Strange things are afoot at Wal-Mart. The word on the street is that the area is closed down and the police are there. Reportedly, at least one radio station is advising people to avoid the area entirely. Anybody know what’s going on? Thanks to Rob for the tip. 12:07pm Update: WINA is reporting that it’s a bomb threat. They say it was called in around 11am after receiving two phone calls (you’d think one would do it), and the building was promptly evacuated. K9 units are now searching the building.
News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA, since 2001.
Monthly Archive for May, 2002
Page 2 of 9
writes: Conventional wisdom has it that Maurice Cox is in line to be Charlottesville’s next Mayor. However, Blake Caravati is said to be interested in staying on for another term. Anyone care to speculate on how this is going to turn out, and why?
Anonymous writes “So cvillenews.com has been up a while and seems to have a pretty decent crowd of regulars. But how about some numbers on the visitors the site sees? How much traffic does cvillenews get?” Keep reading for the answer.
The server that I host cvillenews.com on is in a bad way, and lacks anything in the way of decent logging tools and such. As a matter of fact, the drive that records logs ran out of space a few weeks ago, so I’m missing a few weeks of logs. So I’ve written a few shell scripts to extract some data from the log files, and I hope that this will suffice.
We’ll start off with the most useless of all statistics: hits. cvillenews.com gets between 1,000 – 9,000 hits per day. An average weekday sees about 4,000 hits.
We’ll take yesterday as an example to look more closely at a regular day. There were 6,900 hits from 263 unique users. About half of those users are from known-local addresses: intelos.net, cstone.net, cfw.com, virginia.edu, mediageneral.com, monticello.org, bnsi.net, charlottesville.org, ceva.net, rlc.net, cruchfield.com, snl.com, etc. etc. About a quarter come from possibly-local users connecting via aol.com, earthlink.net, va.sprint-hsd.net, starband.net, etc. And the remaining quarter came from interesting places like keck.hawaii.edu and c-span.org and unresolvable IP addresses. Some of our most regular users here come from that last bunch, mostly C’ville expatriates, from what I’ve gathered on the boards.
Taking a step back to the last week we see 1,033 unique users. (Due to dial-up modem users with ever-changing Internet addresses, that’s probably more like 800 or so.) The population increases to just over 2,000 if you look at a month. The conclusion that I draw from this is that we have a core group of a few hundred users that visit “obsessively” (see the recent poll on the topic), a thousand or so that visit regularly, and folks that discover the site and promptly forget it. (Or run screaming to the relatively safety of the streets after reading the discussions.)
Weekends are the slowest for traffic (and posts, consequently), as a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy: why should I add news to the site, since nobody looks at the site on the weekends? So, of course, nobody looks at the site on weekends because there’s nothing new. Oh, well.
As long as I’m spouting statistics, I may as well point out how most people get here. The vast majority of visitors (well over 75%) simply type in the address or use a bookmark. This is good, because it means that random people aren’t finding the site due to crazy search terms in Google and wasting my bandwidth. Which leads me to search engines. None of them lead here except for Google. We get some pretty crazy results. Here are some recent terms that brought up cvilenews.com in Google and led people here:
Meadowcreek Parkway
meredith richards
ClearChannel monopoly
D&R Development
Gaylon Beights
Lee Danielson
aolian islands
bike box portland maine airport
curfew law scenario
Charlottesville local news
STEPHEN MALKMUS IS A SNOB
charlottesville recycling
david allen coe cum stains
domestic terrorism charlottesville
hook charlottesville
ice-cream environment vermont
ron martin appliances charlottesville
ludicrous mike tyson quote
cville weekly paper
Colin Rolph
oxymoron sculptures
why northerners suck
labor action group Charlottesville
Maurice Jones Virginia Charlottesville
michael spicer tortola
Charlottesville local news
Gaylon Beights
Judah Friedlander everyday video
Reid Nagle SNL Securities
cville waldo
george loper
kevin armstrong
law professor abraham student
malicious wounding law
progress on the budget with city council 2003
martin luther king plagerism thesis
Weird.
Anyhow, that’s pretty much the basic data that I can easily extract from these log files. I hope to get the site moved to a new server at my apartment in the next week or two, and I should be able to get some more useful data from that.
On Tuesday, May 7th, the day of the Charlottesville City Council elections, Jake Mooney had a story in the Daily Progress regarding the Republicans’ planned strategy of encouraging voters to cast only one of their two available votes, strengthening the single Republican candidate’s position over the two Democrats. After Republican Rob Schilling won, a review of the votes showed that 31% of voters cast their ballot for just a single candidate. It didn’t take long for people to start pointing fingers at the Progress and accusing them of behaving unethically, including defeated candidate Alexandria Searls. To that end, last week’s Hook featured an article by Lisa Provence (newly available on their website) effectively demonstrating that the Progress’ article was not unethical by most standards. What do cvillenewsers think?
The Board of Architectural Review has approved an application to demolish large portions of the Wachovia block on the Downtown Mall. The buildings were originally approved for partial demolition in September of 2000, but building owners Lee Danielson and Colin Rolph failed to do so within in the one-year time limit. The building is for sale, and not all interested purchasers desire to go through with the demolition. Jake Mooney has the story in today’s Progress.
Sideblog
Police announced this afternoon that their investigation into what was initially believed to be a fatal fire on Rugby Avenue is now a homicide investigation. #
The Virginia Supreme Court has denied George Huguely’s appeal. His second-degree murder conviction will stand, WRIC reports. #
In a carefully worded story, and not citing specific sources, WTVR reports that forensic evidence belonging to Jesse Matthew Jr., the main suspect in the disappearance of Hannah Graham, matches forensic evidence collected during the investigation of Morgan Harrington’s 2009 murder. #
In the wake of Hannah Graham’s disappearance, and the evidence that came from private security footage, city officials are revisiting the question of installing security cameras on the downtown mall. #
Both Charlottesville Registrar Sheri Iachetta and former Electoral Board member Stephanie Commander have turned themselves in to the police on
foursix and four felony counts of embezzlement, respectively. #Ten years ago, the National Institutes of Health budget doubled and schools like the University of Virginia built massive new research facilities. A decade later, those buildings remain largely underutilized. NPR visits UVA in this story on the effect of federal binge and spurge spending in the sciences. #
In 2012, Council approved a new student housing complex on West Main—now some council members are questioning whether what they were shown matches what was built. #
The Architectural Review Board has approved a bike-themed mural on West Market, below the McGuffey Art Center, although at least one member expressed concerns that it might look like the bicyclists were riding away from Charlottesville’s downtown. #
City Police Chief Tim Longo is meeting with city leaders to work on protocols regarding the use of military surplus police weapons in Charlottesville. #
A 100-year-old Colonnades resident received military honors for her service in the WWII Women’s Army Corps #
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