To be honest, we don't know! What we do know is how many "unique visits" we get. A "unique visit" is defined as a user viewing at least 2 pages of the site within a 30 minute interval. The graph shows how our average daily visits score has changed following the "official launch" of the site at the start of July 2008 (click for larger view).

In October 2008 we started to transfer the movies to YouTube to avoid the Club having to pay extra costs for excess "bandwidth" (i.e. users downloading information). Some of the movies were very popular so that probably explains the apparent decrease in visits to our site after that month.

In June 2009 we decided to provide access to almost all our movies directly through the SRCMBC Channel on YouTube rather than through through a link from our own web site. The aim was to ensure that high quality access to the videos was maintained despite changes in format adopted by YouTube. Direct visits to our YouTube channel are not counted in the statistics we present here.

Again, in general we don't know! For some users we can identify their Internet Service Provider (ISP). If their ISP is, for example, "something.co.uk" then it's a good bet that they are in the UK. However if their ISP is "something.com" they could be anywhere! This is likely to become more and more of a problem since, for example, in the UK ISP's such as BT and Sky who are expanding their business have ".com" addresses. The result is, out of 30059 visits during 2008, we could only identify the country for 2598 of them. Thus we only know about less than 1 in 11 visits. Particular cases where we have little information are the USA and Africa (view explanation).

However, despite the uncertainty, it's still interesting to see where the minority that we can identify came from, we've marked the visits during 2008 on this interactive map (we hope to update it soon)...

(NB If you are using Google Translate the map will not work correctly; here is a non-interactive map showing where our viewers come from)

Looking at the data for 2009, apart from the very top level pages... the home page (4.3%), photo gallery page (2.5%), and movie gallery page(1.7%), which you would expect to be very often "viewed" (as a route to elsewhere!), its relatively even. The most popular photo-gallery is the "all boats" page (1.7%) followed by the "Latest Photos" page (0.7%). The "adverts" page is often viewed (1.1%) so it's worth putting your adverts there! In the "Hints and Tips" section Alan Bond's Marine Engine Sound Unit is the clear winner (0.7%) but Peter Taylor's Smoke Generator (0.4%) and Pete Bryant's Hovercraft (0.2%) also attract interest.

The astute among you will have noticed that these precentages are all very low! In fact after the 34th most popular page all the values are below 0.2%. This is actually good since, as shown in the graph left (click for larger view), we have is what would be called by statisticians a "histogram with a long tail"! What it implies is that lots of the pages on the site are getting viewed, not just a few most popular ones. In fact the graph predicts that, at the very, very least, 760 other pages on the site have been viewed since the start of 2009, the true number will be much, much larger.

How many pages are there on the site? We just don't know! The pages get assembled as needed when a viewer requests a particular page from over 26,000 separate files!

A word of caution. The statistics include visits by "web robots". These range from the "googlebot" which indexes the pages for the benefit of everyone, to malicious "webbots" searching for email addresses to spam, bank account details to steal, etc. These visits get counted in the statistics and we can't distinguish them from genuine users.

The site is hosted by 1&1 Internet on unix servers situated in Germany (so the "Last modified" time is actually CET rather than the time in the UK!). It is written in a combination of the php scripting language and html (please read the acknowledgements for a history of the php code which you actually might find surprisingly interesting!). Some parts of the site (including the photograph galleries) are formatted semi-automatically using unix "C Shell" scripts. Site development by Peter Taylor is performed on an Apple Mac computer taking full advantage of the power of the unix based MacOs X operating system. Alan Bond's pages are developed in Linux which is a version of unix which runs on Windows type computers.