All About Orkney: news, events, pictures, articles, shipping, shopping- it's all here, why go anywhere else?

Apologies to those following this site on Twitter, who may well have wondered why there have been no articles over the last few days.

Well, there have been, but an opaque problem with the automatic Twitter updater has meant that no Twitter update has been sent for about three days.

If you get this message it has been sorted!

And if you are wondering what you missed, then this was it:

Scottish Government agree to meeting on ADS

Today's Orkney internet sensation

Financial breakthrough for Oyster firm

THI grants to juice up Stromness shopfronts

Why oh why have there been so few stories here the last couple of days?

It's been down to lack of time, and I apologise. I tried writing a story when I was half-awake after the election count, and believe me, it was not a success - I won't be doing that again.

But I'm sanguine, as a) I have some enhancements to this site up my sleeve, and b) am not too proud to beg for contributions from others!

Joking aside, that has always been a longer term aim of this site, to widen it out to contributions from others, as exemplified by Fran's excellent Mumford and Sons articles.

So if you feel creative, create.  Non-libellious copyright free content of wider Orkney interest is welcomed for consideration.

AllAboutOrkney is doing very well thank you, and the visitor numbers have trebled since the start of the year. The traffic stats from Alexa place it around the top 25,000 in the UK, which doesn't sound startling, but looks a lot better when you get the corresponding statistic for other Orkney based sites. Don't compare it with Facebook though, as it returns the Facebook.com figure (which is number 2, behind Google).

As it has been been running for a while now in basically the same format, I'd like to change things around a bit, bring some things back to life, and maybe add some new features.

My other agenda of course is to find some way to make some money from the site, as the hosting isn't free, and my time generally isn't either. I've refrained from thinking about ads so far, as I wanted to build up the traffic to an extent that meant the advertisers would genuinely be getting to a lot of people.

... like I did, when I just created the site tour slideshow.

On the In Pictures page you get a stream of the latest Orkney pictures posted on Flickr, and selected YouTube videos such as the one below that Mobba09 has posted from last night's Mumford and Sons gig in the Cathedral.

This site has been up and running for almost an year now, so some navel gazing will be in order. With that in mind, I'll share some of the Google Analytics with you which tells the story of how people access this site.

In the browser wars the prevailing trend of the Second Browser War is reflected in our stats, with Internet Explorer declining as its rivals fight back. However the family of Internet Explorer versions that are out there is still being used by 60% of visitors, with Firefox only being used by just over 17%! Firefox is perceived to be a contender in the wars, but in actual fact it is being squeezed by Google's Chrome (11.5%) and Apple's Safari (7%). Opera, my personal favourite is just used by 2.5% of discerning visitors. 1.8% of visitors still use Internet Explorer 6. Upgrade, for the love of God!

Windows remains the dominant operating system, used by 90% of visitors. Of these, 47% are using XP, 31% Vista, and 21% Windows 7. Sell your Microsoft shares, the customers are no longer locked into the upgrade cycle. A single visit has come from a computer running Windows 98!

So how is Linux doing in the desktop PC arena? Very badly actually, with only 0.5% of visitors running a Linux-based OS. However 7% are running MacOSs, which is but a mutant Unix these days anyway- some consolation. The next most popular operating system family is also from Apple, belonging to the iPhone- 1.5% of visitors access the site using one of these expertly marketed wallet-emptying devices.

Screen resolution used to be a significant concern, with sites being designed to show up nicely on 800x600 monitors. Well forget that, its safe to design for 1024x768 now at the very least, as only 1% of visitors are using SVGA screens.

The last statistic I'll quote is a double edged one. Only 1.5% of visitors access this site using dialup- does that mean that 98% of people now have broadband connections, or does it mean that this site loads so slow on dialup that dialup users just give up?

Cross-referencing with Orkneycommunities.co.uk however shows a similar number of dialup users, suggesting that statistic does represent that most users now have broadband. Interestingly Orkneycommunities has a far smaller proportion of visitors who have Apple computers or iPhones.

All About Orkney- both mobile and upwardly mobile! Whilst still being for the people of course...

I was going to write what should be a periodic exhoration to visit the other pages under the hood of this site, such as The Neighbours, Politics, General Interest, all under the News tab above, when I realised some of them were broken. This was due to categorising articles wrongly, and should now be corrected- apologies for the loss of service!

In more positive news, I am pleased tp report that the Flickr slideshow in the In Pictures section is up and running once again, and now that Marine Traffic have their Googlemaps API sorted, the Shipping section once more displays the ships on top of a map. If the map ever disappears, just switch to 'satellite' view and all will become clear again, by the way.

Apologies to the 56% of visitors who use Internet Explorer to view the site, and who may have been confronted with a popup asking them to download ietag.dll recently. This is not a hack or anything malicious but a side effect of cutiing and pasting part of an article from Word, which includes invocation of 'smart tags'. This has now been removed, and if you did download the dll, it was safe enough, don't worry.

Since we are talking about browsers, I note that 2% of visitors still use Internet Explorer 6. This is akin to living in a world of pain, and I implore you for your own wellbeing to upgrade to Firefox (like 22% of visitors), Chrome (12%), Opera (2%), or even Internet Explorer 8 (44%).

If you feel your computer is a bit slow, Chrome or (my favourite) Opera might be best.

The much trailed nature blogs are now here, albeit in non pictorial form. Work will take place to get pictures on the page, and also give a context and links in the right hand column.

So a work in progress, and these blogs also need to be added to the latest updates box. Any suggestions for blogs to include, just email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .