Six Month Anniversary and Spam Milestone

“Moving to Freedom” is six months old! I haven’t made a huge amount of progress on my goal of moving to free software, but this blog has definitely helped keep my mind on it, and I think I’m going to make it eventually.

The writing of the blog takes a lot of time that could be spent on *doing* free software, but I like it. I’ve gone from craving thousands of readers and attention to just enjoying keeping this thing for what it is: a public journal of my thoughts and efforts on free software and related topics. And sometimes un-related topics.

So, thank you, to all my loyal readers. I hope to still be here in another six months. Let’s take a look at some visitor numbers from the first half year and then take a look at the spam report.

Some 6-month Stats, Courtesy of Google Analytics

• Unique visitors: 6,057 (daily average 34)
• Referrers: Google (35%), Free Software Magazine (27%), Direct (16%)
• Location: USA (55%), UK (9%), Canada (7%), Australia (4%), Germany (2%), India (2%)
• Top three posts: Thomas Jefferson on Ideas (598 unique views), SF short story Picnic (336), Ben Franklin on Patents (292)
• Browsers: Firefox (53%), Internet Explorer (37%), Safari (4%), Opera (3%)
• Operating systems: Windows (74%), GNU/Linux (19%), Mac (8%)
• Connection speed: Cable/DSL (71%), Corporate (14%), Dialup (9%)

The bulk of the Free Software Magazine traffic came over a fairly short period of time when I was writing more entries there and had a couple of articles “dugg.” Since November, Google has been sending me 53% of my visitors. (I want to write more for FSM, but always time is in such short supply.)

Top 500 locations from the “Geo Map Overlay”:

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam

I recently reached 1000 spam caught by Akismet. I was on pace to reach 1K much earlier, but installing the Bad Behavior plugin back in November helped slow the influx down. It blocks about 400 access attempts per week.

Spam can be such a drain. It just irks me that it actually works enough to make it worthwhile for some lowlife scumbags. The attempts at disguising it are so pathetic, for which I guess we should be thankful: “Hi! Great site with interesting design.” Followed by links for porn, v1agra, phentermine, and whatnot.

Akismet does a great job, although unfortunately one of my best customers is regularly caught by it. Apparently some IP ranges are blocked altogether, and if it is for a large ISP then tough luck for its customers. Maybe that helps cut down on large swaths of spam if an ISP doesn’t do a good job of controlling the plague, but it catches very helpful and non-spammy comments like one I received yesterday. Apologies to the victims of this behavior, but I’ll continue to use Akismet to filter out all the raw sewage.

The cartoon that goes with this post illustrates the severity of the spam problem. It has joined death and taxes as the only certain things in life. (The image is from the April 2003 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. I don’t know who owns the copyright, but I’m posting it here as–what I hope is–fair use.)