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<img alt="Men and women" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/1e9e5_4137645689_d57bdd0a28_o.jpg” title=”Men and women” class=”alignright” width=”150″ height=”100″ />Tech is generally thought of as a male-dominated field, so it’s not surprising to see that visitors to tech blogs are predominantly male. What you might find a bit sad is just how massively the men outweigh the women.

To find out what the balance looked like, we picked out a group of popular tech blogs (and a couple of tech blog aggregators) and examined how many of their website visitors are male versus female with the help of demographics data from google’s <a href="http://www.google.com/adplanner”>DoubleClick Ad Planner.

The sites included in this survey are: TechCrunch, GigaOM, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Techmeme, Slashdot, The Next Web, Slashgear, Hacker News, Venturebeat, TUAW, BGR, Daring Fireball, All Things D, and AppleInsider.

Male vs. female site visitors

We can do a lot of talking, but the easiest and clearest way to show you how the site visitors to these sites are divided is simply to… show you.

<img title="110531-tech-gender.png" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/b5a26_110531-tech-gender.png” border=”0″ alt=”tech site visitors gender division” width=”580″ height=”500″ />

We were tempted to go with blue and pink for the chart, but we’d never hear the end of it. <img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/b5a26_icon_wink.gif” alt=”;)” class=”wp-smiley” />

The stats are averaged for the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. These are the only countries that have demographics data in DoubleClick Ad Planner, which as we mentioned was our data source.

The results:

• Most male-dominated sites: Techmeme, Slashdot and John Gruber’s Daring Fireball all have close to 90% male visitors. Hacker News and AppleInsider weren’t far behind.
• Least male-dominated sites: Mashable was the least male-dominated of the sites (59%), followed by TechCrunch (66%).
• The average for the sites in this survey is 78% male visitors, 22% female. If we look at just the United States, the average is 75% male visitors, 25% female.

Social networks tend to have a pretty even distribution between men and women overall, in many cases even being female dominated (here is a survey from 2009). This may explain why Mashable had more female visitors than any of the other sites in this survey; the site has a pretty strong focus on social media. Another reason may simply be that it’s considered a more mainstream blog.

The million-dollar question

Why do some of these sites attract so few women? It would be interesting to hear your take.

A quick note about the data source: google bases its demographics data on a <a href="http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/answer.py?answer=98132&hl=en_US”>variety of <a href="http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=98349″>data sources. There is unfortunately a certain lack of transparency regarding exactly what data sources those are and how google estimates the amount of male versus female visitors to sites.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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Part 1: <a href="http://www.ezwebsitemonitoring.com/blog/php-benchmark-memcached-with-pecl-memcache-php-memcached-redis-with-predis-rediska”>PHP Benchmark – Memcached with pecl-memcache & php-memcached , redis with Predis & Rediska Part 1

Please read Part 1 for my explanation of what I am trying to do, and why I am testing these out. It is good to note that libredis performed almost identical to pecl-memcache when running 10 concurrent connections (each request puts 5 keys and gets those 5 keys back)

wget http://127.0.0.1/path/to/benchmark

1 connection pecl-memcache 10000 sets/gets
set: 0.6813(s)
get: 0.6937(s)

1 connection php-memcached 10000 sets/gets
set: 0.6988(s)
get: 0.7722(s)

1 connection libredis 10000 sets/gets
set: 0.8227(s)
get: 0.7697(s)

1 connection predis 10000 sets/gets
set: 2.2110(s)
get: 1.0792(s)

1 connection rediska 10000 sets/gets
set: 5.0501(s)
get: 3.3987(s)

—————————————
ab -c 10 -t 10 http://127.0.0.1/path/to/benchmark

10 concurrent connections pecl-memcache – 5 sets/gets per request
Complete requests: 4402
Requests per second: 440.14 [#/sec] (mean)

10 concurrent connections libredis – 5 sets/gets per request
Complete requests: 4754
Requests per second: 475.35 [#/sec] (mean)

10 concurrent connections predis – 5 sets/gets per request
Complete requests: 2179
Requests per second: 216.43 [#/sec] (mean)

10 concurrent connections php-memcached – 5 sets/gets per request
Complete requests: 2200
Requests per second: 204.78 [#/sec] (mean)

10 concurrent connections rediska – 5 sets/gets per request
Complete requests: 1678
Requests per second: 167.76 [#/sec] (mean)
—————————————
nginx/0.8.36 PHP print “hello” (php-fpm latest SVN, PHP 5.3.2)

ab -kc 100 -n 10000 http://127.0.0.1/dummy.php 100 concurrent keepalive connections
Requests per second: 1781.36 [#/sec] (mean)

ab -n 100000 -kc 10000 http://127.0.0.1/dummy.php 10,000 concurrent keepalive connections
Requests per second: 1559.65 [#/sec] (mean)

b -n 100000 -kc 10000 http://127.0.0.1/dummy.php 10,000 concurrent NON-keepalive connections
Requests per second: 1416.88 [#/sec] (mean)

—————————————
ab -kc 100 -n 30000 http://127.0.0.1/404.html

nginx 404.html – 100 concurrent keepalive connections
Requests per second: 15954.15 [#/sec] (mean)

<img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/66f89_y-qm6l2ZVvk” height=”1″ width=”1″ />
<a href="http://ezwebsitemonitoring.com/blog/php-benchmark-memcached-with-pecl-memcache-php-memcached-redis-with-predis-rediska-part-2″ rel=”nofollow”>Go to Source

Part 2: <a href="http://www.ezwebsitemonitoring.com/blog/php-benchmark-memcached-with-pecl-memcache-php-memcached-redis-with-predis-rediska-part-2″>View Part 2

Update: 04/27/2010 – Scroll to bottom for benchmark which includes the almost unknown Libredis library for PHP.

I am new to using key-value memory caches, so today I decided to run some tests. I’ve searched the web quite a bit today (ok.. a LOT) and found some old benchmarks, but I wanted to run some modern benchmarks on the latest versions and see how it worked for my needs.

$expire = 120;

$key = md5($query);

$begin = microtime(true);

for ($i=0;$i<10000;$i++)
{
    $this->_server->set($key.$i,$value,$expire); // different for different libraries, but you get the idea
}

$taken = microtime(true) - $begin;
$taken = number_format($taken,4);
print "set: $taken(s)<br />";

$begin = microtime(true);
for ($i=0;$i<10000;$i++)
{
    $this->_server->get($key.$i); // different for different libraries, but you get the idea
}

$taken = microtime(true) - $begin;
$taken = number_format($taken,4);
print "get: $taken(s)<br />";

<img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/1c2db_hLaNvRGfN_o” height=”1″ width=”1″ />
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Bing has just announced on their community search blog <a href="http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2009/10/21/bing-is-bringing-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter-search-to-you.aspx”>here that they now have real-time access to the entire public <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter feed.

Here is an excerpt from their announcement:

We’re glad you asked that. Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter, we now have access to the entire public <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter feed and have a beta of Bing <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). <a href="http://www.bing.com/<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter” target=”_blank”>Try it out. The Bing and <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter teams want to know what you think.

Now.. this all sounds great, except for the fact is at the time of writing this blog post, the <a href="http://www.bing.com/<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter“>link to their <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter search (bing.com/<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter) is 404.

Update – Bing <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter Search went live (from 404) about 15 minutes after this post was published!

I don’t see anything odd about this day being April Fool’s or anything, so I am assuming they are working on that page as I am writing this article (or that post got published sooner than it should have on Bing’s Search Blog).

Let me know what you think <img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/f431f_icon_smile.gif” alt=”icon smile Bing announces search for <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter feeds” class=”wp-smiley” title=”Bing announces search for <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter feeds” />

<img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/1c2db_a8rn2spAMs0″ height=”1″ width=”1″ />
<a href="http://ezwebsitemonitoring.com/blog/bing-announces-search-for-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter-feeds” rel=”nofollow”>Go to Source

Well.. today is a good day!

I thought my first informative post should be a good one, so here goes.

It may not be the biggest list, but they are verified by me as having dofollow comments, a good amount of content, and a decent mozRank, which usually means a decent PageRank.

I decided not to list PageRank, since I much prefer the mozRank floating point numbers, but if someone wants to go through and provide the PageRank info, I will update it.

I’ll also throw in some other sites that provide more lists, no guarantees, but I believe in sharing, so here they are:

http://buckdat.blogspot.com/2009/10/effective-link-building-galore-unique.html

http://niceblogger.com/2009/08/21/dofollow-list/

http://www.seotrafficgenerator.com/website-seo/high-pr-do-follow-blogs-list/2009/09/07/

<a href="http://www.clickonf5.org/google/dofollow-blogs-google-reader/4570″>http://www.clickonf5.org/google/dofollow-blogs-google-reader/4570

If anyone has any more to add to the list, just let me know via comment!

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<a href="http://ezwebsitemonitoring.com/blog/top-list-follow-blogs-mozrank” rel=”nofollow”>Go to Source

It’s been a long year, but we are now in Beta and looking for testers. Ideally we would like a good cross-section of website owners, marketers, and agencies to use the service and give us feedback on it. We are working very hard to to provide the best possible website monitoring service, but we can’t do it without lots of feedback.

A little background on the testing done so far. We began using and testing the system in May 2009. Originally the service was conceived for Go Web Solutions, a web design and marketing firm. The goal was to provide staff with monitoring tool to deliver website management and marketing services, and to provide clients with reporting that shows how their site is performing at all times. As soon as the tool was implemented, it was a huge hit with clients.

Since May, we have had several dozen client domains in the system and being monitored. In that time we have identified and fixed several bugs, implemented numerous enhancements, and we have been creating a list of future enhancements that our users will find useful. Now that we are in Beta, it’s time to start putting a larger load on the system to test its stability and scalability.

Aaron, the amazing developer and co-creator of EZWM, has put some excellent tools in place that allow us to monitor the monitoring queues in real-time. This allow us to visually watch all types of monitors, across all servers, and see the real-time load on each server. This level of detailed monitoring of the queues will let us easily identify when upgrades are needed to the network and deploy additional resources.

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-9" style="border: 1px solid black;" title="monitoring-tools” src=”http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/8814a_monitoring-tools.jpg” alt=”monitoring tools We are now in Beta and looking for website monitoring testers” width=”656″ height=”346″ />

We are looking for the following types of beta testers:

1. Website Owners. The average website owners doesn’t know how their site is doing, they simple watch the traffic (if that). Our goal is to give website owners and simple way to actually monitor uptime, quality, keyword positions and popularity in one place. We need website owners that are looking for better tools to monitor their website and want to take the next step to controlling their success.

2. Power Users and Website Managers. EZ Website monitoring is a great tool for tracking multiple websites, making it easy for power users to track more than one website and always know how it’s performing. Typically this type of user has several sites they are responsible for, they have one or more hosting providers, and are responsible for getting traffic to those sites and converting that traffic into sales. This group will help us test the multi-domain capability of EZWM and the ease-of-use of monitoring more than one domain.

3. Agencies. Internet Marketing, SEO, Advertising agencies, New Media companies…whatever the name, we need testers like you to really push the system from the multi-domain/multi-client stand point. The idea is to provide you with the ability to manage multiple customer web sites from one interface and easily switch between website monitoring reports. We also want to test the notification and weekly reports, eventually giving you the ability to white-label the reports and notifications as a value-added service to your client.

If you know anyone that would be interested in testing our service, please have them sign up for the Beta and for 6 months of <a title="free website monitoring” href=”http://www.ezwebsitemonitoring.com”>free website monitoring. The Beta test is scheduled to end October 18th, 2009.

<img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/ff11c_1THOAdxKuf4″ height=”1″ width=”1″ />
<a href="http://ezwebsitemonitoring.com/blog/website-monitoring-beta-testers” rel=”nofollow”>Go to Source

<a rel="fancybox" href="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/c2768_database_2.png”><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-745" title="database" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/c2768_database_2.png” alt=”" width=”143″ height=”143″ />Every modern website relies on stable and well written databases. It is impossible to find a large-scale website not implementing one or more database systems.

This month, we’ve detected a high increase in response time for one of the sites we monitor. It is not a particularly large site; however it is one that relies on fast navigation. On average, the website used to load in about 3 seconds. One morning it went up to 10 seconds only for the site to begin to load. This is a good time to say that it is always advisable to test out new designs and functionality.

The website owner rolled out a new outlook combined with more functionality. Later on we found out that the site was rewritten from scratch – scripts, databases, supporting files, everything. The webmasters overlooked one single thing – they left the site working with the beta version of their database. They made multiple request to a database located on a completely different IP. This added up 5 seconds on top of their average loading times.

Having your database on a separate server is by no means a bad thing. Big sites have no other choice but to have dedicated servers powering their databases system. These servers are usually very well connected, and most of the times in close proximity to the hardware holding their web server. Smaller sites don’t usually need all this and have a single server or shared hosting providing everything they need. In this particular case, the database was on a server which was used for various tasks. It wasn’t their fastest one either.

So, imagine you request a page and then the web server requests data from the database that is located in a different city, running alongside many other services. Then the database generates the reply to the query and sends it back to the web server to process. This all happens before the actual transfer to your host starts.

We were able to act fast and let them know of the issue. They fixed it and shaved off a few valuable seconds. Luckily, it all happened in under a day. Monitor your website for 30 days, completely free, and let us know if our services helped you!

Go to Source

<img alt="wordpress” src=”http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/8823e_4925467819_8531d3ccc3_o.png” title=”wordpress” class=”alignright” width=”150″ height=”150″ />Exactly eight years ago today, Matt Mullenweg announced that the <a href="http://wordpress.org/news/2003/05/wordpress-now-available/”>first release of wordpress was available for download. We wonder if he knew what he was starting.

Much has happened with the blogging software since then. For one, wordpress has become the most popular blog platform in the world, which is no small feat. It’s also without a doubt one of the most successful open source projects ever created.

How many wordpress blogs are there? In December, there were more than <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/07/wordpress-com-now-hosts-half-of-all-wordpress-blogs/”>16 million <a href="http://wordpress.org/”>self-hosted wordpress blogs. If you also count <a href="http://wordpress.com/”>wordpress.com, the hosted wordpress blog service from Automattic, that number more than doubles. wordpress.com alone now hosts more than <a href="http://en.wordpress.com/stats/”>20 million blogs.

And yes, this blog runs on wordpress. <img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/d7907_icon_smile.gif” alt=”:)” class=”wp-smiley” />

We’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate Matt and the whole team at Automattic, as well as everyone else who has contributed to the development of wordpress through the years. It must feel good to have made such a big contribution to the evolution of the Web, and blogging in particular. As the saying goes, keep up the great work!

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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Isn’t it great that companies like <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook and google’s massive Web applications also contribute back to the community by opening their code to developers? <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook is famous for delivering a great user experience — regardless of huge traffic and immense usage of its applications. Are you a Web server administrator interested in these technologies — [...]
<a href="http://blog.mon.itor.us/2011/05/<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook-open-sourced/” rel=”nofollow”>Go to Source

Mon.itor.Us recently launched something that we think is truly groundbreaking: Free Internal Server and Network monitoring. Now users of Mon.itor.Us, the free web server monitoring service, can download our internal agents onto Windows and Linux servers and monitor CPU, Memory, Disk, Load Average, MySQL, Processes, HTTP, Ping, and even SNMP, for free. Your server could [...]
<a href="http://blog.mon.itor.us/2011/05/free-linux-server-monitoring-guide-2/” rel=”nofollow”>Go to Source