What happened on April 15/16? (And more dodgy Blogger stats)

My blog is a fairly modest affair that gets around 500 pageviews a day - mostly of old posts. However, this week has seen a rather unexpected spike in activity:

What happened on the 15^th of April? It seems to be something to do with MacBook Air storage expansion, as that’s the post that seems to have the lion’s share of pageviews this week:

The odd thing is that in the detailed stats view, the peak of views is on the 16^th. More dodgy Blogger stats it seems. Clearly unimportant but if anyone knows what’s going on (in either case), I’d be interested to hear!

200,000 pageviews... and some dodgy Blogger stats

I noticed that my blog hit another landmark recently, exceeding 200,000 pageviews. I was therefore curious to see once again what were the most popular posts. At 100,000 pageviews, the top three were:

1. Expanding Macbook Air disk space with SD cards (4002 VIEWS)
2. OMICS Group Conferences - Sham or Scam? (Either way, don’t go to one!) (4000 VIEWS)
3. How to root a phylogenetic tree (2662 VIEWS)

The updated top ten, according to the “Stats » Posts” page on Blogger look like this:

So, no change in the top three other than a reversal of #1 and #2. Except… looking at the “Posts” page revealed that a number of more recent posts exceeded some of the listed posts. Last year’s Paddy’s Day post, for example, has 707 views, not the 524 listed. Not a big problem in the grand scheme of things but a little annoying. (What’s the point of providing stats if they don’t agree?!)

Out of curiosity, I decided to go through the individual post counts. The top six are the same order, at least, just with higher page counts:

1. OMICS Group Conferences - Sham or Scam? (Either way, don’t go to one!) (11503 pageviews)

2. Expanding Macbook Air disk space with SD cards (9054 pageviews)

3. How to root a phylogenetic tree (7913 pageviews)

4. Are “Happy Eggs” really happy? (And are Viva really pro-welfare?) (6047 pageviews)

5. How to stop Outlook on Mac OSX replacing quotes & apostrophes with superscript numbers (5883 pageviews)

6. Avenged Sevenfold - my kind of Nightmare for Halloween (1803 pageviews)

However, then it deviates in both order and number, with the rest of the top 20 posts beating the 1000 views and thus the listed ranks 7-10, which are either missing or muddled:

7. Putting photos on Picasa with an iPad = 1684

8. Artificial Selection versus Natural Selection = 1641

9. (≠10) Kumala Zenith Merlot/Cab Sav/Shiraz - another bargain red = 1604

10. (≠8) Who does Microsoft Academic Research think you are? = 1301

11. (≠7) When snowmen go bad (Christmas graffiti) = 1286

12. Making e-Books with Wikipedia = 1263

13. Differential survival, (inclusive) fitness, selection and evolution = 1207

14. Blogging in Markdown with Blogger and Markable (on a Mac) = 1124

15. When is a Moro not a Boost? When it’s an Aussie Cadbury’s Mars Bar! = 1107

16. iPlan with Onzo revisited (and not recommended) = 1100

17. A review of the “Instant Markdown” eBook from Packt Publishing = 1064

18. Finding Nemo’s sex-changing father = 1063

19. Marvellous Markdown = 1031

20. How to read a phylogenetic tree = 1014

The Paddy’s Day post was way down with 707 pageviews. Indeed, three posts that I feel are much more worthy weighed in higher (along with some others):

• Wallace was not forgotten and Darwin did not cheat him = 922

• Prominent anti-GM campaigner becomes GM defender after looking into the science = 748

• Australia: a country so big that its rainfall can affect global sea level = 735

I guess the take-home message is: don’t count pageviews!

Mary Anning (21 May 1799 – 9 March 1847)

Today’s Google Doodle is one of my favourites, celebrating the life (or 215th birthday) of Mary Anning, a paleontologist who discovered many fossils along the Lyme Regis coast, including the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton (at age 12 after her brother found the skull) and the first plesiosaur.

Lyme Regis is just down the coast from where we used to live in Southampton and it really has a fantastic shoreline, part of the Jurassic Coast. We paid a visit with a friend in 2011 and although we did not find any ichthyosaurs or plesiosaurs, there were plenty of ammonites to be found in the rocks. It is very humbling to look at something that died tens to hundreds of million years ago and has been sitting in a rock since, waiting to be found.

I think that there was a cast of Mary Anning’s ichthyosaur at the Lyme Regis Museum, which is sited on her birthplace (or it might have been Dinosaurland fossil museum, which is in her old church). Well worth a visit if you find yourself near the Devon coast!

Blog titles gone squiffy (again)!

It seems that the titles of my blog posts have gone a bit screwy. This happened once before but I can't remember how to fix it - if anyone knows, please comment below!

It's a(n auto-awesome) twinkly Christmas Tree!

This year, we made a little photo collage of our Christmas tree for our relatives back home. After uploading it to Google+ for sharing, something rather unexpected happened: a twinkly version appeared!

Apparently, Google+ features “Auto-awesome photos & films”

Auto-awesome creates fun new versions of your photos and videos. Your photos will be combined into short animations, wide panoramas or merged into group shots where everyone looks good. You’ll know when an Auto-awesome photo or film has been created by the [auto-awesome] icon.

It’s not just adding twinkles to lights either:

Auto-awesome photo effects

Eraser - If you take a sequence of 3 or more photos in front of a structure or landmark with movement in the background, Eraser will give you a photo with all of the moving objects removed. It’s helpful for those situations when you’re trying to get a great shot of a landmark or other crowded place, but want to avoid including all of the people in the background of your photo.

Action - Take a series of photos of someone moving (dancing, running, jumping) and Auto-awesome will merge them together into one action shot where you can see the full range of movements in a single image, capturing the movement in one captivating still.

Pano - If you’ve taken a series of photos with overlapping landscape views, Auto-awesome will stitch these photos together into a panoramic image.

HDR - High Dynamic Range is the process of taking multiple exposures of the same image. By merging these images together, your photos will achieve a greater range of shadows and light. Uploading three similar images at different exposures – low, medium and high exposure – will create an HDR image for you.

Motion - If you’ve taken a series of photos in succession (at least 5), Auto-awesome will stitch these photos together into a short animation.

Smile - If you’ve taken a few group photos, Auto-awesome will choose the best shots of each person in your image and merge them into one great-looking photo.

Mix - If you’ve taken a series of portraits sharing similar background elements, Auto-awesome will compile these photos together into a photobooth-style grid. Mix is meant to showcase portrait photos taken with similar backgrounds in time, so it works best with close-ups of faces.

My iPhone already has Pano and HDR covered but I am intrigued by some of the others. The twinkly lights is particularly good for this time of year, though, so stick up those festive shots on Google+ and see what happens!

Don't panic!

And if you do, Google can help... (Happy Birthday, Douglas Adams!)

The joys of intext and other Google search tips

Every now and then I revisit my growing pool of half-written blog posts and see if any are worth salvaging. One such post is some useful Google search tips from John Todesco.

His post from last summer, How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques, was sent to me by a colleague at work. There are lots of useful tips in the article but a few in particular stood out for me, including a couple of things I knew but a couple more that I had wondered about but never got round to looking up for myself (modified from John Todesco's post):

Use quotes to search for phrases.

• Typing “San Antonio Spurs” will show you the websites with the phrase “San Antonio Spurs.” If you don’t use the quotes, Google will search for the terms “San,” “Antonio,” and “Spurs” individually and you might miss pages related to the basketball team.

Use OR but not AND.

• Don’t bother typing AND in your search queries – Google treats it like any other word.
  
• OR in all caps actually works. OR is great for finding synonyms and boilerplate language. Typing “Smith denied” OR “Smith claimed” OR “Smith argued” will find more pertinent websites about the controversy involving Smith.
  

Use minus, not NOT.

• Avoid using NOT if you want to exclude a search term. Instead, type a minus sign in front of the word. So if you’re visiting San Antonio but don’t want to visit the Alamo, type: “San Antonio” -Alamo.That will search for the phrase “San Antonio” on web pages that don’t have the word “Alamo.” There’s no space between Alamo and the hyphen.

Minus does not equal plus.

• Although putting a minus sign in front of a word removes it from a search, adding a plus sign in front of the word does not force Google to include it. It simply stops Google from changing the word into a synonym or correcting the spelling, like putting it in quotes. Typing +Alamo is the same as typing “Alamo”. If you want to force Google to include an exact word or phrase in all your search results, use intext:...

Force Google to include search terms.

• Typing intext:[keyword] might be Google’s least-known search operations, but it’s one of Russell’s favorites. It forces the search term to be in the body of the website. So if you type: intext:”San Antonio” intext:Alamo it forces Google to show results with the phrase “San Antonio” and the word Alamo. You won’t get results that are missing either search term. This also stops Google using an alternative word that it thinks you're searching for.

Find relational search terms.

• What if you’re curious about search terms that are near each other on a website? [keyword] AROUND(n) [keyword] is incredibly handy for finding related terms such as “Jerry Brown” near “Tea Party.” (“n” is the number of words near the search terms.) Typing “Jerry Brown” AROUND(3) “Tea Party” will show you all the websites where the phrase “Jerry Brown” was mentioned within three words of “Tea Party.”

I've not yet used AROUND successfully but intext: and -unwanted has already helped me out a couple of times.

h/t: Alistair Bailey

Google Sea View

The Google Maps Street View Collections are pretty cool (and just plain pretty!) and well worth an explore whenever you have a few moments to kill. (Armchair tourism at its best.) The new Ocean Collection is particularly impressive because you can wander around underwater! As reported in the Guardian Science Section "Google Maps' virtual diving brings the Great Barrier Reef into view":

Millions of people will be able to take a virtual dive on the Great Barrier Reef via Google Maps on Wednesday as part of a pioneering underwater scientific expedition.

The Catlin Seaview Survey will allow internet users to share the discoveries of scientists who are using new technology to study the composition and health of the Great Barrier Reef.

I like!