Category: observations

Tim Bray: ongoing · Aggregator Market Share (1):

In reply to one of my Browser Market Share postings, Ian Brown wrote to point out that with an increasing portion of the traffic going through newsreaders, it might be interesting to do some breakdown on that. So I did.

Here’s my top ten:
3040 37.7% (unrecognized)
2996 37.2% Ocelli
759 9.4% msnbot
189 2.3% Firefox
168 2.1% Bloglines (1 subscribers)
140 1.7% ShopWiki
124 1.5% w3search
94 1.2% NetNewsWire
82 1.0% NewsGatorOnline
59 0.7% Opera
Not sure that tells me all that much (unrecognized as the top vote-getter is bad enough, and I have never heard of the next one either).

Ocelli Information Page (2):

Ocelli is a Web crawler owned and operated by GlobalSpec®, the leading specialized search engine and information resource for the engineering community. Ocelli’s mission is to find and index web pages for The Engineering Websm from GlobalSpec, a unique slice of the World Wide Web focusing solely on engineering and technical content.

So I guess I have some relevant material here, but they promise (threaten?) that if they don’t find engineering-related content, the robot won’t return. As the wise man said of the Thermos, how does it know?

I guess they can tell if people link to the content they gather and use that for ranking/relevance.

Below the fold, the rest of the story for the day so far (I roll logs each night).
Continue reading “next gen web stats”

I tried using Staticize [Photo Matt » Staticize 2.5 (124)] but it seems ecto doesn’t like it.

What does Staticize Reloaded do? It is a highly advanced caching engine that dynamically and automatically caches pages on your site that need to be cached, when they need to be cached.

Something in the handshake seems to be off (looks like Staticize passes back data on how well it worked and ecto barfs on it).

So, for now, I have to be content with 4+ second page load times, instead of 2.5 seconds . . .

<update> One possible fix is to turn off the downloading of entries in Preferences->Recent Entries, but it also messes up the RSS feed (entries disappear). I’ll do without it for now.

Crooked Timber is Down

Our transition to WordPress (204718) radically increased our database usage. Then we got a bit of an uptick in traffic on top of that and our host provider (1538) pulled the plug on us because we were gobbling up a lot of resources that needed to be shared. I have to say I think they were a bit peremptory about it. But in any event it seems we’re going to have to get a dedicated server now. Bit more pricey. Hopefully we’ll turn this around quickly and be back online soon.

Posted March 17, 2005 04:26 PM

You’d think Dreamhost would have a little more clue about capacity planning and the products they support — ie, how much load will this add to our infrastructure? when all the the html pages are parsed as php with 15-20 queries per page, can we handle that? How close are we to the threshold where we have to make some changes? — to avoid something like this. It’s a black-eye for them more than for the CT crew.

The nice people at Adagio will show some love to people who link to them.


If I had more PageRank, I could see myself getting one of these cool pots. But as near as I can tell, I don’t make the cut.

I have been trying to drink more green tea lately: it makes a nice break — not too heavy, a little warming.

gpshewandotcom » Blog Archive » Ecto 2.2.4 and WordPress 1.5:

I’ve had some problems posting to WordPress from Ecto. Not showstoppers, just annoyances really. Whenever I tried to post something new, or edit an existing post I had the following error thrown back at me:

Method “metaWeblog.editPost” produced a server error: “Sorry, your entry could not be edited. Something wrong happened.”

Me, too. This took a couple of days to show up, for some reason. Dunno why.

Anyway, there is a patch, but for some reason, it doesn’t install. Gary was gracious enough to send his patched functions-post.php file, and if all goes well, this post will go up without that error.

The patch that Gary used was for another bug, it looks like.

Continue reading “ecto and WP at loggerheads”

Google’s new ToS: Now you can say how much you make:

Cory Doctorow: Glenn sez, “Google updated its AdSense TOS and now lets its affiliates discuss what they make:

You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without Google’s prior written consent. ‘Google Confidential Information’ includes without limitation: (a) all Google software, technology, programming, specifications, materials, guidelines and documentation relating to the Program; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to You by Google; and (c) any other information designated in writing by Google as ‘Confidential’ or an equivalent designation. However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google&acirc;’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program.

(Thanks, Glenn!)

Trouble is, I’m not sure I want anyone to know how anemic my revenue stream trickle is.
Continue reading “AdSense’s new transparency”

Pharm Policy:

A similar problem holds for secure email. I could digitally sign my outgoing email, but this wouldn’t do much to prevent forged messages in practice. A forged message would of course be unsigned, but unless unsigned messages were rare, nobody would be taken aback on seeing one. But if almost all messages were digitally signed, than an unsigned message would be rare enough to arouse suspicion, and might trigger a prominent warning from the user’s email program.

Is any application vendor interested in pushing this as a strategy? What if you could simply block all unauthenticated email and be assured being spam-free?

Now playing: Lost in the Supermarket by The Clash from the album “London Calling” | Get it (2)

I had been led to believe the Apple vs Think Secret, et al case was about the release of information about the iPod Shuffle and the Mac Mini. Coming on the eve (or near enough) of MacWorld, I didn’t see the harm.

The New York Times > Technology > Apple Can Demand Names of Bloggers, Judge Says:

The ruling came in the three-month-old lawsuit brought by Apple against the unnamed individuals, presumably Apple employees, who reportedly leaked information about new music software, code-named Asteroid, which the company said constituted a trade secret. Under California law, divulging trade secrets is subject to civil and criminal penalties.

[ . . . ]

Judge Kleinberg acknowledged that the public had a huge appetite for news about Apple, but said that “unlike the whistle-blower who discloses a health, safety or welfare hazard affecting all, or the government employee who reveals mismanagement or worse by our public officials,” the Web sites are “doing nothing more than feeding the public’s insatiable desire for information.”

Well, yeah, welcome to the Internets, the world’s largest back fence . . .

I still have a hard time getting beyond my (apparently old school) ideas about reporting/journalism as a potentially adversarial relationship: it’s a good reporter’s job to find a source of good information (good, adj. what people want) and the target company’s responsibility to close up leaks, however it cares to.
Continue reading “more to this than I realized”

Shiny.

Easy to upgrade, and it looks like there are a lot more features than I am likely to use right away.

50,000 users had grabbed copies as of March 1? Impressive.

It looks good: the default layout (Kubrick) is nice and clean, and the admin interface looks very impressive. I like the Dashboard, with it’s links to pages hosted within the WP development community, as well as the high-level summary of activity.

Looks like a user-focused project . . . like they have really been listening.