News site rankings

Before I started QatarJournal in April last year, I took a snapshot of the Alexa page views from local news providers. Looking at the changes over the past year, it's obvious that QatarLiving is now serving more pages than any of the other news sites, and Watan's website is declining in relative terms against the other papers. Permalink here. A similar decline can be seen in terms of Watan's market share, with only QL showing a noticeable increase.

When we look at only visitors from Qatar, the ranking of sites providing news becomes clearer:
* Qatar Living
* BBC
* Al Raya
* Al Jazeera
* Al Sharq
* India Times
* The Rest.

QatarJournal.com sold

Today I sold QatarJournal.com to a local businessman. I probably wouldn't have sold the site in January - I was quite upset about it. Now, it just seems like someone has given me a surprise gift. I'm going to have a good holiday this summer.

Back!

Qatar Journal is finished, so I'm back blogging here.

At the moment, I'm working on a CGI-IRC gateway, a cleanup of another codebase. It's mostly just a matter of replacing bits of code with CPAN modules, but after it's fairly tidy I'm going to replace the guts of the code with POE::Component::IRC by Chris Williams. That's mainly because I don't trust the IRC code I'm working with, and the POE code looks like it's well maintained.

The idea is that eventually, I'll authenticate web users with OpenID and some sort of NickServ. I haven't quite worked it out yet. Should be a fun bit of work, and very, very web 2.0 ;)