Blog from Italy – Close to a Million Hits

In June 2009, my server logs showed that Blog from Italy got over 785,000 hits.  Now before someone goes, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of hits for a blog’, you should know that hits are not the same as visits, and I won’t even go into the concept of uniques!  ‘Hits’ refers to all the little bits and bobs of a web page which load every time someone visits Blog from Italy.  The actual number of visits which shows up in Google Analytics is much, much lower.

Regardless, nearly one million is quite a big number, and its slowing things down from time to time, and has caused Blog from Italy to crash a couple of times that I know.  It has soon popped back onto the webosphere, thanks to my hosts, but risks falling over like a drunken man once more.   I have not stood back and prayed.  No.

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Magazines Are Dead, Hello Web

One of Blog from Italy’s aims is to tell the world about the good things you will find in Italy.  Good things like Calabria for example, where fellow blogger Cherrye runs a bed and breakfast.

Now, why that funny title to this particular post?  Quite simple.  The web is a much better place to put the hours of hard work writers and journalists spend running up well written informative articles which are often supported by the endeavours of professional photographers.

The magazine articles look impressive, trouble is though, they die.  They become forgotten about almost as soon as the next edition comes out.  That impressive collection of creativity which is a magazine becomes consigned to a bookshelf, or worse, ends up in the bin.  How sad.  It’s almost as if all that effort has gone to waste.

Sadly too, there is no way the writer of the original article can tweak it, update it and increase its longevity.  This is why the Internet is much, much better than printed magazines, newspapers, or even books. … Continue Reading

New Look!

I know the old Blog from Italy look was becoming a little confused, so I decided to give it a facelift.

The new theme is based on yet another Brian Gardner theme, called Revolution only I have modified it a wee bit. I say ‘yet another’ because the previous Blog from Italy theme was also by Mr Gardner.

One of the adjustments I’ve carried out is the addition of a space at the top of the side column menus. I can use this space to place just about anything. As you may have noticed, there is a YouTube video presentation, which will live there for a time. Every so often I’ll change the video or add something else.

Other jiggery pokery is down to Michael Oeser, whose BranfordMagazine code I’ve adapted, well cut and pasted, into the Gardner Revolution theme so I can display bits and bobs from past posts. This is something I’d been wanting to do, but not being too hot with css, it took me a little while to work out how to achieve the double column effect I was looking for.

Along with other small modifications, such as a new Blog from Italy graphic, I’ve slotted in a section at the bottom of home page where I can display photos and the like. Again, this is something I had been thinking about doing for a while.

Finally, I’ve retained the ability to display full posts on the front page, because a number of people voted for this in one of my polls. Now, there is the best of both worlds.

Hope you like the new look. If you do have any problems (loading time, funny layout etc), let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.

Should anyone want a copy of this modified Gardner/Oeser(/Roe!) theme, then let me know, and I’ll place a download link somewhere.

As always, thanks for reading.

Alex Roe

PS I’m still tinkering, so things will move and change over time.

Good News? What Good News?

After writing recently about plenty of bad things going on in Italy at the moment, today I tried to find something a little less negative to write about.

However, after trawling the ‘Italia’ section of Google News, and having seen headlines referring to knifings, murders, drug dealers, road accidents, and the Pope, I’ve concluded that there isn’t much good news to write about. Even my favourite freebie newspaper, E-Polis Milan, has let me down.

The news is as grim as the weather in Milan at the moment. And just to make me feel a lot better, my son’s school is closed until 2 this afternoon because there is a union meeting going on. This means I am baby sitting, and I imagine that a few other Milanese parents are having problems today. These ‘school strikes’ occur monthly, by the way, and you never find out about them until the very last minute.

Back to the news. I had a hunt around on the La Repubblica web site, but it all seems to be gloom and doom. Well, at least Corriere della Sera is running a nice little story about a vaccine to help protect those nipped by a tick from Lyme disease. I guess that is good news.

If anyone else has some good news relating to Italy and it is something that does not relate to celebrities or leisure products, then please let me know. I want to be cheered up.

In the meantime, if you too need to be perked up, you could always hop over to the aptly named ‘Good News Blog‘. Or I suppose you could read my ‘Good Italian Things‘ category.

Happy Monday to you all.

Out with the new, and in with the old

If you read my previous post, and one entitled ‘The Right Way?‘, you could be forgiven for thinking that Italy is on the verge of seeing something of resurgence in fascism.

Well, Beppe Grillo seems to be of the same opinion, and the title of a recent post of his ‘Fascism is Coming‘, just about says it all.

Just to add fuel to your convictions as to just what is going on in the Living Museum, you may also dislike reading Grillo’s even more recent post ‘Bricks of Gold, Truncheons of Lead‘, which tells of the sort of strong-arm police tactics beloved of extremist regimes the world over. I recommend you don’t read it.

Somewhat ironically, Grillo’s so called anti-political movement appears to have allowed those at the top to find a way to become even more entrenched than they were before.

Is indeed Italy falling, as the title of this Italian blog in English would appear to claim?

Out with the new, and in with the old.

I guess what is simmering away just beneath the surface here in Italy could be a consequence of entrusting a 71 year old with the modernisation and reform of a country.

The news media here is awash with doom and gloom items, almost as if Italy is being prepared for something…

Or am I just being paranoid? But then with the likes of Fini, Bossi, La Russa, Maroni, Calderoli, and the B man in power, maybe I have every right to be.

Wasn’t Mussolini quite chummy with the Vatican too? And I thought the RC church disdained those who are divorced.

Spooky it is. This is the 21st century, isn’t it?!

Ego Massaging Statistics

I stand confused. I’ve got Google Analytics running on this blog, and a system provided by Quantcast, but according to these systems, I don’t really get many visitors per month. These hardy types view around 4,500 pages. Nothing special at all.

I recently had a look at the Urchin 5 statistics system that comes with my Media Temple hosting service plan, and I saw over 88,000 page views for May alone this year! OK, so this includes my own visits and my other two domains, but even so, that is one heck of a difference. The average session length is around 6 minutes according to my hosting server stats too, which seems to be quite a long time for search engine bots and the like to be spending sniffing around this blog.

The difference is weird, and I don’t know which numbers to really believe. I’d love to think that 88,000 was right, and it is an ego massaging figure, but I suspect that 4,500 is the more accurate representation of the actual number of pages that are read by real humans. Even so, I’m not sure how to explain the enormous difference.

If anyone out there can tell me why there is such a difference, then I’d love to know.