According to Google Analytics, the following are my most popular posts. Funnily enough, the post to Manually Remove Google Desktop had twice the number of hits to the Absoblogginlutely! home page.

1. Manually removing Google Desktop
2. Absoblogginlutely!
3. Unknown error 0x80040600 – Outlook corrupt emails in deleted items.
4. Clientdiag for troubleshooting WSUS
5. Fixing vpmsece.dll errors in outlook (Symantec AV plugin problems). Interestingly I posted this in 2003!
6. Audible to mp3 (how to conversion)
7. Backup Exec jobs won’t run but go to queued.
8. Spell Check not working in Word. Word hides the option in a very strange location.
9. Svchost crash with 0x745f2780. Need to install a hotfix from Microsoft.
10. Error 0x80096001 when trying to run Windows Updates

85% of my traffic came from search engines – 75% in total from Google. This shows I have great Google ranking but not many people stick around 🙁

I run a small site with only 61,000 unique visitors 2000 of whom are suprisingly on dialup, 45% of users use dsl or cable – no surprise there really.  Internet explorer accounts for 68% of users which I think is pretty large for a technical site. The 8 users who visited more than 200 times in the past year really need to learn the benefit of RSS feeds – if that is you and you need some help then let me know. 53% of users are in the USA, 13% in the UK.

Finally, as all good statistics are not complete with some sort of a graphic here is a map of visitors from the world – there are very few locations that haven’t visited – Madagascar was one that I could actually recognise from the map.

Liz wrote a post on why do givers not ask to be paid, something that I’ve been wondering this last week or so. I’ve received lots of thankyou emails and comments over the years on this blog from users who have been helped from the posts on this blog. I’ve also read other blogs where people have mentioned that they have made some money from donations on their website/application purely by having a donation button on there. After all if you don’t make it easy for users to donate or even ask them, then it’s unlikely they will.
Therefore I’ve been considering putting something like a paypal donation button on the blog posts so that if a post has helped someone then maybe they would like to donate. If it’s possible I’d like to only put it on pages where users have been referred by Google or other search engines. This way regular users who read the blog via the web wouldn’t get the donate button, rss readers wouldn’t get it, but those who I’ve really helped by providing answers would get the button on the page.
I’ve previously not put something like this on the website as it has always been my personal record of solutions that I have come across in my daily life and I like to help other people – getting the thank you emails and comments make my day (and they still do).
So what do you the readers think of this idea? Do you think I’m selling out or do you think it is a good idea? How many of you click the adverts on this blog already? (Some already do as I make a little money from adsense but not much).