Lichfield Cathedral is number 2...

click photo to enlarge
... in terms of popularity on this blog. On a few occasions I have reviewed my hit counter and noted, in particular, the most popular posts and photographs, and the countries that produce the most hits. Ever since I first did this my blog post showing the nave of Lichfield Cathedral in Staffordshire has been second in popularity. By a large margin, I must say, from the third most popular, and considerably behind the number one post. I don't propose to list all these again, but I do still wonder what makes Lichfield's cathedral a relative magnet for visitors.

This particular English cathedral is a bit of an oddity in that its two west towers have tall spires, as does its crossing tower: cathedrals with three big spires are very unusual in England. It's also true to say that Lichfield isn't one of the "big" cathedrals in terms of size, popularity, architectural beauty and significance, or visitor numbers. It lags well behind the likes of Canterbury, Westminster, Lincoln, York, Durham etc. And maybe that accounts for it. Perhaps, on the world wide web, Lichfield has fewer photographs and articles than many other cathedrals and therefore the ones that do exist attract relatively more hits.

This photograph of the nave taken on my recent visit is from a slightly different position compared with my earlier effort. And this time I looked very carefully before I pressed the shutter and checked that there wasn't a box in the foreground! I took my shot with a 16:9 aspect ratio in mind to remove some of the nearest seats and give greater emphasis to the repeated verticals of the columns, piers and arches.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 12mm (24mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f3.2
Shutter Speed: 1/100 sec
ISO:3200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Spires, views and hits

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Ever since July 2010 I've used Blogger's in-house hit counter to analyse the traffic that comes to this blog. It's called "Stats" and it gives a reasonable summary of information: not as much as some of the other free offerings - I also use StatCounter and Google Analytics - but enough for it to be my main port of call. Regular readers of this blog will recall that in August 2010 I posted a list of the top 10 pages by hits and speculated on why they were popular. I looked at this information again recently and found some interesting developments and, once again, more questions. The current 1 to 10 (with last August's placing in brackets) are:

1 (1) Tree shadows and architectural drawings
2 (2) Lichfield Cathedral
3 (5) The corrugated chair
4 (new) Old tools and toffee hammers
5 (3) Promenade silhouettes
6 (new) Views with spires
7 (new) The story of a blog post
8 (new) Church music
9 (new) Colour or monochrome?
10 (new) Rooks, hoar frost and adverts

I find it interesting that only four of last year's top ten feature in the current list, though given the relatively short amount of time I'd been using Stats when I did the first survey perhaps that's not so surprising. As before I'm given to wondering why these particular posts receive more hits than others. However, one of the newcomers is, I think, particularly noteworthy. The entry, View with spires, dates from as recently as May 24th 2011, yet in that short time it has become the 6th most viewed blog post with 351 hits. Not as many as the number one with 2,101, but a high number (for this blog) in quite a short period. Why? The photograph isn't what I'd call my best, and the writing that accompanies it is unremarkable. So what is it that brings so many viewers to that particular page? I haven't a clue!

Incidentally, in October 2010 I noted the top ten countries providing the hits for PhotoReflect. Here is that list compared with today's:

2010 (2011)
1 UK (UK)
2 USA (USA)
3 Australia (Australia)
4 Canada (Canada)
5 India (Germany)
6 Germany (Netherlands)
7 Netherlands (India)
8 Brazil (Poland)
9 Italy (France)
10 France (Russia)

Much less of a change here: eight countries remain in the top ten, with Brazil and Italy being replaced by the newcomers, Poland and Russia. The connection of all this with today's offering is tenuous, but my photograph sparked the line of thought that resulted in the subject of this blog post. The Swaffham church shot is a view with a spire, a lead-covered spire that looks like a later addition to a tower of about 1500. However, it seems that a spire was part of the original design, was replaced by a Gothick version in 1778, and the one we see today is a rebuilding of the eighteenth century incarnation that dates from 1897.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 21mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Morning habits and blog visitors

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I'm a creature of habit. Eating breakfast reading The Guardian newspaper is my start to the day, every day except one. On Sunday I don't get a newspaper because none of the offerings appeal to me. I used to buy The Observer (the world's oldest Sunday newspaper), but it became a bit too "lifestyle" for my tastes, so now on Sundays I dip into the bits of the more extensive Saturday edition of the Guardian that I didn't read the previous day. But, as well as newspapers and breakfast I often have a quick look at the blog. I've done this a little more recently now that I'm using a mixture of Blogger's "Stats" and Google Analytics. It's interesting to see where people come from, what they look at, what search phrases they use, etc.

The other day I used the combined data from the two packages to look at which countries visitors are coming from. The results are, I think, interesting, and pose a few questions. Here's a summary after a couple of months use of this pair of hit counters. So far I've had people from 92 countries/territories. The top ten countries for visitors are: UK (55%), USA (29%), Australia (5%), Canada (4%), India (2%), Germany (2%) - these six countries account for 97% of hits - then comes the Netherlands, Brazil, Italy and France Those four countries plus the other 82 account for a total of 3%. Clearly, as a UK-based blog, you'd expect the largest percentage of visitors to be from the UK. And the USA, a big, affluent country with a large anglophone population might be expected to provide the second highest total of hits. But the remaining eight of the "top ten" seem to be a mixture of countries that have a high proportion of first or second language English-speakers, or have a high population, or are near European neighbours to the UK. This is largely true also of the three countries that sometimes nudge their way into the top ten - Ireland, Belgium and Poland. Unsurprisingly there are no visitors from most central and west African countries, and some of the Gulf States are absent too. The most surprising (or perhaps not) statistic - thus far there hasn't been a single visit from the People's Republic of China, the world's most populous nation.

Today's photograph was taken on a morning when I was away from home, so I had no newspaper over breakfast, and no computer distractions. However, I did have a post-repast stroll in Fineshade Wood and managed to get this contre jour shot of horse riders and a dog as they disappeared up the forest track ahead of us.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mm (300mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/640
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Search me!

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The ability to search the internet effectively is a useful skill, yet, if my experience is anything to go by, there are a lot of people who haven't got beyond the most basic level. One of the interesting features of my "hit counter" (SiteMeter at the bottom of this page) is that it shows me the search engines and the search words that brought individuals to PhotoReflect. In recent weeks I've started to notice Microsoft's Bing making an appearance. Google, of course, has been the most commonly used search engine, followed by Yahoo, with all the others as "also rans."

Why do I say that many people don't use these sophisticated search engines well? An example will illustrate the point to best effect. Yesterday someone, somewhere in the UK, entered the words "fylde hag" into Bing. That brought them to a page of Bing search results - http://www.bing.com/search?q=fylde%20hag&first=11&FORM=PERE - with at the top a PhotoReflect reference to the sought after term. The person followed this link to the start of a page of posts from May 2006 - http://photoreflect.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_archive.html . At this point that person appears to have looked at what was visible on screen and gone no further to find what they wanted. In fact they must have gone elsewhere because their stay on PhotoReflect was recorded as less than one second. So, despite having gone to a link with information about their search terms they appear not to have had the skills to find it. He (or she) didn't scroll down to the fifth post on the page: that would have found it. They didn't enter the search term in the Blogger search box: that would have found it. Nor did they use their browser's facility to search the page Bing had sent them to: that would have found it too. You might think that this is a case where someone had gathered as much information as they needed and couldn't be bothered to search further for what they thought would duplicate information they already had. Perhaps. The trouble is, I see evidence of this kind of poor searching most days, often several times! I remember, as a student, being taught how to search libraries and archives using card indices, microfiche and so on. Today these courses must have expanded to include the internet. Perhaps the poor search skills that I highlight shows there's a need for a basic course for the layperson.

All this, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with my photograph of Fringed Water Lilies (Nymphoides peltata) that I photographed on the Maud Foster Drain at Boston, Lincolnshire. Except for the fact that I'd always thought they were Yellow Water Lilies (Nuphar lutea), until an internet search put me right.

By the way, if you're wondering who or what the "Fylde hag" is or was, this post - Do you believe in magic - tells the tale.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro, (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/2
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -2.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Who visits PhotoReflect?

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At the very bottom of this page is a hit counter icon/link from Site Meter. By using a piece of their code in the Blogger template I can gather a few useful statistics about the hits I get. As well as the number of visitors, how many pages they view, how long they spend here, which country they're from and so on, it also tells me some basic information about their computer - screen resolution, OS, browser, colour depth and other bits and pieces. Lest anyone should see this as Big Brotherish, let me emphasise that NONE of this is personal information, just generic stuff that's useful in terms of deciding how to present web pages to potential viewers and readers.

About half of the people I get each day are returning visitors who usually click a browser bookmark of the blog address or come through, for example, Google Reader, or the Atom feed, though now and again I get a flurry from an email link. The other half arrive here through either a text or an image search. One of the other useful pieces of information that the hit counter offers is details of the search that a person makes - the search engine and search terms are listed. If that's news to anyone, or if some people find it a bit scary, get used to it: all this information has always been available from internet users. However, only your ISP, or perhaps some shadowy government agency with your ISP's connivance, can track that information back to you.

But, that's not the main point of today's "reflection" which is to comment on how surprising it can be to discover which blog images and articles attract the most search engine hits. In recent weeks, topping the text searches has been Why black and white photography? and The corrugated chair, whilst Beautiful feathers and A Victorian Garden have been the most popular image searches. Why those? Well it's my guess that they perhaps deal with subjects that are less widely covered on the web, so come nearer the top of a search. But, I can't acount for my all-time winner in terms of searches, both text and image - Blue glass, with clouds. What is it about that post that regularly brings visitors to PhotoReflect? I'm at a loss to answer my own question.

One thing I can say with a fair degree of certainty is that today's black and white rendering of a pink rose, a conversion I did for the lovely soft grey tones that it produced, will generate few search-based hits!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f9
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

If it ain't broken...

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This blog has a Site Meter hit counter. It tells me how many visitors I have, what they look at, where they come from, any search term they used in arriving here, and much more, though nothing, I hasten to add, that can be tracked to an individual. Over the past two days Site Meter "updated" this counter, incorporated flash, and made a useful tool virtually useless! Features that I used regularly became unavailable, or only accessible by multiple clicks, new features were not what I needed, and the whole process became painfully slow. I looked on the internet to see if others felt the same as I did, and the "noise" around this change showed that they clearly did. So, hearing this, Site Meter immediately posted a notice saying they would roll back to the original offering, and followed up by saying any further changes would be fully beta tested and incremental. In fact, having fouled up, their behaviour was then exemplary: to their credit Site Meter listened to their customers and within 12 hours we had the hit counter back to its old, useful, self.

I wish the BBC TV weather forecasters would learn from Site Meter. A few years ago they introduced a new "chart" that the camera swoops over whilst the presenter prattles on, telling us what we can already see from the animated weather on the screen. The overview of the weather should be presented with stationary graphics, and doesn't need any talk at all. But now a simple summary takes a couple of minutes as we lurch from region to region. People are mainly interested in what's going to happen in their area or the place they are to visit, and don't want to know about the rest of the country. But, the software has other ideas, and the forecasters are dictated to by its features, rather than using it to illustrate what they want to say. Because of this we don't routinely get a forecast for 12 and 24 hours ahead - there isn't time! Moreover, the animations have a spurious accuracy, suggesting that patches of rain and cloud will affect very specific areas across the country for carefully measured amounts of time: they rarely do! Nonetheless, the precision of the display beguiles people into that belief. Then, later in the day anger and frustration set in when the weather proves to be different from that which was predicted. Consequently the forecasts are less useful than those which preceded them, and the new, all singing and dancing graphics are no improvement at all! However, contrition of the type shown by Site Meter is conspicuously absent at the BBC and they press on with their wretched "forecasts."

All of which has very little to do with my photograph of a traction engine driver at the Bicker Steam Threshing weekend. Except that he knows what Site Meter and the BBC seemingly don't - namely, if something is working well, leave it alone. Or, as it is often phrased, "if it ain't broken, don't fix it!" Despite the smoke from the engine's funnel blowing all around him it was powering the threshing machine beautifully, leaving him the time to survey the people and activities around him from his high, warm vantage point.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 137mm (274mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On