Although I enjoy lots of different subjects at heart I am a fully fledged, Doctor Who sock wearing, geek. So I hope you all have a great 2010 and I leave you with my website statistics for 2009. Not entirely accurate since several months were not counted due to a technical error but on the whole they are quite interesting. Especially several of the most popular search terms!

Unique Website Hits: Greater than 11,412
Number of Visits: 37,079
Number of Page Views: 178,633
Bandwidth Transfer: 106.91GB

Top 3 Web Browsers

-          Firefox
-          Google Chrome
-          MS Internet Explorer

Top 3 Countries

-          Great Britain
-          United States
-          Germany

Top 3 Referrers

-          Twitter
-          Facebook
-          Stumbleupon

Top 10 Search Terms

-          mikewhite
-          mike white
-          94u
-          pittville campus
-          sex2008
-          paul bowler gloucestershire
-          pittville campus closure
-          pittville campus closing
-          leaf jokes
-          Stephen fry itunes festival

As we come to the end of a decade I have also reached the end of an era. The first blog which I set up on the internet, asuperfluousramble.com, has now ceased to be. It was set up February 2006 and acted as a giant diary detailing my steps through life. Steps are not always physical though and the multiple articles discussing my thoughts upon religion and philosophy dominated its readership and gained an impressive following.

Those of you who have followed my journey through the blogosphere will know that as I have grown older my writing style has changed which impacted upon how I was viewed as an author. It isn’t that my interests no longer remain in religion and philosophy but instead that people change.

I consider it no personal obligation that I should hide what my views of the Universe are. Those who know my writing well will know that I am an atheist. Some of you will know of the academic reasons to what swayed my thoughts in such a direction. Asuperfluousramble.com ended up being a blog almost entirely focused upon atheism.

As my journey through the blogosphere has progressed, the years have grown upon me and I have come to a point which I consider more mature. I am in no position to criticise the beliefs of any individual. It would be wrong of me to do so and at times my previous blog stepped over the line of civility to what I would regard as irrational, rude and indecent. Some of the posts were reaction posts and for those I still support. I cannot help it if my academic musings cause offence to the targeted individual. Only that I am comfortable with the beliefs in life I have reached.

The game of keeping a blog entirely focused upon religious/secular matters is immature in many ways if the sole purpose of it is to criticise contrary members of the online community. Nothing is achieved as each post is simply a decry(…)

A few of you have contacted me raising awareness of slow loading page issues and occasionally a complete failure for the website to load. I am pleased to announce that this issue has been fixed and many of you should notice increased performance levels coming from my little blog.

If you would be so generous to allow me to geek out:

1. Pages have now been cached which means you should notice a speed increase of at least 50%. Although my beloved scripting language php holds very dear to me it does take a couple of seconds for the server to systematically process. Caching now means that php is preloaded by freeze framing recent content as html format. This basically means all pages on my site are now html which is much quicker to load.
2. I can now boast that this website is now mobile phone compatible (whether you are viewing my site through wap 1.0 or 2.0) and will cater for your device’s needs by scaling down graphics to give you increased loaded content. Although the mobile version of my website will appear as default this option can be switched off when viewing this website through your mobile phone.

Thank you to those of you who have highlighted the slow loading problems and I hope that this has satisfied you. It has certainly given me something to do on an otherwise formless and fruitless Monday afternoon.

xx