Tag Archives: Blogging

This post was not bought

coinsAt times I post blog articles that get the view counter go up to and beyond 50,000 views. This puts me in a position where I get offers from companies to mention them or to “cooperate” on further blog posts that would somehow push their agenda or businesses.

I also get the more simple offers of adding random ads or “text only information” on specific individual pages on my sites that some SEO person out there figured out could potentially attract audience that search for specific terms.

I’ve even gotten offers from a company to sell off my server logs. Allegedly to help them work on anti-fraud so possibly for a good cause, but still…

This is by no counts a “big” blog or site, yet I get a steady stream of individuals and companies offering me money to give up a piece of my soul. I can only imagine what more popular sites get and it is clear that someone with a less strict standpoint than mine could easily make an extra income that way.

I turn down all those examples of “easy money”.

I want to be able to look you, my dear readers, straight in the eyes when I say that what’s written here are my own words and the opinions revealed are my own – even if of course you may not agree with me and I may do mistakes and be completely wrong at times or even many times. You can rest assured that I did the mistakes on my own and I was not paid by anyone to do them.

I’ve also removed ads from most of my sites and I don’t run external analytic scripts, minimizing the privacy intrusions and optimizing the contents: the stuff downloaded from my sites are what your browser needs to render the page. Not heaps of useless crap to show ads or to help anyone track you (in order to show more targeted ads).

I don’t judge others’ actions based on how I decide to run my blog. I’m in a fortunate position to take this stand, I realize that.

Still biased of course

This all said, I’m still employed by a company (Mozilla) that pays my salary and I work on several projects that are dear to me so of course I will show bias to some subjects. I don’t claim to have an objective view on things and I don’t even try to have that. When I write posts here, they come colored by my background and by what I am.

Blog refresh

Dear reader,

If you ever visited my blog in the past and you see this, you should’ve noticed a pretty significant difference in appearance that happened the other day here.

When I kicked off my blog here on the site back in August 2007 and moved my blogging from advogato to self-host, I installed WordPress and I’ve been happy with it since then from a usability stand-point. I crafted a look based on an existing theme and left it at that.

Over time, WordPress has had its hefty amount of security problems over and over again and I’ve also suffered from them myself a couple of times, and a few times I ended up patching it manually more than once. At one point when I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to the latest version it didn’t work to upgrade anymore and I postpone it for later.

Time passed, I tried again without success and then more time passed.

I finally fixed the issues I had with upgrading. With a series of manual fiddling I finally managed to upgrade to the latest WordPress and when doing so my old theme was considered broken/incompatible so I threw that out and started fresh with a new theme. This new one is based on one of the simple default ones WordPress ships for free. I’ve mostly just made it slightly wider and edited the looks somewhat. I don’t need fancy. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up with WordPress better this time.

Additionally, I added a captcha that now forces users to solve an easy math problem to submit anything to the blog to help me fight spam, and perhaps even more to solve a problem I have with spambots creating new users. I removed over 3300 users yesterday that never posted anything that has been accepted.

Enjoy.  Now back to our regular programming!

a 20 to 1 spam to comment ratio

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! 🙁

11 years of me

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…

A view of a popular post

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:

visitor graph from daniel.haxx.se/blog

Not social enough

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.

You and the 199 others

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.

Avatars by gravatar

Daniel's gravatar avatar imageI’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…