Ron Graham’s Report
—for Jan-Feb-Mar 2013
This page reports my voluntary ministry activities for the information of those who take a special interest in my work.
Dear Brethren... This report covers the first quarter of 2013.
Preaching at Bundaberg
During January, February, and March 2013, I presented 22 Sunday lessons in Bundaberg. These included 12 sermons, and 10 Bible class studies in Acts (chapters 10-13).
Studies in Acts
As mentioned in previous reports, I have been preparing verse by verse studies in the book of Acts. In this quarter I completed chapters 22 to 28, finishing all chapters in Acts. These lessons are online on simplybible.com and Sunday class at Bundaberg is up to the 13th chapter.
Two Funerals
In January I preached briefly at two funerals of members at Bundaberg. One was an elderly sister in Christ; the other was her son who had suffered a long time from cancer. They fell asleep in Jesus within hours of each other.
Website simplybible.com
New Lessons. In the quarter, I added 16 lessons to the simplybible.com website. Seven of these new lessons are the verse by verse studies in Acts. I also added eleven collections of slides. The whole simplybible.com website now includes 1240 study pages. The site has 1668 pages in total.
Facebook and Twitter The Facebook page facebook.com/simplybible received more than 40 new "likes". The number of "likes" at the end of March passed 243. I also now "tweet" once or twice a day on twitter as @simplybible and currently have 43 followers.
Behind the Scenes I continued improvements to optimise the website’s performance, and finished improving the indexation of the site for SiFi, the site's own search facility.
Visitors to site. During the quarter the number of pageviews per day averaged 2700 in January, 3100 in February, 3400 in March (source: Awstats). According to the same source, the actual visitors (rather than pages viewed) numbered 800 January, 900 February, 1200 March. Note that these statistics do not include robots crawling the site.
It's not about “hits”. Nor do the above figures refer to "hits" which run at around 60,000 daily. A so-called "hit" is recorded each time a file is requested in the process of displaying a single page; and many "hits" may occur per page view. Actually we try to reduce "hits" and increase "pageviews".
Increased page views. The marked improvement in page views over Jan-Feb-Mar is due partly to seasonal influence; partly to measures taken to achieve better indexing on Google, Yahoo, and Bing; partly to my efforts to make pages load faster and look better. I'm hoping that this level, of around 3000 pages per day being looked at, will be maintained.
Improved Topic Spread. One thing the above figures don't show is the variety of pages being viewed. Some months back, there were a half dozen pages that received most of the page views. But visitors are now reading a very wide variety of pages and topics. This is a very pleasing qualitative improvement in the usage of the website.
Thank You Again
Again may I say how much I appreciate those who keep on helping me in the Lord’s work. “Without you, I could not do it.”
Love and best wishes in Jesus.