New website after a week

My new website has now been live for just over a week and in that time I have been investigating its usage, both during that week and in the month before that. A couple of interesting facts have come to light.

During May, when the Joomla site was there, the administrator login page was accessed over 3000 times. All but a handful of those accesses were not by me as I was too busy developing the new site to regularly update the old one. As nothing was changed, I assume that all the login attempts not by me failed. This huge number of unfriendly accesses was not new, but was about average for any month. This was one of the reasons why I decided to abandon Joomla.

Now that the Joomla site is not there, the administrator login page is not there, but there have nonetheless been 48 attempts to access it in the last week. There also appear to have been 8 attempts to access a non-existent WordPress login page. I have never used WordPress on this site.

Putting the new site live has caught the search-engine crawlers on the hop. At least three of them have all week been attempting to access pages that are no longer there. These attempts make up the vast majority of the traffic. I suppose that this is to be expected given the large amount of data in the Meson Chess Problem Database. I haven't made any checks, but I would imagine finding the new site via a search engine is not yet possible.

Before the change, Meson was the most popular part of the site, and still is. This week 743 chess problems have been retrieved and viewed, which is just about the same as when the old site was there. Hopefully Meson now looks better and is easier to use.

At last the 2016 blog post.

After several years' break, I have decided to start blogging again. I've deleted all the old posts and used a different template, so don't panic if you've been here before and don't recognise it.

As the last task of my twenty-five year stint as director of the Winton Capital British Chess Solving Championship (WCBCSC) I am currently moving all the WCBCSC content from my website to the BCPS website, where it should have been all along, and would have been if I had been webmaster of that latter site years ago, as I am now.

After all that content has disappeared from my site, it won't require such regular updating. All those updates were one reason why I have been using Joomla. However, performing all those upgrades to evade the hackers has become something of a bore, so I have decided that I shall use the opportunity I now have (more free time) to redesign and rebuild my site. I want a responsive site that loads faster than Joomla, so I shall not be using a CMS at all. I have decided to use HTML5, jQuery and Bootstrap on the client-side supported by Perl and MySQL on the server-side. Perl and MySQL are old friends, but the first three are new and I shall enjoy learning all about them as I develop the new site.

I listen to the radio most of the day and I especially like radio drama. This week the best new production has been the five episodes of the seventh, and last, series of Pilgrim by Sebastian Baczkiewicz. I have been listening to this since series one and am sad that there will be no more stories about the immortal and compassionate William Palmer. There have been some disturbing scenes this week, but the series came to a satisfying, and indeed moving, conclusion. You can start listening from last Monday's episode one. This has been a fine example of what the BBC is best at - audio drama.

Other drama worth a listen has been the repeat on Radio 4 Extra of their most recent adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories. These, starring Clive Merrison as Holmes and the late Michael Williams as Watson were adapted by, amongst others, Bert Coules. For me they have become definitive radio versions and I listen to them each time they are repeated. You can start listening with A Scandal in Bohemia, which started the series last Monday.

I don't know how regular this blog will be, but I've made a start. I hope it has been of interest to somebody.