I’m working on something non-blog related which will consume most of my cycles this morning and possibly the afternoon as well. Feel free to browse the archives: there’s bound to be stuff there you haven’t seen before.
June 20, 2012
May 10, 2012
Eight years of blogging
In the fast-paced world of blogging, where sites go dark in mere weeks or months, a blog reaching the venerable age of eight is a bit of an achievement (if only of persistence). Why do I still do it? Damned if I know … but if I haven’t published at least a few posts by mid-morning I feel like I’m slacking. It’s certainly not for the fame or fortune: it’s probably harder to become rich and famous through blogging than in many other fields, but to compensate it requires less talent.
Eight years ago, a fellow writer set up his own blog and invited me to set up my own blog on his site. Jon stopped blogging (far too soon, in my opinion), but allowed me to maintain my blog on his site for over five years and still graciously hosts the archives from that period. I probably wrote more and quoted less in the early days, but it’s now hard to remember what I did online before I became a blogger.
I did a retrospective round-up of the first year for the 2010 anniversary, and I collected the “best of 2005” for last year’s anniversary post. I guess this year requires a look at what I posted in 2006 (and may still have some relevance or interest):
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January 3, 2012
Blog statistics for non-statisticians
I’m not a big stats nerd — being mathematically challenged means I’m less willing to devote time to things that require extra math. However, most if not all bloggers do care about a few statistical measurements: how many people are visiting their blogs. I’m no exception to that rule.
I don’t have a complete series of annual numbers, as the tools under MovableType (the old site) and WordPress (the current site) don’t provide quite the same slices of data. I installed SiteMeter on the old site a couple of months after I started blogging and it shows 414,416 unique visits from 17 August, 2004 to today (and it still gets around 100 visits per day, even though I haven’t been posting there for more than two years).
Since I switched to the current site the traffic has been going up, although the big blogs don’t have to worry that I’m drawing too much of their readership:
- 2009: 58,121 unique visits, 131,825 hits (site went live in July, stats date from mid-August)
- 2010: 328,374 unique visits, 825,381 hits
- 2011: 413,463 unique visits, 1,118,497 hits
That concludes our occasional dip into the statistics. Thanks for coming by, and especially thanks to folks that link to my blog.
Update: I happened across this bit from July, 2009 on the old blog that still seems relevant:
I’m not sure why I’ve been blogging for five years … it’s certainly not the money, booze, and groupies! I’ve thought about stepping away from the keyboard every now and again, but I don’t actually write as much as I once did, so large chunks of my “blogging” time are actually copy-paste-and-code sessions, rather than writing.
The blogroll has certainly diminished in importance over the last couple of years. The Red Ensign bloggers, my primary affiliation, has diminished to about a dozen active blogs, of whom perhaps 5-6 produce the vast majority of posts. Other blogrolls I’m on have similar profiles of activity. Blogrolls don’t matter compared to when I first started blogging back in 2004.
I remember worrying about SiteMeter and the Ecosystem, as they showed me what my visitors were reading, where they came from and where they went. Time has also not been kind to the ease of gathering that sort of information, as more readers come in from search engine results, RSS feeds, and goodness knows what other channels. If/when I move the blog over to the new site, I may not bother including the links for those tools. They’re no longer all that useful or informative.
I do miss the cameraderie of the early blogging years … but as more of the early blogs go dark, the replacements are less likely to be bloggers and more likely to be Twitterers, Facebookers, YouTubers, Farkers, Slashdotters, and all the other Web 2.0/New Media options that are now available. What was that old expression about the only constant being change?
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December 12, 2011
Next up for the weekly “This week in Guild Wars 2” posting
I’ve been posting a once-a-week Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2 summary for most of this year, but this week’s entry will probably be a bit different: I’ve been invited to take over the regular “Community Roundup” column at GuildMag. This will be a super-set of the information I normally provide in the “This week in Guild Wars 2” posting. I don’t know if I’ll still post a shorter version here or if I’ll just link to the new column at GuildMag (it’ll probably depend on how much extra work will be required to post in multiple places).
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November 25, 2011
This explains why Google dropped out of my “referer site” log
John Leyden explains how a change in the way Google handled search requests was reflected in my blog’s referer log by Bing suddenly becoming the top search engine for folks visiting Quotulatiousness:
Google made secure search the default option for logged in users last month — primarily for privacy protection reasons. But the move has had the beneficial side-effect of making life for difficult for fraudsters seeking to manipulate search engine rankings in order to promote scam sites, according to security researchers.
Users signed into Google were offered the ability to send search queries over secure (https) connections last month. This meant that search queries sent while using insecure networks, such as Wi-Fi hotspots, are no longer visible (and easily captured) by other users on the same network.
However Google also made a second (under-reported) change last month by omitting the search terms used to reach websites from the HTTP referrer header, where secure search is used. The approach means it has become harder for legitimate websites to see the search terms surfers fed through Google before reaching their website, making it harder for site to optimise or tune their content without using Google’s analytics service.
I’d assumed that there had been some kind of change in the way Google was handling searches, because even though Google pretty much disappeared from my logs (having been the #1 referring site forever), the volume of traffic remained about the same.
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August 31, 2011
That was weird
I’d posted a short entry at lunch time, but hadn’t refreshed the main page to show the new article. When I tried refreshing the page a couple of minutes ago, as my blog page loaded, it was redirected to blogrolling.com, which appears to be an abandoned site (that is, it’s up for sale). I still had a couple of links to two blogrolls that used to be hosted at that site, so fixing it was as easy as commenting out the links . . . but it’s weird that just showing a link allows that link to redirect the linking page. I haven’t seen that before.
My apologies to anyone who tried loading the page over the last hour or two!
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August 8, 2011
Another technical problem? Must be a day with a “y” in it
Last week, you’ll recall that I was bewailing the failings of the Microsoft Windows Easy Transfer utility. Having given up on that and managed the transfer of files by the traditional tools of Brute Force and Ignorance (BF&ITM), I thought I was done.
All the necessary files now reside on the new laptop, and the old laptop has been dedicated to a new life as a genealogy workstation for Elizabeth. Today’s problem was network connectivity.
But not just network connectivity for the laptop, as I discovered when I tried turning on my desktop machine a little while ago.
At some point while we were away, the wireless router seems to have had some hiccoughs, because now it seems to imagine that it’s actually two separate machines. When I tried to connect to the internet this morning (from the new laptop), it insisted that I was connected to both a public network and our own named private network. But because it thought the public network was the primary, it refused to actually interact with our named network. It took several iterations of running diagnostics and power-cycling the router before the phantom “public” network disappeared and I was able to connect to the internet normally.
This evening, I had a similar problem with my desktop, except that my desktop machine is connected by ethernet cable, not wireless. That phantom “public” network re-appeared, and nothing I could do would get rid of it. The physical connections were fine, but nothing could persuade my desktop that it actually had a connection to the router and it was unable to get an IP address.
Having just bought a new laptop, I’m hoping that these symptoms do not imply that I need to also buy a new router, as you can imagine.
August 6, 2011
Back from vacation . . . posting will eventually resume a more normal pattern
To my mild surprise, spam comments only accumulated at the usual rate, so it wasn’t a huge problem to wade through them to ensure that there weren’t any real people’s comments mis-marked as spam. The vacation was great — but too short — and we had lots of low-key fun.
Now, I’ve got all the stuff to catch up on that happened last week, so blog posts will happen, just delayed a bit by all the other things that need catching up.
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August 1, 2011
Back to the drawing board
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been trying to use Microsoft’s Windows Easy Transfer utility to move 100Gb of files and settings from my old laptop to the new one, but between technical glitches and thunderstorms, it still hasn’t completely worked. When the initial estimate ballooned up from a few hours to nearly two days, I started to suspect things were not going to go according to the script . . .
Today’s plan is to do it in two stages: back up the old machine’s files to the NAS, then install the files from the NAS to the new laptop.
July 31, 2011
Posting will be sporadic this week
I’m on vacation, which means I’m much less likely to be near a computer. I’ll probably post a few items, but expect it to be fairly quiet here for the coming week.
July 17, 2011
Testing a new WordPress plug-in
I’ve installed a new WordPress plug-in to display Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ buttons at the bottom of individual posts (not on the main page). If you have any problems using them, please let me know.
Update, 8 August: I had to turn it off, as it was interfering with the stylesheet for both comments and extended entries. In both cases, whatever it was doing was reducing the space between paragraphs to the same as the ordinary inter-line spacing, and treating bulleted lists as if they were just ordinary paragraphs.
Nice idea, needs either a better (less intrusive) implementation, or should only be used by bloggers who know much more about the innards of stylesheets than I do.
June 5, 2011
Typical weekend weather disrupts blogging schedule
I’d planned to have a normal slate of Saturday morning blog posts up by the time I headed out for the day, but a series of thunderstorms had a conflicting plan for my time. Oh, well, in the spirit of fairness, I’ll refund all subscribers a full day’s credit. You’ll see the credit show up on your next bill.
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May 10, 2011
Seventh anniversary at Quotulatiousness
Seven years ago, after being an avid reader of other peoples’ blogs for quite some time I was given the opportunity to have my own blog. Jon, a co-worker of mine (and fellow blog reader) had set up a MovableType website and started blogging. He offered me a free blog on his site. Free being a very good price (this was long before the “free” blogging sites were worth using), I leaped at the opportunity. Jon called his blog Blogulaciousness, and I named mine as a joking reference to his. He gave up on blogging after a while, but I didn’t want to change the name of the blog, so I’ve stuck with a name that is purely an inside joke.
I did a round-up of the first year of blog posts here. Rather than repost that, I’ll do a round-up of the second year of blog posts. I have no particular criteria for which posts I think are worth remembering, so expect the grab bag that this collection certainly is:
January 2005
- Website registration follies — 2005-01-01
- Tales of Canadian retail — 2005-01-03
- Woodworking as a hobby — 2005-01-03
- Liberal mindset — 2005-01-18
- Search engines — 2005-01-19
- Bosworth Field — 2005-01-22
- Child safety — 2005-01-24
- Wine tasting — 2005-01-25
February 2005
- Packrat or public nuisance? — 2005-02-03
- Hillier scraps blueprint — 2005-02-07
- There ought to be a law — 2005-02-07
- Fisking Rifkin — 2005-02-08
- Vikings sold, pending league approval — 2005-02-16
- Visiting the Grange winery — 2005-02-21
- Moss to the Raiders — 2005-02-23
- Equal Pay? — 2005-02-28
March 2005
- The curse of Docco (a tribute, of sorts, to the late Hunter S. Thompson) — 2005-03-01
- The military MBA — 2005-03-04
- Back from New Orleans — 2005-03-20
- Trip report, part one — 2005-03-22
- Trip report, part two — 2005-03-26
- Serpent Mounds — 2005-03-28
- Trip report, part three — 2005-03-31
April 2005
- Yesterday’s trivia — 2005-04-10
- Canada’s Militia — 2005-04-11
- Helicopter woes — 2005-04-12
- Meetings, bloody meetings (with cameo appearance by occasional commenter Chris Greaves) — 2005-04-13
- Contrarian views — 2005-04-14
- Regulation and the economy — 2005-04-15
- Fear and Loathing in TechWriterWorld — 2005-04-18
- 2005 NFL Draft preview — 2005-04-21 (follow-up post here for one of the worst draft classes in Minnesota team history).
- “Checkers” for the 21st Century (can’t believe I left that mistake in the headline) — 2005-04-22
May 2005
- Computer meltdown — 2005-05-01
- So much to investigate, so little time — 2005-05-03
- Blogfight! Blogfight! (where we bid an unexpected farewell to Blogulaciousness) — 2005-05-03
- Monster truck action on suburban street! — 2005-05-05
- The sad state of Canada’s armed forces — 2005-05-06
- Fencing . . . and not with swords — 2005-05-08
- Fighting historical revisionism — 2005-05-13
- This could be the first blog to get an ASBO against it — 2005-05-19
- Another collossal waste of time, incoming — 2005-05-
- Trying to encourage people to save more — 2005-05-24
- Converting semi-auto to full-auto — 2005-05-27
June 2005
- Tag! It’s my turn — 2005-06-06
- Boring, geeky army stuff — 2005-06-09
- Poverty in Ontario — 2005-06-10
- A wet day for soccer — 2005-06-14
- Not the same as it ever was — 2005-06-16
- The identity theft epidemic — 2005-06-20
- Not fitting anywhere on the left-right spectrum — 2005-06-22
- Steve H. expounds on Nerdness. Nerditude? Nerdulaciousness? — 2005-06-26
- Scotland bans the claymore . . . again — 2005-06-29
July 2005
- SGML tagging is bad for your mental health — 2005-07-06
- Knopfler in Toronto — 2005-07-06
- A message from an alternate reality — 2005-07-08
- Sales taxes and basic arithmetic — 2005-07-09
- Next right abrogated: freedom from unreasonable search and seizure — 2005-07-22
- More on the Diane Schroer case — 2005-07-26
August 2005
- Offensensitivity again — 2005-08-05
- The Ghost of a Conscience — 2005-08-05
- Pushing back the encroachment of the state — 2005-08-12
- Steve Stirling interview — 2005-08-12
- This is not the way to fight terrorism — 2005-08-13
- Stormblogging — 2005-08-19
- Advance preview of the next health act — 2005-08-25
- News coverage of the aftermath of Katrina — 2005-08-31
September 2005
- Jane Galt Praises Price Gougers — 2005-09-01
- The name game, wine version — 2005-09-16
- Your linear art offends my religious sensibilities! — 2005-09-19
- The next NASA funding boondoggle — 2005-09-20
- Tom Wark on amateur wine reviews — 2005-09-22
- Synchronicity — 2005-09-28
- Vindicated! — 2005-09-30
October 2005
- Serenity — 2005-10-04
- Work Psychosis . . . a micro case study — 2005-10-12
- Courtesy in blogdom — 2005-10-13
- Is Amtrak headed for the junkyard? — 2005-10-18
- Municipal taxes in Ontario — 2005-10-19
- Red Ensign Standard, Mark XXX — 2005-10-24
- Royal Navy ship names — 2005-10-27
November 2005
- Photoblogging Algonquin Park — 2005-11-05
- Offensensitivity, Registry Office style — 2005-11-10
- When “help” is actually “extended harm” — 2005-11-11
- Pre-woodworking exercise — 2005-11-13
- Lee Valley Customer Service, in praise of — 2005-11-17
- No wonder GM is in trouble — 2005-11-24
- Wine Tour 0: Jon attempts to liveblog my wine tour — 2005-11-30
December 2005
- Preserving the past — 2005-12-06
- “Your papers, please.” — 2005-12-08
- Red Ensign Standard 33 — 2005-12-12
- Why Paul Martin is sounding desperate — 2005-12-19
- Gag laws and the freedom of speech — 2005-12-23
I’m still one of the laziest bloggers on the planet, but I’m still blogging after late middle-age in blog-years (most blogs start up with a few quick posts, then fade out with less and less frequent “sorry for not updating recently” posts).
Thanks again to Jon, both for getting me started in blogging, and for continuing to host my archives from the first five years.
April 16, 2011
Sorry for the lack of blogging
Sorry for the lack of blogging today: just after I posted the Guild Wars 2 round-up, we had a power outage that lasted a few hours. By the time the power came back on, I didn’t get any opportunity to get back to the blog. Normal blogging will resume on Sunday (I hope).
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February 26, 2011
Spammers getting more clever
I’ve noticed a significant shift in the spam comments being posted to Quotulatiousness lately: they’re less likely to be link-stuffed pharmaceutical spam and more likely to resemble real comments. I also notice that lots of the spam showing up now comes from .pl domains.
Just over the last 24 hours, there have been more than a dozen spam comments that almost qualified as real: they’re actually related to the blog post, they’re relatively well written, and they aren’t studded with links. If they’d arrived one at a time, I might well have approved them, but because they arrive in batches the pattern becomes too obvious to ignore:
- They all have real-sounding user names, but the email addresses are all to the same domain.
- They’re all from the same IP address.
- They all have a link to something that looks remarkably like a commercial site, rather than a personal one.
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