Monthly Archives: February 2020
Tesco’s loading bay
Tesco the ubiquitous retailer has its shops in almost every location. Take the one in Covent Garden it has because its loading bay in a road so small I defy most cabbies to be able to locate New Row. To stock, their store Tesco despatch an articulated lorry the size of a small house, its driver just about managing to manoeuvre his vehicle into the tight space. If that wasn’t enough the geniuses in charge of logistics send their lorry at the height of the evening’s theatre-going public arriving, so the driver has to contend with negotiating the vehicle as hundreds of people try to squeeze past and then try vainly to get into Strand past dozens of parked cars.
Statistics 2019
It’s been another eventful year for CabbieBlog.
You have probability noticed yet another change in CabbieBlog’s appearance. As I mentioned previously hosting for all these keystrokes and pictures with CabbieBlog, now in its 12th year in cyberspace, comes at a cost.
A domain name to find your work on the internet; the purchase of back-up support should the site become corrupted; a speed optimization plugin, a selection of typefaces; Patreon as a means for any fans to support the work; the yearly purchase of an SSL certificate to give the domain name an https prefix required by Google in its rankings; and updating PHP, the programming language used to maintain WordPress required for the second time in a year. Added to that protection from hacking, viruses, and malware. This entailed the removal of someone’s nasties inserted within my missives last year, an expensive and a problem which, believe it or not, got CabbieBlog banned from the internet.
Now, excuse me, but with all that protection the site should have been as sound as the Bank of England. Not so! More malware had been inserted by the back door into CabbieBlog.
So with all those excuses, and in part as an apology for the site’s more basic appearance, I have reverted to CabbieBlog’s second incarnation (the first was a defunct platform now no longer lamented), which will be similar, but different.
So with those caveats here are the annual blogging statistics for 2019. As before, with the data amassed over the last year (taken from both sites), I’ve broken it down into bite-sized chunks with comparable figures for the previous year.
Blog visitors and page views
The numbers of visitors has decreased, but and those willing to loiter around CabbieBlog have increased quite substantially, which is been very encouraging. (Average hit rate per visitor: 2018 – 1.737; 2019 – 1.8117).
2018
Visitors – 34,255
Page views – 59,503
2019
Visitors – 22,994
Page views – 41,659
CabbieBlog’s readers from abroad
The different countries whose residents have viewed CabbieBlog again include Jersey and Guernsey as if they were sovereign countries and curiously the European Union with 497, a huge drop from the 1,166 visits last year, presumably the result of us being released from their clutches. The United States leads our curious cousins with 4,773 a fall since last year’s 12,851 hits. The total number of countries who checked into CabbieBlog appears to have dropped this year, but as I’m collecting data across two sites, I might have missed the occasional visitor from a foreign land.
2018 – 137
2019 – 117
Number of comments
The yardstick of a blog must be, how many of its readers decided to metaphysically put pen to paper and comment. To all of you, again a huge thank you for your encouragement or discouragement. Your comments keep me submitting posts for your perusal. Social media is increasingly reactive these days, and a much smaller proportion of people now write long-form posts providing the original material that everyone else comments upon. But at least what comments CabbieBlog receives are intelligent, relevant and insightful. I’m delighted, obviously.
2018 – 124
2019 – 94
Number of ‘likes’
It would appear that some of you have taken to the cyberverse to mark your approval of CabbieBlog in the form of a ‘like’, again a huge thank you for increasing that number by over six-fold.
2018 – 12
2019 – 79
Followers of CabbieBlog
My e-mail updates only include a brief description so many of your will have had to peruse the site to read the full post. I can’t calculate how many times you have taken the trouble to follow these notifications and read my incitful posts, but thanks for following CabbieBlog.
2018 – 1,252
2019 – 1,248
Posts written
Much of this year’s output is re-publishing old posts. Many are now being read for the first time and I have received many compliments. So the total posts and number of words do not reflect new writing. Having said that, included are 52 new trivia posts, published on Sundays. For years my Journal has lain undiscovered as a page. As an experiment, starting January 2020, every Wednesday I’m publishing the The Weekly Whinge partly from my Journal along with new material; in addition, taken from my old site, will be London in Quotations, published every Monday.
2018– 156
2019 – 157
Most viewed and least viewed posts and pages
It has to be said that some subjects take on a life of their own while others just sit in cyberspace minding their own business. At the bottom of the table lie many posts with only one view a year, and some I suspect just sit there patiently waiting to be noticed.
2018
Highest post
London’s top secret tower – 1,440
Lowest Post
London Trivia: Bear fight– 1
Highest page
Green cab shelters – 2,328
Lowest page
Time Out – 34
2019
Highest post
London myths debunked – 2,295
Lowest Post
Queen of Hell – 1
Highest page
The Knowledge – 4,536
Lowest page
Time Out – 12
Pages written
Last year due to having to comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) a number of new pages had to be written, this year no new pages have appeared on CabbieBlog.
2018 – 3
2019 – 0
Number of words written
As I mentioned before I have written substantially less this year so the word count includes new material and re-published work, I have also recalculated the words written on Sunday’s trivia.
2018
Words – 71,329
Characters – 415,241
2019
Words – 80,757
Characters (with spaces) – 468,385
Characters (without spaces) – 386,545
Paragraphs – 2,335
Referrers
If you ignore the search engines (with Google clocking up an impressive 19,103 hits). The next highest referrers are Twitter at 443 and behind them is Facebook at 255.
2018
The Hackney Hack – 48
The Telephone Box – 46
2019
Spitalfields Life – 46
The Hackney Hack – 12
In conclusion
This post is, of course, my highlight of the year. Unfortunately my readers don’t share my enthuiasm. Last year only 47 of you bothered to click on to read Statistics 2018.
London in Quotations: Herman Melville
There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear — the city of London and the South Seas.
Herman Melville (1819-1891), The South Seas
London Trivia: Caught in Cato Street
On 23 February 1820 at 7.30 pm in Cato Street the Bow Street Runners apprehended the Cato Street Conspirators who had planned to murder all the British cabinet and the Prime Minister. The police had an informer and the plotters fell into a police trap, 13 were arrested, while one policeman was killed. Five conspirators were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, later the sentence was commuted to being hanged and decapitated.
On 23 February 1633 Diarist and Chief Secretary to the Admiralty Samuel Pepys was born in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street
Legendary Miss Marple actress Dame Margaret Rutherford lived at 4 Berkeley Place, Wimbledon from 1895 to 1920
Big Ben (ie the Clock Tower) tilted by over an inch when Westminster Tube station was excavated for extension of Jubilee Line in 1990s
Britain’s first fatal car crash took place on Grove Hill, Harrow.Today a plaque on the spot warns drivers to take heed!
10 Downing Street’s famous black door was, in the first decade of the 20th century, painted green, now there is more than enabling regular painting
The statue of Eros was meant to be ‘burying’ the ‘shaft’ of his arrow in Shaftesbury Avenue – but they put him up facing the wrong way
During the 1749 premiere of Handel’s Fireworks Music in Green Park, a pavilion erected for the event burned down
Fred Perry’s racket bearing the personalised monogram ‘F.J.P, from the 1934 Wimbledon Championships sold at Christie’s in June 1997 for £23,000
London’s oldest underground line was opened in 1863 between Farringdon and Paddington and is still in use today
From 1787 to 1852 Hackney was home to Loddiges’ Nursery, famous for tropical orchids, hothouses and an arboretum
The legally required turning circle of a London taxi is 25 feet. Cab owners include Prince Philip, Stephen Fry and Bez of the Happy Mondays
Trivial Matter: London in 140 characters is taken from the daily Twitter feed @cabbieblog.
A guide to the symbols used here and source material can be found on the Trivial Matter page.
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