daniel.haxx.se

It has been a little over 1500 days since I started this (wordpress’ed) version of my blog. During this time, I’ve posted entries, people have submitted comments and most of all there have been spammers posting “comments”.

During these 1500 days I’ve posted over 600 blog entries. Roughly one entry every 2.5 days. We can see that my visitors aren’t that talkative in comparison as I’ve received some 550 comments in total to my blog posts.

10,000 spam comments have been submitted. That means roughly 20 times more spam than legitimate comments. The world can indeed be a sad place at times!

On May 11th 2000 I posted by first blog entry that is still available online on advogato.org. No surprise but it was curl-related.

The full post was:

I was made aware of the fact that curl is not really dealing well with the directory part of an ftp URL.

I was gonna quote the appropriate text piece from RFC1738 (yes, it is obsoleted by RFC2396 although 1738 has more detailed info about particular protocols like ftp) to someone when I noticed that I had interpreted it wrong when I read it before.

The difference between getting a file relative the login directory or with absolute path. It turns out you have to get a path like ftp.site.com/%2etmp/ if you want have the absolute path “/tmp”. Oh well, I have it support my old way as well even if that isn’t following the RFC just to allow people using that way to be able to use the new one unmodifed…

… which I guess proves that even though lots of time has passed, I still occupy myself with the same kind of hobbies and side- projects…

Seen on my wordpress dashboard before I posted this:

That’s 500 posts since my first post on this blog (August 28 2007).

So I post frequently on this blog, but I’m not a particularly interesting person myself, I’m not really a master at writing and phrasing articles to make them thrilling and irresistible and I basically only deal with really geeky and technical subjects. It means there’s an average of perhaps 200 views per day.

The other day I wrote my multipath tcp post, and someone submitted it to reddit. It turned out to become my most read posting on my blog ever. By far. I think the “views per day” graph looks pretty cool:

Summer time is here in Sweden.

Those of you who keep up with projects I’m involved in, or if you simple read my blog or follow me on twitter, might notice a slight decrease in activity during July or so when I’m going to have vacation and most probably not be at home during a few weeks.

There’s this concept that’s very popular these days. Social networking web sites. I’ve always been intrigued by the six degrees of separation idea so I joined Facebook and I’ve given it a try. Result: yawn.

Of course I realize everything depends on who you are, how your social network works and so on, but for me the Facebook experiment has only proven to me what I already suspected: I’m not “social enough” to care about all my friends’ teeny weeny little issues and expressions. I don’t have many friend added (35 at this particular moment) but already at this low number I get terribly uncomfortable after reading too much personal goings-on. And I’m not interested in everyones’ top-lists, what IKEA furniture they would be or which of the characters in the Muppet Show they resemble the most. I’m not going to use Facebook much until something changes.

Twitter is another one of the more trendy sites and services. This is very chaotic and most of the stuff posted there is utter crap. But there are some interesting people to follow and I do my best at following the tradition and contribute with my junk: My Twitter feed. More seriously I kind of use and view twitter as chatter around the coffee machine at a virtual office. You can select who to listen to. You can say whatever you feel like and the ones who might care could be reading it… The good part – for me of course – being that I can stay all geeky and techy and avoid that facebookish stuff I don’t like. Oh, and if you’re a friend in this manner, do tell me so that I can follow you!

LinkedIn is different. Here’s a site with a different goal and perspective, and keeping in touch with people I’ve been involved with professionally is a totally different matter. This makes a lot of sense to me, and it’s actually proven to pay off – several times. I believe me being a contract developer of course also make me value having a large network to reach out to so that I keep getting myself interesting assignments on a regular basis! My LinkedIn page.

How many readers are there of my blog, being no frills hard core tech oriented and all?

The stats are pretty clear: there is roughly 200 visitors per day on the actual daniel.haxx.se/blog site. The main RSS feed is requested 600 times per day, but the blog entries are also mirrored and read on advogato.org and fnoss.org as well.

Since I started blogging on this site I’ve done 383 posts (before this one), which makes roughly two posts every three days on average.

I’m using one of those fancy Wordpress plugins on this blog that makes use of gravatar for the avatar images that appear next to your name when you post a comment. So if you comment here on daniel.haxx.se and want to see a fancy personal image next to your wise words, skip over to gravatar.com and put up a picture of you that then will be associated with your email address.

This system does not reveal your email address to any outsider, as the avatar is received from their service simply by sending a oneway hash of your address.

This isn’t really anything new here, it’s been like this for a while but I figured I should explain it better to the few who might not have realized this yet…

There’s yet another blog aggregator on the internet now, and this time it’s fnoss.org which includes blogs from a bunch of “Nordic” (I would assume that means people from the northern parts of Europe) people writing about free software and related matters. I am one.

My blog is since previously also seen in the advogato aggregation.

This of course makes my blog get more read but like the rss feeds it also makes it harder for me to know how many readers/visitors I have since it’s all distributed. Not that this number matter very much anyway…

So the big fancy (and often ridiculously stupid) Swedish IT news site idg.se opened up a “blogging” portal, and in there we find an at least semi-interesting open source blog named Open Force. Contrary to linuxworld.idg.se, it doesn’t look exactly like they just suck out all the news from slashdot, linux.com and linux today and translate them to Swedish.

But of course the author (Niklas Andersson) is but a journalist and not an open source contributor, why I fear it may very well keep up with the rest of idg.se anyway.

I’ll try to keep an eye on it and give it the benefit of the doubt for a while.

Update: it should possibly be noted that “Open Force” – despite the name – is written entirely in Swedish.