freeg131: Philip Gamble

I was recently asked by one of my computing teachers if I knew somewhere were you could see how popular a particular website was. I recommended Alexa, easily manipulated, but probably the most widely known about site providing estimates of traffic stats.

Obviously the different traffic estimation sites use different techniques to calculate traffic data for websites, so some variation in their results should be expected.

Here is a quick look at the popularity of what is, under normal circumstances, my most popular site - GameMaker Blog.

Alexa - #438,208, however the week average is higher at 332,014.

Compete.com estimates the number of unique visitors to a domain per month. For April their figure for GameMaker Blog is 658. This figure is far too low. Even if we are just counting visitors to the blog itself, the figure should be closer to 3,000 and that is excluding the much larger number of people who see the site through the GameMaker Affiliation Service.

Quantcast is a site I found relatively recently a couple of months ago. Unlike the other sites Quantcast provides much more detailed information about visitors to particular websites, based on the number of monthly US unique visitors. They give GameMaker Blog, at the time of writing, a rank of 622,506.

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Yesterday lunchtime I was invited along with Jon to attend Mr Needlestone’s first student e-council meeting to discuss the use of technology in school and in particular our school’s e-learning resource, Rickypedia. Most years were represented and I was surprised to see that I actually knew a couple of the lower school members.

I couldn’t stay for the full meeting as I then had to demonstrate my computing coursework to Mr Cruse. And yes, it went wrong. This was followed by a discussion about GameMaker - Mr Cruse is considering teaching in it to Year 9 (but couldn’t complete the 1945 tutorial!), and my websites - primarily GameMaker Blog but also some general talk about SEO (mainly how I ‘hijacked’ 3rd place in a search for “Rickmansworth School“).

This was followed by Computing in which we undertook a field-trip. To the room next door, the library and LI6 to inspect hubs and the server. What fun! Still it made a change from the normal lesson format.

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You may know that I run several websites which relate to YoYoGames’ Game Maker software as well as contribute to the MarkUp game development magazine which focuses on the Game Maker platform.

Despite the apparent lack of recent developments in Game Maker, Game Maker 8 is not due until at least 2009, Game Maker’s appeal is growing. So much so that in this year’s ‘activity week’ at my school it looks as if one of my computing teachers will be running a Game Maker course.

My major GameMaker projects:

• Game Maker Blog - popular GameMaker news, comment and opinion blog
• Game Maker Affiliation Service - button/banner exchange service for Game Maker websites

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