Cow juice

Without being at all convinced this story is true, I can’t resist repeating it…. The Times says that Hindu Nationalists are about to launch a soft drink made from cows’ piss.

In 2001, the RSS and its offshoots – which include the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party – began promoting cow urine as a cure for ailments ranging from liver disease to obesity and even cancer.

The claim is that it will be healthy and cheap.

(Hmm. If the health argument is founded on the likelihood that drinking cow’s piss will cure cancer or liver disease, what is there to say? Obesity is a different matter. It might be hard to keep down any food after you’d forced yourself to swallow a cup of cow’s piss, so maybe you’d lose weight through starvation.

Cheap? Quite possibly, but, as you couldn’t pay most people enough to drink it, charging anything at all seems a doomed marketing strategy.)

He insisted, however, that it would be able to compete with the American cola brands, even with their enormous advertising budgets. “We’re going to give them good competition as our drink is good for mankind,” he said. “We may also think of exporting it.”

Many of the comments on the Times article are surprisingly in favour of the idea. (Do I suspect a comment-based marketing impetus?)

And oh joy! 😀 Just when you thought there was at least one area of life that the anti-PC brigade couldn’t spew out their gibberish, one commenter says:

Cow’s urine or anyone’s urine! Never in a thousand years! Yuck!! The world has indeed gone mad. What else will they think about? The politically correct bunch will no doubt embrace it and force it on us. Just wait and see. John Lim, Carlsbad, US

Amazingly, it’s actually easier to get your head round the prospect of drinking cows’ piss than it is to see the tortured logic in that.

Most viewed posts

Just out of interest, I thought I would take a look at the most popular posts on the blog and see if it gave an insight into visitors here.

The top three most viewed articles on WhyDontYou (at the time of writing this post) are:

  1. How to Defend Religion? with 2411 direct views (it even has 14 comments and over 1000 home page views).
  2. One Person’s Take On Christianity has managed a total of 2332 direct views, although it only generated three comments and 14 home page views.
  3. Content Negotiation – Mirrored Post, which despite being a blast from the past still gets 10 – 15 hits a day and has amassed a total of 1979 direct hits but in languishing in the comments stakes.

Alternatively, using Feed views you get this picture:

  1. Rapture with 5197 feed views (a paltry 106 direct views of the URL though)
  2. Faith in its death throes? with 5150 feed views but only 114 direct views
  3. Computers aren’t doctors with 5119 feed views but only 126 visits to it’s URL.

This produces some interesting assumptions about people who come here. It seems (and this correlates for more than just the top three) that a post is either popular with people coming to visit the site (direct URL views) or popular with people reading it on the feeds, but never both. For example, One Person’s Take On Christianity has amassed exactly ZERO feed views.

The most popular category is Bad Shops with almost twice as many views this year as the second most popular which is Television (13598 views vs 7278), which, given the high quality philosophical content here, speaks volumes about what people are really interested in 😀 .

Now, my original aim was to see if I could get an insight into visitors here. I am not sure the stats are really successful.  The preponderance of Religious related posts in the “most popular” lists makes sense, but I have no idea why “Content Negotiation” has become a run away success. How to defend religion has a constant stream of visitors since Ruth Gledhill linked to it in her article for the Times Online but why the others are popular currently escapes me.

From a technological point, I have no idea why the decisions between reading post / viewing feed seems so heavily polarised. There are no posts I can find which have a similar number of both, it seems very much an either/or thing.

Lastly, I wonder if, by highlighting the most popular, will this make them even more popular? I often see blogs with sidebars proclaiming the “most viewed” posts – surely this will have the effect of making those even more viewed and, as such, increasing the distance between them and others to the point at which it can never be crossed.

Comments welcome 😀

[tags]Technology, Feedburner, Feeds, RSS, Content, Blog, Philosophy, Society, Content Negotiation, Religion, Ruth Gledhill, Times, Firestats, Statistics[/tags]

Plugin Admin

In a previous post, I wrote:

Secondly – I will be getting rid of some plugins and experimenting with new ones. Your feedback is welcome, if one annoys you or breaks your feedreader or what ever, then please tell us. I think the “Sphere It” plugin will have to go, as it looks like it is slowing down the pages by a considerable amount now.

Following that post (and it was only a few hours ago), I removed the plugin but it did not help speed things up with the site. Add to this a couple of comments made which drew my attention to the problem still being there and I have had a ruthless clean out of plugins.

It does seem like the “Sphere It” plugin was innocent but I have no removed so many other plug ins I am far from happy about saying it was any of them causing the problem. I removed ones like the popularity contest, the duplicate social bookmarking plugins and some obscure ones which rarely seem to have been used. In my testing here, the site is now loading in about 20 seconds so it seems to have cured the problem. I would appreciate it if people could let me know what they are getting (estimates and approximations are fine, it is what I used 🙂 ).

[tags]Admin, blog, Blog Software, Feedburner, Feeds, plugins, RSS, Site Admin, Sphere, Sphere It, Technology, Upgrade, Web Design, Why Dont You, WhyDontYou, WordPress[/tags]

Site Matters

Just a few “site admin” comments to make, so I thought I would make them all in one post.

First off, WordPress 2.2 has been released. Normally we would follow the generic Compuskills advice and wait a while before upgrading but, following some off-line playing, it seems this blog could upgrade sooner rather than later. For this upgrade we will have to delete all the existing files and upload new ones, so there could be a period where this site becomes unavailable or unusable. As, recently, we have been having a fairly continuous run of traffic (around 360 visitors per day) there seems no “low traffic” time to do this. All I can offer is an in advance apology if you get funny page layouts and the like.

Secondly – I will be getting rid of some plugins and experimenting with new ones. Your feedback is welcome, if one annoys you or breaks your feedreader or what ever, then please tell us. I think the “Sphere It” plugin will have to go, as it looks like it is slowing down the pages by a considerable amount now.

Lastly, as I am about to move house there will be a significant interruption of service. Hopefully Heather will be able to hold the fort, but given VirginMedia’s abysmal service there is no guarantee. Please, feel free to continue to comment or email us. They will be read eventually.

On a related note, if any one is a Sky Broadband customer I would love to know what the service you have had is like and how reliable it is – also is the service really uncapped? (Sky Max). I have my doubts over the veracity of Sky when the broadband thing gives three options – Base (£40 set up, no monthly charge, 2MB bandwidth, 2GB cap), Mid (£20 set up, £5 per month, 8MB Bandwidth, 40GB cap) and Max (no set up, £10 per month, 16MB bandwidth, no cap) – all of which seem amazing value for money.

Worryingly, when I put in the telephone number for my current address, I am told the only broadband option is Sky Connect (not one of the above) which is 8MB bandwidth with a 40GB cap (looks suspiciously like “Mid” above) but this will incur a £40 set up fee and £17 per month. Why on Earth does it cost over three times as much as “Mid?” Does this imply Sky have headline services and rates (which are very good) but in reality customers can not get them? (Would this even be legal?)

Still, I will for a while give Sky the benefit of the doubt and consider it as an option- unlike Virgin Media which I would, now, only consider if it was free and uncapped…

[tags]Site Admin, Why Dont You, WhyDontYou, WordPress, Blog, Blog Software, Admin, Web Design, Broadband, Cable, VirginMedia, RSS, Feeds, Plugins, Feedburner, XML, Technology, Virgin Cable, Virgin Media, Internet, ISP, Upgrade, Sphere, Sphere It, [/tags]

Technical Problems

It seems Heathers problems with the crappy service from Virgin Media is not the only issue hitting this blog at the moment. Looking at the stats, it seems an awful lot of people are reading this blog via it’s feed rather than actually visiting the URL.

There seem to be two main options for people getting the feed. It either comes straight from the blogs feed (here) or from the feedburner feed. Recently, although the blogs feed has been working fine and includes all the latest posts, the feedburner one has been showing problems.

When I tried to investigate this, it seems that trying to connect to the blog feed from feedburner returns a server timeout error. This is not apparent why you try to access the feed direct, but also appears when you try to use feedvalidator to check the feed is valid. I find this really, really strange. Does any one have any ideas?

[tags]Technology, Feed, RSS, WhyDontYou, Why Dont You, Website, Site Admin, XML, Feedburner, Feedvalidator, Rants[/tags]