www.thegilmours.co.uk

Yes, Rachel is on Paranal, so I’ve been bashing out some serious zzzzs and playing with the website again.

In the sidebar on the right you can find our new online poll booth, above the Santiago weather report. You, our readers, can vote! In fact, you can vote as many times as you like, which is not only unscientific, but almost defeats the purpose of the poll entirely. But who wants an online poll like you can find on the BBC website anyway? Lets see how well you can vote-rig and reveal some of your biases!

Well we pushed our website visitor numbers to an all time high last week, with the publication of a hoax about sighting a UFO over Santiago.

For those that missed it, you can scroll down and find the unusual (aka rubbish) photographs of the eclipse of the moon, visible in Santiago in March. As noted, i have Mandy to thank for that and a couple of beers. The latter may have inspired the webexperiment!
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So, how many people actually searched for UFOs in the last week and managed to find us?
343 over 7 days
How many people also read our front page (for more than 10 seconds)?
163 and, incredibly, another 180 by RSS feed
How many hits did we get in the last 7 days? (this includes robots and indexing hits)
3700
How many hits did we get on the day the blog was published?
523! Up from an average of 200 a day, around 30% normally robots and 40 unique IP addresses
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In the words of the Beatles, we ask “All the lonely people, where do they come from?”
Over 50% from the US, 35% from California alone! No surprises there….Roswell, Area 52, 51 and 746 not enough for you, eh?
4% was lower than normal (as a % of total)- come on you folk! Spread the word!
2% from Australia- thanks Dave & Jemima!

Well, a memorable week in the life of thegilmours.co.uk…. a lot of fun.

We’ll run another webexperiment soon, probably relating to 2ndLife or Chilean pies.

We were told recently of an incredible spike in visitor statistics on a Santiago newspaper website after the publication of an article relating to un-iden-ti-f-ied flyin-g obj-ects being visible in Chile.

So we’re going to try the same experiment. In exactly 5 days (thursday). I’m going to post a blog, with “apparent” pictures of said object in the sky above Santiago. In fact, better than that, i might just create an entire category on the subject!

Those pictures will in fact, be pictures of the recent lunar eclipse, whose credibility (if they ever had any), is damaged by the additional interference of a young 5 year old, Mandy, pulling at my left trouser leg. Yes, they are more blurred than the eyesight of your average canine friend after polishing off a pint of Newcastle Brown Ale.

I don’t suggest you give your dog an “Old Dog”, but I do suggest you do your bit to feed the frenzy of web traffic attracted to our website by my selection of related keywords…. in english and spanish.

We’ll see if it has any impact whatsoever on visitor statistics (you can detect my skepticism already). Now, time for that pint…

Well i’ve been quiet at work this week, so i have been exploring the graphics capability of Joomla, an alternative website platform to Wordpress. I use Wordpress for this site and for other sites i’ve developed in Chile.

Joomla seems very similar to Wordpress and even uses an embedded Wordpress blog! It is open source developed although it appears that fewer themes are available for free and they are generally less flexible/editable.

The list of extensions to Joomla is quite incredible- there are so many gallery possibilities, including modules, components, plugins… all with multi-language capabilities. They look really exciting.

I’ll have a go with Joomla and i may even transfer our site into Joomla as an experiment. Of course, work might pick up again, in which case i’ll have to drop another commitment, like youth group, reading the bible, my wife or just reading the news.

Watch this space.

We hope you like it. We took this photo of our car in front of Volcan Llaima, in the 8th Region, near Temuco, southern Chile, in November. The snow still covers this active volcano in November. There is a ski-centre on the south-side and a National Park, in which you can hike, camp, fish while wowing at the impressive peak.

Thats not all that’s changed on the website. I’ve finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.1. which includes a few security fixes, auto-saves for posts and other random stuff that I or the average blogger doesn’t really know much about. The upgrade process was surprisingly simple. We hope you find it easier to use, to comment, to track comments and discussions.