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- http://taint.org/2004/04/15/033025a.html — really outdated stats on GMail’s spam filtering accuracy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
Crazy! Somehow or other, this blog has made the
shortlist for “Best Technology Site” at the Irish Web Awards
2008,
up against TechCentral,
Silicon Republic,
Camara, and Robin Blandford’s
ByteSurgery blog. I have no idea how this happened,
given the quality of the sites I’m up against — two of them are even proper news
sites, with journalists! ;)
