I’ve started a project called ‘Photo Leap Year’, which is basically a Project 365 in a leap year. The project is a photo per day during 2012. I followed Adele’s and Amber’s photo projects in the past and have finally taken the plunge myself. Instead of updating my main website daily with photos, I decided to use Tumblr for daily photo posts, but will still produce a monthly round-up here on my main blog.

I happen to live in a beautiful location, but I want the photos to reflect my tastes, my activities, mood etc more than just my beautiful environment, which means the project should end up being pretty diverse in images.

I’ve configured my Facebook page to be automatically updated with the latest individual photo blog posts from Tumblr, so please ‘like’ my Facebook page if you want to be notified of updates there, else you can subscribe to the Tumblr blog or just wait for the monthly round-up here.

The Tumblr blog: http://photo-leap-year.tumblr.com/

The Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/AndrewEmmettUK

On a completely unrelated note I’m loving Coldplay’s ‘Paradise’ song.

My parents brought my girlfriend and I a Kindle 3G as a gift. No anniversary, birthday or Christmas, just them being generous as always. This blog post contains my initial thoughts.

It’s thin and light, not I must admit as light as I was expecting. Which is pretty ridiculous on my part, seeing the amount of tech this device sports. The screen quality and their e-ink technology is wunderbar. So let’s get down to the surprising bit, nothing to do with the awesomeness which is the ebook reading. They’ve done a deal with Vodafone (in the UK), so that all the glorious ebooks can be downloaded from the Amazon Kindle store via 3G mobile technology, without the need to hook up via a cable or wifi. It is touches like that help propel a product and service beyond their competition. Yes I know hence the ’3G’ being in the name, but currently a free connection in the UK! That rocks. Now that wasn’t the surprising bit, though pretty great if you ask me, what is surprising is what follows.

Then I discovered their ‘experimental’ browsing, which means I can surf the internet for free via the Kindle 3G in the UK. A nifty feature is that once you have moved away from a home page of a blog, over to a specific article you can use the article mode feature, which makes the web page content very readable for the sites I’ve visited. Pretty darn awesome! Now this isn’t a paid for feature and they could pull it at any moment, it is just a nice to have while they offer the service. Don’t go and buy it for that alone, as they might turn it off, who knows?

Another nice touch was the fact it already came partially charged, which meant I could start devouring books. As I’ve been collecting their free books for a while, both the always free and limited time offers, there were over two hundred books waiting for me.

Now this is my very brief review of the product and service. I’ve had a crazy busy week, I’ve not had a chance to try out the other features, so I guess that is another post. What I will say is the product feels solidly built. The qwerty keyboard is nicely done and the monster length usb cable they supplied is appreciated.

So using a Kindle 3G in the UK isn’t just about glorious ebook reading using their e-ink technology, there is more to it. Obviously this post is only the tip of the ice-berg so to speak, so perhaps I will write a more detailed post, once I’ve spent more time with it.

Cheers Mum & Dad.

Yet again time for my monthly statistics for this blog and the free photo website on this domain. I made many changes to the website over the last month, including adding a search option, tidying menus, removing or upgrading remaining plugins, some cms tweaks, plus obviously a bundle of posts. I also performed some external tasks that will help my personal domain.

This month I can proudly say the lost page ranking was regained, so it is back to Google PR3. So how about the monthly visitors? I will put some previous month’s website statistics in a list to help you see the growth:

• May – 1766 visitors
• June – 1805 visitors
• July – 1982 visitors
• August – 2433 visitors

So a sizeable jump in monthly visitors, which as you can expect there are some other major statistic jumps, such as search engine traffic in August was 2064, compared to 1690 for July. Plus referring websites was 182 for August, which is a figure I expect will grow a lot more this year.

Last August I had only just reintroduced Google Analytics to the domain, but September had a full month of statistics and shows 148 visitors for last September, plus in March of this year I had 1112 visitors. So fairly rapid growth for a personal domain. Having this domain isn’t about visitors numbers, but it is nice to see so many people visiting.

In August I had visitors from 86 countries / territories, compared to 85 for July. So only a slight increase, but that isn’t surprising.

As many of you know I placed many old journal entries into the blog during August. Each old journal entry didn’t get an individual post, instead I grouped them into posts of roughly around 300 – 400 words per post. Also a couple of years ago I had used another CMS for blogging on this domain, but had not transferred the posts to this current CMS when I changed packages. I went through the old posts and published a number of those here also. Plus I wrote 12 blog posts during August. So now my total blog posts are 208 (including this post) accompanied by 18 pages, which is a sizable jump, from 147 posts (but still 18 pages).

As mentioned in last month’s statistics post, my external backlinks statistics are not quite right, due to an htaccess issue at a site. So currently they are 4621, but I suspect that will decrease and this statistic will yo-yo. With a calculator to help out, I think my external links are roughly 3185 currently.

Actions to take?

It would be nice to have over three thousand monthly visitors by next August, if not sooner. However what I will focus on is carrying on writing posts that interest me. I’ve definitely not written enough history, hobby or travel posts, but as always the content will be varied here.

I also want to engage more with readers and provide even better content, including more images and video in my posts. I do include far more photos than I used to, but there is still room for improvement.

At some stage I will revisit some old posts and either write a new updated post with fresh content, else write an update within an existing post. Though I can’t see myself doing that during September.

So a good month for the statistics. Who knows what September will bring?

Time for my monthly domain statistics covering my main website and the photo site on this domain. Last month I thought the statistics might actually drop for July, so let’s see what actually happened.

Visitors in May were 1766 and the visitors in June were 1805. Instead of a drop as I thought could occur, the July visitors were 1982, which is a sizeable jump in numbers! Plus search engine referrals are up from 82% to 85.27% with 1690 search queries.

In May people visited from 74 countries / territories and in June the figure was 77. In July this increased to 85 countries / territories.

My external backlinks in May were 2301 and June they were 2564. In July the external backlinks increased to 4513. Now this monster jump isn’t as impressive as it appears as a) I think there is an issue with an htaccess file at one the sites creating incorrect stats b) Three websites hog a large percentage of the links. Though regardless of those three websites (two being forums), my external links grow month on month.

My internal backlinks are 3726 and there are currently 147 blog posts, plus obviously many pages both on my main website and photo site. My internal backlinking strategy is perhaps too extreme!

Sad news time….my Google Page Rank decreased from 3 to 2! Not a surprise at all. I’m probably never going to have a high PR on this website, but I will look at moving this back to a PR 3 within three months and hopefully a PR 4 within a year.

Actions to take?

Well it’s tough as there are two websites on this domain, with the blog being the main one and it isn’t focused on one or a few topics, instead I cover a lot of topics. Next month I will write varied content as per usual with minimal regard to SEO. I enjoy monitoring the statistics and I do make an effort to improve them, but not the same effort or focus if this was a business website.

My heavy workload does restrict my time, but there are a few website adjustments I will make and some additional actions I will take, to hopefully improve the statistics. Though at the end of the day, this is my personal web domain and not a business site. Mind you I have received three advertisement offers in the last month alone.