« Thank You

Droitwich Junction Canal »

Tony Blews' UK Waterways Ranking Site (UKWRS) records the hits on sites registered with UKWRS and publishes a score for the number of hits in the previous seven days.

I've been recording the scores from UKWRS each day for around 14 months and we can look back to see how sites have changed over the year - and compare how they are doing compared to last year.

There are just seven sites which have been in the top 20 every day during 2010. Many others have been and gone during the year as scores fluctuate with, for example, Captain Ahab’s Watery Tales making just one appearance in the top 20 (on 23rd January).

Let's have a look at those seven sites and how they changed during the year, and compared to last year.

Jim Shead’s Waterways Information

A wealth of information covering almost anything waterways you can think of.

Just Canals – Forums

A consistent performer with a peak during the snow in January when, perhaps, people were "working at home".

Pennine Waterways

Describing themselves as - Canals of the South Pennines - UK canal information, history, photographs, virtual cruise

Granny Buttons

Andrew Denny's own private thoughts and ignorance about the canals and waterways. (And no-one else's, except as quoted.)

CanalPlanAC – Canal Route Planner

An interactive guide to the inland waterways of Europe, it plans journeys, calculates the length (distance, number of locks, time taken etc) of your trip and shows gazetteer information on places along the way (pubs, shops and museums).

A remarkable year on year improvement with scores mored than doubled.

Canal Cuttings

Information and features about canals, navigable rivers and their usage.

Joined the UKWRS site just as I started logging the data.

Waterway Routes – DVDs and Maps of Canals and Waterways

Our own, wonderful, site showing a healthy year on year improvement.

I have scores for all sites on UKWRS since November 2009 so please let me know if you would like to see the scores for your site.

« Selly Oak Aqueduct

UKWRS Monthly Report for December 2010 »

Thank you to all our customers, friends and family for your support throughout the year.

We've had lots of fun producing DVDs and posting them out before Christmas. I do hope they've all arrived - nobody has said they haven't, despite all the snow.

We've enjoyed meeting you all too, while we were out cruising and filming, at exhibitions, or elsewhere.

« Oxford Canal

Thank You »

The new aqueduct across the Selly Oak bypass has been open for boats since the beginning of December although, with the canals being completely frozen since then I don't think any boats have been across yet.

Boats had been diverted into a temporary channel while the aqueduct was constructed bu that has now gone and the excavators are busy removing the earth so the aqueduct will no longer appear to be at ground level.

A viaduct has been constructed to take the adjacent railway line over the new road too. That's on the other side of the railway and it will be slid sideways into position during a Christmas closure of the railway.

Once that's in place the earth will be excavated under both to allow the new road through. Then it will become clear just how high the aqueduct and viaduct are.

I wonder when the first boats will cross the aqueduct. It wont matter if they come from both direction as it's nice to see the viaduct is wide enough for them to pass without slowing any more than they normally would to pass an oncoming boat.

« Witham Navigable Drains

Selly Oak Aqueduct »

We cruised home from the IWA National Festival at Beale Park along the River Thames and north along the Oxford Canal. It was a lovely cruise and we took lots of photos as we went.

At long last I've sorted through the photos and the information and added these to our website. You can now see these here:
> Route Information
> Photo Gallery

Follow the arrows in the right margin of the photos for a virtual cruise along the Oxford Canal, or the other canals featured in the photo galleries.

« We’re back

Oxford Canal »

During the summer I was asked about updating a map of the Witham Navigable Drains for the IWA Lincolnshire Branch. Their members had done the hard work of determining the local information and they already had a map with outdated information. Unfortunately the map was in a format which could not be updated.

Working with the IWA members I updated the map and now have a new master which can easily be updated in the future. The IWA have an up to date map for their branch and for visitors to the drains to accompany the other information the branch can provide.

Clicking on the thumbnail will show a larger map or you can see a much larger Witham Navigable Drains Map.

I was very pleased with the feedback from the IWA. "Many thanks for your help in producing such a good quality map for us to promote the Witham Navigable Drains."

« UKWRS report for November

Witham Navigable Drains »

Hopefully most of you will be surprised to find we're back as you won't have known we've been gone.

Regrettably some of you will have noticed our website was missing, or at least had problems accessing it.

For a few days we've been the subject of a denial of service (DOS) attack. That's when some malicious person requests so much information from our website and sends so many emails targeted at it, the server grinds to a halt.

We don't think it was targeted at us directly, but at one of the other users who shares the same server at our ISP. The ISP have been most helpful in managing the problem and moving us between servers but it will have meant a poor service from us for a little while.

It was made worse because one of the pair of drives in the RAID array (that's where our data is stored on two hard drives to guard against failure) gave up at the same time, possibly triggered by the exceptional workload from the DOS attack. The drive was hot-swapped by the ISP staff within minutes but it then took several hours to rebuild the new drive with a copy of the data from the remaining good one which made it even slower.

The good news is that we believe everything is back to normal now and I'm not aware of any data being lost. If you have had problems placing an order then please try again. If you are still finding problems, or you've placed an order that we haven't acknowledged, then please let us know.

We know we've missed quite a lot of visitors because our web stats and scores on the UK Waterways ranking site have dropped unusually low. Hopefully we're scoring normally again now.

« Selly Oak Aqueudct – Again

We’re back »

Many people have registered their website with Tony Blews' UK Waterways Ranking Site and benefit from a little fun and entertainment watching their scores go up and down. It's unfortunate that at least one person has rewarded Tony's efforts with threat of legal action instead of the praise that most people give it.

The rules are quite clear and aim to give a level playing field - if you don't like the rules you don't have to join - if you can see opportunities for improvement then make sensible suggestions.

Each site is allocated a unique ID number when it is registered. Tony's own UK Waterways Ranking site is number 1, with another of Tony's other sites, Google Earth Canal Maps having number 2. Granny Buttons has number 3.

There are about 130 active sites, with the latest addition being Narrowboat Ceramics which is number 224. Some of the other numbers are simply inactive sites, or where the owner has withdrawn from ranking system.

Some are registrations from sites which have nothing to do with waterways - you'll have to imagine what services they might be offering - and they have been blocked from using the site.

The graphs show how the scores have varied during the year for the first three sites to be registered.

I now have over 12 months data, with daily scores saved since 8th November 2009 so let me know if you would like to see your scores (or those for someone else) featured in a future blog.