It goes without saying that the Zebras' gig at The Barrel in Brookend Street was a great night! Dylan, John, Paul and Steve played all the usual songs plus three new numbers, which they performed for the first time. The new songs sounded great! I like 'Come As You Are', which has become a song I have grown to like through Matt playing a lot in the car.

It must have been good because people were up dancing during the first set - something which is virtually unheard of locally and I also got dragged up to dance (second time in 20 years) by somebody I don't even know. (That was probably just the beer doing the job for which it was intended!)

Not much else I can say other than that I look forward to the next date in the social section of my photography diary, which will be at the Zebras' next gig in Ross - Rowing Club, Friday, 16th February.

There is one other thing about the Barrel Inn though. Last time I photographed the Zebras there, one of the photos I took was so corrupt that the file nearly brought down my whole computer network. The toilet door also opened for me, all by itself. I had actually forgotten about those experiences by Saturday evening but . . . My camera went strange again at the Barrel on Saturday night. The display showed an error message after taking four photos, at the very beginning of the evening. I have had the camera I used that night for four years now and have taken hundreds of thousands of photos with it. The only two times it has ever gone wrong have both been in The Barrel Inn. Enter the Twilight Zone at the Barrel.

I have not published the visitor statistics for Wyenot.com for at least two months now. The reason for this has simply been that I have not had the time. As is probably quite obvious, working on Wyenot News has become a major time consuming issue for me as I do the whole thing myself and there is actually quite a lot of work involved in going through the server log to produce statistics and then producing the tables of figures.

Just to show that the site is still working well however, here is a quick rundown on the basic facts for January 2007.

In January 2007 the web site as a whole had 869,106 'hits'. This probably means (if the past seven years are anything to go by) that during the coming summer months, the 'hits' figure will more than exceed one million per month. The 'hits' figure includes every visit, including search engine robots etc..

A minimum 143,760 pages of the site were read during January, by 45,116 unique visitors. I say 'minimum' because, to save and spread my bandwidth, I do not keep all of Wyenot on the same server. Some of the most popular audio / video pages are kept on my ISP 'Free Space' to save dosh. (The bells, Esmeralda!)

During the month, on average 4,637 pages of the site were visited per day. The maximum pages per day figure for the month was 6,645. This was recorded on Wednesday, 3rd January. Most of those visitors looked at the New Year edition of Wyenot News.

What is really interesting to me is that of the 'hits' 136,281 of the 'referrals' throughout the month were 'direct requests', i.e. people either typed 'www.wyenot.com' directly into their web browser or had the site stored in their 'Favourites'. This is really good news to me as it means that people actually wanted to find Wyenot and did not just arrive from a search engines to find that the site was not really what they were looking for. Word of mouth is a powerful advertising tool!

The most visited pages, in order, were: Home Page, Wyenot News, Accommodation, Site Map, Pubs, What's On, Dining Out.

I am astonished at visits to the accommodation pages. If they are anything to go by, this is going to be a good tourist season. I am guessing that they are forward planning for later in the year. (Wish I was that organized!)

1,380 people visited the 2004 Wyenot News page which once contained a picture of Amy Winehouse. This happened in the past 2 weeks, after I removed the photo from the web server to stop thieves on 'myspace' from stealing my bandwidth. What is even more sad than actually wanting a photo of Amy Winehouse is that, during the month, I also had to remove a 1973 photo of myself because some poor sod in the USA had it on his 'myspace' page and was pretending that it was a photo of himself. Now there is desperate, and there is REALLY DESPERATE!!! I don't know what he actually looks like but I am guessing he's a three foot tall, bald, endomorph with black teeth and acne.

If you have a local news item or story of local interest which you would like to appear on Wyenot News you are very welcome to submit it by email, telephone or by post.

Please advise as early as possible if you would like me to photograph your local event so that I can put it in my diary. This service is offered strictly on a first come, first served basis.

Many Wyenot News photographs appear in various local newspapers and magazines. This does not imply that Wyenot News or any other part of this web site belongs to those publications. Wyenot News is a totally independent news magazine.

Contacting Wyenot News:

Email: please click here.

Telephone: 01989 763217 - Mobile: 0779 683 4077

Postal address: Wyenot News, 1, Hillview Road, Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire. HR9 7EY

If you would like to order prints from Wyenot News photographs, please click here.

Prints are only available for photographs taken by Wyenot News (Not of those which have been sent in by readers).

Prints of 'people' photographs are only available to those directly involved in the news event covered. i.e. I do not sell prints of people to the general public.