Five years ago, on 15 May 2001, I started writing this weblog.
Subject matter started with a forward of something odd from the Forteana list
– ‘Why Finns are sick of illnesses named after
them’. In terms of subject matter, I started the weblog to reduce the amount of
forwards I was passing on by email to other groups — hence the preponderance
of forteana posts early on.
Nowadays, by contrast, I try to write original ramblings^Wresearch for the main part of the site, and the
occasional “fresh bits” I unearth elsewhere are kept separate, posted to the link-blog at
del.icio.us/jm.
However, the real reason I started the thing was to act as an experiment in
using WebMake as a blog platform — at least, that
was the excuse. It worked quite successfully, for what it’s worth — but in
mid-August 2005, I eventually
accepted that there weren’t enough hours in the day to maintain a weblogging
CMS, and its templates, as well as everything else, and that I didn’t really
need to test WebMake’s abilities any more, and switched to
WordPress. I’m glad I did; WP is a great piece of
software.
So what’s been the biggest hit on taint.org, by far? Here it is:
http://taint.org/xfer/2004/kittens.jpg . Lots and lots of Google Image
referrers, MySpace hotlinkers, etc. etc. ;) It’s a top hit for a GIS search
for [kittens], I think.
Random stats, based on April’s logs:
- About 81247 hits were received during April to the RSS 2.0 feed (the
default), 9921 to the Atom feed, and 7795 for the RSS 1.0 rendering. That
indicates that format-wars-wise, people just use the default. ;)
- Assuming the RSS reader apps average out to 1 HTTP GET every 30 mins (as
Bloglines and Apple’s reader do), that means there are somewhere around
(98963 / (30 * 24 * 2)) = 68 subscribers.
- In terms of the old style browser-using readership — there were 44926 hits
on the front page using web browsers.
- AWStats claims 2700 visits per day, from around 33000 visitors per month. I find the latter figure hard to believe.
After the front page and the feeds, the scraped RSS feeds at
http://taint.org/scraped/ come second,
Threadless beating out Perry Bible
Fellowship by a little bit.
Top stories last month, based on hits:
- http://taint.org/2006/04/29/230814a.html — Single-Letter Google Hits
- http://taint.org/2006/01/20/220239a.html — the SweetheartsConnection.com Scam (still attracting comments from scammees!)
- http://taint.org/2004/04/15/033025a.html — really outdated stats on GMail’s spam filtering accuracy
- http://taint.org/2006/04/20/213624a.html — Automatically Invoking screen(1) on Remote Logins
- http://taint.org/2006/04/15/134751a.html — Google Calendar
- http://taint.org/2006/04/03/121837a.html — A Gotcha With perl’s “each()”
- http://taint.org/2005/08/06/024026a.html — The Life of a SpamAssassin Rule
- http://taint.org/2006/04/21/133432a.html — Phishing and Inept Banks
- http://taint.org/2006/04/06/210519a.html — RSS Feeds for Events in Dublin
- http://taint.org/2006/04/13/140841a.html — BT DSL’s Daily Disconnects
Technorati says there are 514 links from 105
sites. I still don’t
know what the hell that means. ;)
Update: I’ve remembered that, before I started blogging at taint.org, I kept a diary at Advogato, which dates all the way back to March 2000!
Also, here are some pretty graphs from the graph-top-referers script:
The several slashdottings and a Boing Boinging are quite clear ;)
Tags: anniversary, blogging, blogs, forteana, meta, taint.org, webmake
Somehow or other, I seem to have won the 2009 Irish Blog Award for Best Technology Blog/Blogger!
To be honest, for the last year I haven’t been spending as much time on the blog as before, due mainly to a rather compelling distraction, so I’m doubly grateful for winning.
