is there are far more people out there using dialup to access the internet then we'd ever imagine (Mulley only yesterday wrote about there still being 200,000 dialup users in Ireland alone)...

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Yesterday I posted a blog entry ranking Irish music web sites, from the skinniest, to the most bloated. For those of you who missed it (or don't have the time to check it out) I basically started off riffing about how, despite the growth in broadband penetration in Ireland, website owners and bloggers should remain acutely sensitive to the size of their blogs as: a) there is still about 7% out there who are on a dialup modem and b) broadband users are an impatient bunch you don't want to annoy with bloated pages that test the outer limits of their download capabilities. I then ranked the top 30 or so Irish music sites and blogs in terms of their page size.

Today I'm turning my (weight-obsessed) attention to Irish technology blogs,...

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In Ireland recent years have seen progress in the availability of broadband services (in July 2007 it was up to 15.5% penetration, according to the European Commission). However that does not mean that dial-up as an access route to the web has gone the way of the Dodo. CLUAS.com's experience is that about 7% of our visitors in 2007 visited the site via a dial-up modem (based on Google's web traffic analytics service we use). If you ask me, many website and bloggers targeting Irish readers would do well to keep it in mind that a decent chunk of their readers are still dependant on a dial up connection to access the ould internets, and that flabbing out their site (or blog) with hefty images...

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For years people have been talking about the day when we'd be able to access the internet on our mobile phones. The first technology that had a stab of bringing the web to a mobile phone was WAP ('Wireless Application Protocol'). It raised its clumsy head in 2000 or so and was - to be polite - an excruciating experience for users. In any case only a tiny number of sites (bless 'em) went to the trouble of providing a WAP enabled version of their website. "Fret not", we thought back then, "glorious pocket-based browsing is surely just around the corner now that the telcos have splurged all these countless billions on 3G licences". Well it never really worked that way, did it? 3G is with us and a 3G-enabled phone is indeed quite likely sitting in your pocket right now. And how...

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Something that never fails to get up my nostrils is websites that use Macromedia Flash. Used when appropriate Flash can create nifty looking and often informative websites - I'll concede that - but such niftiness comes invariably with a pretty hefty downside for both user, and for the website.

In a nutshell Flash based sites break all sorts of well established best practices for user navigation in addition to making the website, for all intent and purpose, 'invisible' to search engines (i.e. invisible to one of most important WWW 'launching pads' for surfers around the world). A few years ago on the CLUAS Discussion board I let rip about such sites, pointing out the numerous shortcomings of this technology before...

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In the last few years it has been as clear as crystal to me that there were - and continue to be - so many things that CLUAS needed to do better (or, for that matter, just simply start doing). Finding time to do them for me has always been a problem.

Thankfully 2007 saw some essential building blocks finally get put in place - the launch of the CLUAS blogs, rolling out the ability for writers to directly publish reviews to the site themselves and optimisation of the site for search engines (one result of which is that Google now features new CLUAS articles usually within - literally - minutes of them being published). The last 12 months also saw CLUAS secure thousands of valuable new links to the site (of which several hundred links were from authoritative...

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Journalist and blogger Adam Maguire has kicked off a campaign to get Tom Waits classic "Christmas card from a hooker in Minneapolis" to the top of the Irish charts this Christmas. Quite right too.

For a purchase of the song to count for the chart you need to buy it by this coming Thursday (Dec 20) from any of the outlets listed below (all of which are used by IRMA when they compile the charts each week). I've culled these links from the Official Blog Adam has set up for this initiative, I've just split out which services work with what type of platform.

Indulge me a moment as I have a moan. It pains me greatly to see there are no DRM-free (Digital Rights Management) downloads that are recognised by IRMA when they compile their weekly charts. But that I am sure is a temporary state of affairs. By next Christmas I suspect things will have changed on that front as the music industry progresses, as it has begun to do, towards the realisation that using DRM to restrict what music consumers can do with a purchased download is a mug's game.

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