Last year there were 4,064 visits from 2,407 unique visitors to this website. With an average of 1.53 pageviews per visit, a grand total of 6,199 pages were viewed. Average time on site was 49 seconds. That's all a bit down from last year. Which doesn't surprise me much, as I didn't write as much as last year.

Last year I had visitors from 68 countries. That's nine down from 2009, and the top 5 hasn't changed a bit:

1. The Netherlands
2. United States
3. Belgium
4. United Kingdom
5. Canada

Traffic then. Just over a third of the visitors come here directly, nearly a third uses a search engine, a quarter clicks on a like on some other site, and the rest come in via Twitter and the like. Among the search engines, and quite unsurprisingly, Google is the most popular by far with an eighty percent share. From the others only Bing (10%) and Yahoo (8%) are worth mentioning. Among the 535 different keywords recorded, "book title generator" is still the most popular. People looking for an evil nickname (or me, I never know), screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place, 'were all just kinda winging it' and Dans der Vampieren also generate a bunch of traffic. Several other search phrases that made me chuckle were "dat is me fiets" (which is a personal pet peeve, people butchering the Dutch language like that), "christelijke paasquiz" (I guess it is an popquiz about easter popquiz, but if it's christian enough, I dunno), "100 things that make my heart beat" (aaaahhhhh), "philip pullman is a massive douche" (if you're so certain, why do you need reaffirmation?) and "w00t²" (which is, like, w00t! squared. awesomesauce.)

Last year I wrote 114 entries. The most popular of those were:

1. A bootleg of Meat Loaf in Slagharen was good for 226 pageviews
2. My Hang Cool Teddy Bear review (153)
3. PostSecret: We're all just kinda winging it (103)
4. My write up of Dans der Vampieren (59)
5. And I'm still looking for more info on Fat Out Of Hell (49)

The most popular page apart from the front page is still my random book title generator.

Finally, the browser stats. Internet Eplorer is down 5% from last year. And while Firefox loses some of it's market share, overall, decent browsers are up.

1. Internet Explorer (54.31% — IE8 83.91%, IE7 11.19%, IE6 4.67%, IE9 0.18%, IE5.01 0.05%)
2. Firefox (29.72%)
3. Chrome (7.38%)
4. Safari (5.61%)
5. Opera (0.94%)

This year, I might do some infrequent updates from the trenches of the browser wars, as it seems like IE is losing ground. If you just look at the last three months, it's down to just 43%. And that's more like it.

As always, thanks for stopping by. I'll try to make this site more interesting this year.

The color PURPLE is a trademark of 3M.

I guess that means I have no more excuses postponing that make over of this website I've been thinking about.

Those vistors came from 77 countries (one more than last year) on all six continents. Top 5 countries with the most visitors (and last year's position):

1. The Netherlands (1)
2. United States (2)
3. Belgium (3)
4. United Kingdom (3)
5. Canada (8)

Search engines account for 38.04% of my visitors, and once again Google is the most popular among them. Bing is a distant second. A grand total of 852 different keywords has been recorded. Apart from the the always immensely popular searches for a (random) book title generator and evil nicknames in general, the quote screws fall out all the time. the world is an imperfect place. was quite popular too. After that, it's a blur of evolution and atheism related keywords.

Last year, I pieced together 199 posts. That's 84 more than in 2008. Compared to 2008, last year's most popular posts weren't as popular:

1. Screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place (84 pageviews)
2. Top 5 Meat Loaf Songs (73)
3. Foldertjes (72)
4. Motown Turns 50 (56)
5. Least Favorite Meat Loaf Songs (44)

But The Book Title Generator 2.0 is still doing quite well, with 789 page views. The only page that gets more visitors is the front page.

Finally, the browser stats. IE is down 0.98% compared to last year. Firefox is down 3.78%, which means that the other decent browsers must be up. And indeed, two of them are:

1. Internet Explorer (59.45%)
2. Firefox (31.58%)
3. Safari (4.10%)
4. Chrome (2.40%)
5. Opera (0.96%)

Internet Explorer 7 and 8 are virtually tied around 45%, and IE6 gets 9.83%. Strangely enough, one idiot still used IE5.5. For fuck's sake.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

When I started using WordPress, I set it up so that all comments were held for moderation, except those from someone who has a previously approved comment. A couple of weeks ago, I turned off this option, so that all comments should show up immediately.

Today (after reading Zeldman's piece on Web fonts) I decided that I might as well go all the way, and add support for IE7+ too (IE6 is dead to me). So I went to fontsquirrel.com again, downloaded their @font-face kit, uploaded the IE-specific .eot file to the server, and edited my ie7+.css file to feed it the appropriate code, et voila, fancy fonts for everyone.²

The next time you need fancy fonts, pay fontsquirrel.com a visit. Good stuff.³

1. Silkscreen by Jason Kottke
2. Everyone who is using a browser that supports @font-face that isn't IE6 or earlier, that is.
3. This post isn't sponsored by fontsquirrel.com or anything. I just happen to think they're awesome.

So, what's changed?

Well, there's obviously the new color scheme and 'fancy' CSS trickery like @font-face, box- and text-shadows. For the latter you'll need a decent browser, or just sit tight until it's 2020 and Microsoft has finally caught up. Besides, do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser? (Which is exactly why IE6 gets the Universal IE6 CSS treatment, as I'm way past caring about that bug ridden, incompetent, worthless excuse for a piece of shit browser.)

Then I hacked around the Sandbox theme a bit. Out of the box it's pretty awesome for styling with all it's CSS-hooks, but there were some things that I wanted done differently: I am the only author here, so there is no need for links to author pages; the default archive page is a long list of months, and I wanted something more compact so I adapted the Smart Archive plugin to suit my needs; I wanted an easy way to add post-specific styles (see the fancy highlight in my Where's Willie? post below); and I wanted short url's for posting on Twitter that didn't need Tinyurl et al, for which the Twitter Friendly Links plugin works like a charm.

I also completely revamped the sidebar, using javascript to pull in my latest tweets, tracks and photo from Twitter, Last.fm and Flickr. Added mobile and print style sheets for those who require those, and finally I tweaked the footer. Then, today, as I beheld my work, I saw that it was good. Well, good enough anyway. And just before the deadline too.

The rest of this post is just a to do list.

• Add a "live redesign in action, beta version, never mind the mess" banner;
• Rewrite the colophon;
• Write content for the archive page;
• Tweak the meta section on post pages;
• Figure out if I need rel=canonical, rev=canonical and short urls: if so, implement them;
• Completely remove obsolete plugins;
• Compactify the database by removing old revisions, etc.;
• Add mobile CSS;
• Add print CSS;
• Implement Universal IE6 CSS;
• Optimize CSS and Javascript

Anything I'm missing here?

What do you think so far? Am I doing something terribly wrong, or is this heading the right way?

Oh, and, update: I'm using some new and fancy CSS3 that Internet Explorer will probably start to support around 2020 at the earliest, so for the full effect, use a decent browser.

I say almost, as I'm working on a redesign behind the scenes and I'm in half a mind to make it a 'live redesign'. You know, where I put the work in progress in place and tweak it until I'm satisfied with it, and where you get to scream bloody murder at my appalling choices of color, fonts and general aesthetics. Anyway, the final new version of this website should be up before the end of the month, and in the meantime, what you see is what you got to learn to live with.

When there's a question, if often falls in the same category: Darwin and evolution. And I've found that most of the time, those questions aren't even worth answering. I mean, you can ask what the best argument against evolution is. But you can't really answer that question, as science isn't interested in arguments but in evidence.

And sometimes I just can't be bothered. Like when the question "What are the seven promises of Eragon Shadeslayer and Saphira Bjartskular?" turned up. I don't care. Really. I don't. Just read those damn books.

To salvage this post somewhat, I'm going to expand the keywords 'release la derniere volonte laat me' into the question "Where can I find 'Laat me (Ma dernière volonté)'?", assume that it's the version by Wende they're after, so I can answer it by saying it's on the DVD that comes with her latest release Chante, and include the video. Just because I happen to love everything about that song.

So, that's it for this feature in the regular programming. It might make a comeback if a question worth pursuing presents itself, but until then, don't hold your breath.