Today I've installed an add-on to site's engine, called APC - Alternative PHP Cache. As a result, it should work a bit faster. Please, let me know whether that's the case (or not).

We have this :-)

I have been collecting statistics on this site visits for a number of months now, thanks to free service from Google Analytics. Here are the results of the last few months:

 

Site's Popularity

Average: 23 visits per day (depending on the month). When fresh photos are uploaded, we get a lot more visitors coming to the site at the same time, which can create a bottleneck.

Content Visit Statistics

or what people are looking at on this site:

70% gallery

13% front page

17% other information

Average Length of Visit

51% - less than 1 minute

17% - less than 3 minutes

18% - less than 10 minutes

14% - more than 10 minutes

Average Depth of Visit

or how many pages people are looking at

44% - one or two pages

29% - three to ten pages

24% - eleven to twenty pages or more

Visitor Loyalty

or how many times certain individuals visited this site

51% - 1 visit only

This afternoon I've upgraded the website to a newer version of content management. This will bring a bunch of new features to the site soon.

I don't think I'd like to meet one of these in the water... How about you?

Found this on a Russian techie's site. Made a mirror here...

Blue Hole, depth 112m:

Video (DivX, 6.13 MB)

Dive Safe!

Hi All,

I've just returned from Canada, where I went to see a film 'An Inconvenient Truth'. I was very impressed with this film and it also made me very concerned. It is about global warming - what will happen if we keep doing nothing.

You can view the trailer

with Apple Trailers:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount_classics/aninconvenienttruth/

or with YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUiP6dqPynE

More information is available at the official website of the film:
www.climatecrisis.net

I strongly encourage everyone to see it. I don't know when (and if) the film is coming to Ireland, so I've written a petition to Irish Film Institute. You can join me here

Diving is off... the last day before departure we spent camel riding and visiting a bedouin village. In my opinion, the whole trip was crap - the guide did not really bother telling much about bedouin history or anything and was just laughting so hysterically that he made everyone's day with it... They also brought us to a shop on the way back. To turkish Ramstore, to be precise :-)

But camel riding was fun... and so was snorkelling in the Blue Hole... It was worth it only for this two reasons, imho.

I've also put the photos online and so did Bryan

This time we went to a shipwreck called Dunraven, which is also in Ros Mohamed area. Unfortunately, the pickup time from the hotel at 6:15am and drive not to Naama bay, but to Sharm itself made us miss one of the most important things of the day – breakfast. Dunraven is really nice wreck since you go through it actually being inside of the hull. We were also filmed during the day by Nick, the dive center’s cameraman. The DVD is a bit pricey (EUR60), but the video itself turned out beautiful. Once we got back to the dive center, we had to wash our gear, assess the damages (fees for 5-day diving and equipment rental).

In a morning we leant that the injured diver had been flown to Cairo for an operation. An interesting fact about this place was that banks are only open from 11 am till 2pm and from 6pm until 9pm. There was no way to change your money. And if you try/pay with dollars/euro – you’ll be screwed on the exchange rate for sure.

After day in Ros Mohamed – this time on another boat, which we liked a lot less. The dives were still good and gorgeous though. We also got to see some tech divers that went down with twinsets and two other tanks with 40% and 80% nitrox for speedy deco. When we got back to the dive center, it turned out that that injured diver, the poor guy, was still at the Sharm airport waiting for the plane. Apparently amount of bureaucracy here is so high that they could not get all the permissions for clearing the plane to fly from Cairo to pick this guy up there for an operation. Once again, ascent arm-close to the reef, Zodiac drivers are muppets. Another interesting fact was that this reckless Zodiac driver that caused the injury was detained by local police on the charge of murder attempt. And they also wanted this driver to sign the paper stating that he was deliberately trying to kill that diver… What a weird country… The evening finished in a fine Egyptian restaurant with some of the traditional food and bread that was cooked by three women in a traditional oven right in front of the restaurant's entrance.