Finally I have uploaded to Flickr the pictures from last trip to LA. On Monday night I met with Carlos and David. I had already met Carlos a year ago, when he drove by San Luis Obispo, but it was the first time David (Dave from Spaniards.es) and I met.

We had a lot of fun and beers :) Here are some pics:

Last Sunday Elia and her husband visited Paso Robles. We tooke them for lunch at the park and then we went to a couple of wineries: Castoro Cellars and Eagle Castle. Elia and her husband are very nice and we had a lot of fun with them. 

Eagle Castle Wineries

Besides the Paso Robles wine tour, Elia wanted to interview me, regarding the Spaniards.es project. The interview was audio recorded and now she has published it on her website (the interview is in Spanish). Hope you like it!

Like in 2006, Spaniards.es has kept growing day after day in 2007. The number of users, the number of posts and comments... everything keeps growing. But also the bandwith used and the resources used by the server.

It was back in March when I had to move Spaniards.es from a shared hosting to my first ever dedicated server. Everything has been wonderful since then. Now I feel I'm going to need a second server pretty soon, although I hope I can stay with only one for a while.

Here are some numbers of last year (from Google Analytics):

• 1,042,009 Visits
• 676,111 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 5,981,264 Pageviews
• 5.74 Average Pageviews
• 00:06:34 Time on Site
• 52.63% Bounce Rate
• 64.55% New Visits

Drupal content:

• 7,752 nodes
• 136,500 comments
• 7,792 users

Bandwith usage:

• 340.81 GB

One more time, I would like to thank all those wonderful users, moderators and interviewers who collaborate with Spaniards.es and make it possible.

Let's keep growing!

What a wonderful command :) Of course "Spaniards.es" is the Apache log on Spaniards.es web server. I have never tried that before. I knew about tail --follow, which I love. But since 90% of the requests are additional requests generated everytime anybody visits the page (images, css, etc), following the whole log is kind of boring.

So usign grep -v one can remove anything reffered from the server itself. Thus, only direct requests and requests comming from other websites will show up in the output.

Now that's fun. I can see Google Bot hitting my server once every two secconds and Yahoo Slurp doing the same every now and then. I can see every time anybody searches something in Google and follows the link to Spaniards.es.

I love it!

Desde hace unos meses, quizá un año ya, Spaniards.es tenía, además de Google Ads, publicidad de TextLinkAds. Esta publicidad, a diferencia de la de Google, se basa en un sistema de compra-venta de enlaces, ganando una cantidad fija al mes independientemente de las visitas y/o clicks, eso sí, ajustándose la tarifa de un mes a otro.

Pues bien, en vista a las pedazo de penalizaciones que Google está metiendo a un montón de páginas web por vender links a la vez que usan Google Ads, he decidido quitarla publicidad de TLA. Después de todo, no daba para tanto (digamos que un 5% de lo que da Google).

Así que no merece la pena correr riesgos, menos aún cuando Spaniards.es está tan bien posicionada en Google. Puede parecer trivial, pero acabo de echar un vistazo y buscando 'spaniards' en Google, Spaniards.es aparece en la sexta posición de un total de 3.820.000 resultados. ¡Casi 4 millones de resultados! Anda que no habrá páginas en la web hablando de los spaniards, de las conquistas de España, de nuestras batallitas con los ingleses, etc. Ni que decir que en Google.es la web aparece la primera, aunque esto tiene mucho que ver con el nombre de dominio.

En fin, que no está el horno para bollos :)