November 13, 2005: Some Stunning Achievements of Prempeh.org: Part II of X:

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world and that is an idea whose time has come."

-Victor Hugo, Histoire d'un crime, "Conclusion-La Chute", chap. 10.

We have shown you Chapter 1 of our ten-chapter prempeh.org success story; we continue this week. This opus, which is - in the words of Victor Hugo - "an idea whose time has come," is a treasure trove for the young men and women already dedicated to trouncing the distress and weltschmerz of youth. The young people of our country, from all schools, are glued to this website not because Prempeh is better than their alma maters, but because of other reasons: the discovery of young boys whose deeds and exploits are underlined on the same pages with exemplary old men, including the leader of the country, is enough to provide a catalyst for the recrudescence of man.

Who would have thought, that, in a country where the youth are regarded as mere diversions from momentous discussions, a boy in Dormaa would have his achievements displayed on the same page as the President? Where in Ghana will you find that?

For the youth, prempeh.org, as it is affectinately called on Legon campus and elsewhere, provides a form of bucolic paradise, where the sun shines never sets, where the frenzied activity of urban and rural existence and travails is remote and forgotten, and life is one indulgent day dream for young people who aspire to leave behind footprints on the sands of time!

Speaking of the President......On October 18, 1999, Prempeh.org brought President Kufuor (then-Presidential Candidate Kufuor) online for a Q&A session when he was running for the Presidency. This was the first time a world leader used the internet to interact with the populace. We do not know of that happening anywhere in the world. 550 Ghanaians from all over the world showed up that night.

When asked about internet browsing, President Kufuor, the slowest typist ever known, made the following remarks: “Thank you for the advice. I know about Ghanaweb. My host, Kofi Ghana (Max Jumah) has told me all about that forum. I have a laptop. I'll visit. The only site on Ghana I know is prempeh.org. I'll get to know more about the web through the Prempeh College website links”

Just before his death, Otumfuo Opoku Ware II (Asante King who reigned from 1970-1999), while in London, probably from his hospital bed, proudly sent us a congratulatory message for "the great honour we’ve brought Prempeh and Ashanti as a whole."

The website’s popularity may have actually boosted admissions at the school. Children from all over Kumasi visit the website in cafés when searching for schools to choose during BECE. Every day, after school closings around 3pm in Kumasi, particularly Adum, school children from all over the city troop to internet cafes and browse the Prempeh website. The cafes in Adum are in direct competition with each other. While most charge C10,000 per hour, others charge C9,000 and 8,000 just to attract school children. Some cafe owners actually use "the website of the President's School," to attract these young customers. When we found the kids -- including girls -- glued to Prempeh website, they said that BECE is around the corner so they are searching for schools. This means that the website may have actually contributed to the Gold Rush of 2004, which saw thousands of boys applying to the Royal School in 2004, though we loathe to claim some credit. Newspaper reviews on radio stations showed that Prempeh recorded the highest number of first year applicants and the competition for entry into the Royal School is the most brutal in the nation. A record 2400 students chose Prempeh in 2004.

While about 45% of our visitors (shown by the blue wedges) enter the site by pointing their browser to www.prempeh.org, about 48% (shown by the red wedges) enter this site by simply typing in prempeh.org; they have realised that the www is not required. About 5% connect to the site from ghanaweb.com, especially by clicking the hyperlink to our website while reading President Kufuor's profile. This means that prempeh.org has reached a level that few websites are able to reach: a point where the site no longer depends on search engines to attract traffic. If we remove all references to prempeh.org from the search engines, people will still come to the site. They already have the address prempeh.org deeply etched in their brain. How could they forget it?

As could be seen here, about 65% of our visitors use Microsoft Internet Explorer as compared to about 10% using Netscape. Interestingly, when this website was first developed, Netscape was the more popular browser. A majority of the people in the 1990s used netscape. What a difference a decade makes! It shows you how far prempeh.org has come.

This graph displays usage stats for prempeh.org from May ending until November 12, 2005. The dark green bars represent the number of hits the site received for each month; the dark blue represents the files browsed at this site on each visit while the light blue represents the number of pages. The most important statistics appear in the upper right corner, which shows the number of visits in yellow and the number of referring sites in orange. Notice how the month of October (2nd from right) received the highest (12, 504 unique visitors). Though we are only 12 days into the month of November (shown on the far right), this month has achieved about 8,000 unique visits already. At this rate, we could have 40,000 visitors for the month of November 2005.

Hourly statistics for November 2005 shows the 10 a.m, 11 a.m and noon hours are our busiest hours, with 9pm hour attracting the lowest traffic. We got 10, 334 hits at the 11 a.m hour.

However, in September 2005, the 8 a.m and 9a.m hours were the busiest, with midnight having the slowest traffic.

We see here that in September 2005, 4% of our visitors came from Ghanaian domains, which tied with visitors from US universities (4%) and was actually higher than all the visitors from the United Kingdom (2%). This high number of Ghanaian visitors came from the University of Ghana -- Legon, where both Amanfoo and non-Amanfoo are always tuned in to the site. This boom in Legon internet traffic coincided with the placement of the Amanadehyee party photos online around that same time. Nothing attracts Ghanaians more to this site than the appearance of Amanadehyee photographic material on this site. It has been said that most Amanfoo love Amanadehyee more than Prempeh College.

This is an authentic printout of the usage statistics for prempeh.org for September 2005, which was "generated by the server on 14 September 2005, 01:37 PDT" (read from upper left corner). That means this statistics relate to the first 2 weeks of September only, (from Sept 1, 2005 to Sept 14, 1:37 pm)! The website received 141,746 hits within this two week period alone, with a total of 19,140 pages browsed at this website. 1,628 different entities referred visitors to this website. 4387 unique people visited within this 2-week period, with an average of 421 hits per hour and 10,124 hits per day, while browsing 1,367 prempeh.org pages per day. Because these figures defies credulity, we opted to print this out and scan to clear all doubts.

Over here we see the geographic location of prempeh.org's visitors, with the number of hits we've generated from each country between September 1st to 14th. The Top 30 of 66 most popular countries visiting this website have been shown. We see that Ghana-based visitors (4th) surpassed US Educational computers (5th) and United Kindgom visitors. Italy, France, Japan, Netherlands, Germany and Israel are not surprising. US Commercial domains (dot coms) lead the pack, while US Government domains place 17th and US Military place 21st, just ahead of Switzerland. Eastern Europe (e.g., Poland and Czech) and Scandinavian countries are well-represented. Only the Top 30 of 66 countries was shown: Romania, Brazil, Trinidad, United Arab Emirates and several countries are not shown.

Country statistics for November 2005: 29% came from unresolved domains in several countries, including Ghana. 26% came from networks, including mobile phones, which includes all the Prempeh boys checking the site from their mobile phones in their dorms. US dot com domains made up 21%. Norway and the Netherlands were ranked high in November.

Country statistics for October 2005

As can be seen from the top of this printout, "Figures in parenthesis refer to the 7-day period ending Sept 14 2005 at 1:37AM)". That means the 81,933 successful requests and the 433 failed requests pertain to only the one-week period. Imagine what the whole month will be.