Well, I’m curious also: How many people out there are actually reading this site? I know at least one of my sisters is subscribed and a regular reader.* How about the rest of you?

Please leave a comment with this post and tell me if you’re a regular (or even irregular) reader, and if you follow the feed or just pop in from time to time. Or maybe you visit only when I flog a post on Twitter? (Like this one.)

Comment moderation is on, so responses might not show up right away. Anonymous comments are fine if you’re shy or in the witness protection program.

I should confess that I have another appeal for help coming up in the near future. This first one is the easier request, so you’ll want to jump right on it. Then you can see how you feel about the next imposition. Maybe it will be more palatable after warming up here.

So, please, speak! Thank you!

* To be fair, I’m sure both of my sisters are loyal readers. I was just considering playing them against each other.

Why do I use XHTML for this place? Because that’s what WordPress templates were using when I started this site in 2006. I’m sure that’s still the case today, although some searching tells me it doesn’t have to be that way. XHTML seemed like the thing to do three years ago and I was happy to learn about it and conform to the transitional XHTML doctype. I wasn’t so excited about the strict doctype, but figured that was a concern for another day.

(Tangentially, an obscure poem recently made me aware of standards upheaval on the horizon involving the death of XHTML 2 and the emergence of HTML 5. I was surprised — although I shouldn’t have been! — about all of the passion and anger around this topic.)

Anyway, this post isn’t to talk about competing web standards. I only vaguely understand what’s at stake anyway. I just wanted to point out that while I proudly display the W3C validation link on each page here, I have to acknowledge that I fall short of compliance. In order to embed YouTube videos in my pages so that they will show up on the page in my Firefox installation on Ubuntu, and show up in my feed on Google Reader, I’ve made an exception to include (*gasp*) invalid XHTML transitional markup.

No big whoop, really, although it bothers me to claim valid XHTML on every page when I know that isn’t always the case. I’m just posting this so I can link to it from the sidebar as a kind of validation disclaimer.

Related

• WordPress XHTML Validator Plugin

But I did want to mention an administrative detail. What with the busyness and with the prospect of even less opportunity to monitor things this month, I’m turning on comment moderation. Probably only temporarily. There is a good chance that comments will be held for moderation for days and days and days until normal programming returns.

Thanks for your continued patronage. I’ll be back with new material before you know it.

There are some numbers from last year that can serve as the 2006 traffic stats, although they include some traffic from January 2007 since I generated them for the six month anniversary of the site. If you think the 2007 numbers are humble, check out 2006. :-)

Once again, these statistics are provided by Google Analytics.

Visitors

Daily:

On the vertical axis, the middle bar is 500 visitors and the top is 1,000. The jump in February is thanks to Google searches for my “how to” articles about encryption and VNC, and increased image search hits.

Totals:

So, about 400 unique visitors and 600 page views per day.

Where did you come from?

The top ten is the same from August 2006 – July 2007, with some minor changes in position:

Who sent you?

I’m even more dependent on Google this time around: About 83% of my traffic came this way via Google searches.

And a special mention for OpenSourceCommunity.org, which just missed the top 20.

And again I’m much obliged for all the links and referrals!

Most Popular Pages

Here are the top fifteen pages according to pageviews. Not much has changed here. The VNC, Crypto, and Santorini posts continue to be big draws.

These 15 URLs account for 69% of total page views.

Browsers

Pretty much the same story as last time. IE has creeped up and Firefox is down a hair.

Operating Systems

Windows up a bit, GNU/Linux down a notch, and Mac up a smidgen.

Hey, look! We’ve had iPhone, Playstation, and Wii visitors.

Screen Resolutions

Subscribers

Feed subscribers from 22 September 2006 through 8 February 2008:

(FeedBurner doesn’t give you that many options for looking at different data sets.)

That’s All

As ever and always, thank you for your patronage!

Are you a subscriber to this blog, and if so, do you sometimes see duplicate posts in the feed?

To keep an eye on things, I subscribe through Google Reader and the FeedBurner email subscription service. I haven’t seen any duplicates, but loyal reader Paul S. wrote me yesterday to say he sometimes gets multiple posts.

I hope this isn’t a widespread problem, and wonder if it might be related to my posting procedure:

1. Think of a possible post topic.
2. Procrastinate starting on it for days, weeks, or months.
3. Finally, write something.
4. Become anxious to publish it.
5. Publish it before thoroughly proofing it.
6. Quickly make some minor changes immediately after publishing it.
7. Not long after that, wonder if I should have used additional keywords to snag more search engine traffic.
8. Add keywords.
9. Further down the road, add links to later posts in a “Related” section.
10. Make updates as new information and corrections come to light.
11. Sooner or later, recategorize the post.
12. And so on.

Notice that many of these steps involve re-saving the post. I’ve seen where other people have had problems with old posts reappearing in their feeds when updated, but I thought I was safe from this nuisance. (I wonder if it’s more the the fault of the blog software or the feed reader, or maybe it depends?)

Anyway, I’m sorry if my habitual tweaking causes old posts to pop up again in your reader. If you’ve seen this happen and want to let me know which posts you’re seeing “reposted,” that may help troubleshoot the problem.

Photo Attribution

Thanks to Gaeton Lee for sharing “Double red phone boxes” under a free license: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Or maybe just an email from a Google recruiter that doesn’t ultimately lead anywhere, but is still kind of fun to get.

What about you?

Do you have an “about” page for your blog or web site? I hope so, because if I happen across your site, I’d like to learn something about you. Find out what we might have in common or why I might be interested in hearing what you have to say. Without an about page or something that gives me an idea of what you’re about, I’m less likely to hang around and become a repeat visitor. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, so my advice is: if you’re trying to build up a readership, share a thing or two about yourself.

What about that Google recruiter?

I’ve had a fairly lengthy about page since the early days of this web site. Overall, I can’t say how effective it’s been in attracting readers, or if most people really care about the minutiae contained therein, but last summer I did receive an email from a recruiter at Google, I think largely because of the about page. He had found the site by accident and liked some of the articles, and from the about page he found we shared some common interests. Based on what he read, he thought I might be interested in exploring some opportunities at Google.

Wow! Exciting! I’m pretty settled here in Minneapolis, but you have to check out an opportunity with Google. However, the story that comes out of this isn’t so exciting.

We exchanged some emails and spoke on the phone. I think that went well, but I didn’t feel confident in touting my technical abilities very strongly. I do some Java, but I’m not a hardcore Java programmer, and I was intimidated at the prospect of being interviewed for that kind of job at Google. He passed my name and resume on to the open source group in Google, but nothing materialized from that.

It was fun to daydream a little bit about working at Google, but I’m not sure how well that would have worked out for me with where I’m at in my career and with my family. As mentioned, we’re rooted here in Minnesota. I knew the Bay Area real estate market is insane, but taking a closer look I was shocked at how insane it is. A home comparable to ours would cost at least a million dollars there, and probably two. With a young daughter and pets, we’d want to be in a house. And for miscellaneous other reasons, I don’t have any regrets, other than that the story would have been more interesting had I been invited out to Mountain View for a round of interviews. :-)

So?

Why bring all this up now? Because I recently spent some time updating my about page and I wanted to direct your attention there. That’s new content I toiled over, and I didn’t want it to sit there in obscurity. Well, new and updated. And I’m aware that the difference in obscurity between the front page of this site and the about page is a small one. You’ll also find there a hint at possible upcoming changes for Moving to Freedom dot org, which I may (or may not) be writing more about soon.

So: Extra, extra. Read all about it.

I don’t get a lot of legitimate trackbacks, but lately I’m getting an annoying amount of spambacks, so I’m turning them off for now. If you’re one of the few kind folks who occasionally point my way (I’m looking at you, Open Source Community) :-), please consider a “manual” ping in comments.

On the other hand, I’m getting almost no comment spam, which I credit to the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin, previously mentioned in a post about my WordPress Plugin Binge last month.

Bad Behavior is another good tool and currently stops a couple of thousand access attempts per week. Akismet is super, but anything that it catches is something I then have to deal with. I’m not getting all that many spam trackbacks, but the ones I get are still a nuisance. (And several have slipped by Akismet.)

(I hear great things about Spam Karma, but so far I haven’t felt the need to try it out.)

Credits

This is the second time I’ve used this cartoon from the April 2003 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. (This time I modified it more to my liking.) I still don’t know who drew it and I’m still hoping this qualifies as fair use. I much prefer using my own work or the countless freely available images on the Internet for graphics on my posts, but this one just seems so perfect for spam-related entries.

This is the severity of what we’re facing. I’ll bet Spam is irritating the hell out of both Death and Taxes. Death probably wouldn’t even have him. And if Taxes has his way, we’ll all suffer even more when he starts taxing emails to try combating spam. A pox on all three of their houses.

I love working with computers, but sometimes it can be a chore. You want to work on one thing, but other things break and you have to deal with them sooner or later. It can feel like such a burden. Petty distractions from what we really want to do. Do you ever get the feeling we’re building a big technological house of cards?

But it’s always satisfying to fix things and keep the night at bay for a little while longer.

Ethernet

My wife mentioned Friday she couldn’t get to her GMail account, which I mentally filed as a possible transient connection problem. I’ve had a couple of network hiccups lately where I needed to reset my router and a switch. She wasn’t trying when she told me, or trust me I would have immediately dropped everything to address important customer concerns. Things were working on my machine, so I didn’t think much of it. Later I went on that machine to check movie listings and saw that it was out of the loop.

Sparing you the whole tedious troubleshooting story, I determined it was probably a hardware port problem. (I tried a new cable, tried changing ports on the router to one I knew was working, tried booting with a Live CD, tried using a static IP, etc.) I felt some aggravation. This is the new system 76 machine I bought last November. It was either a hardware failure on a ten-month-old machine, or some obscure software problem that appeared out of the blue. (Overall, the machine has been great, and we’ll see what their support has to say.)

I decided to try plugging a spare Ethernet card into the machine, with more than a little trepidation at possible configuration difficulties. Well, I’m happy to report it was simple. GNOME‘s network config tool (System » Administration » Network) made it a no-brainer. The new card was detected; I just had to enable it and then DHCP took care of the rest. I wasn’t all that surprised, given my experience so far in Ubuntu and GNOME, but I guess I have a healthy sense of pessimism. (Let’s call it healthy.)

And this is as it should be. Ethernet should be simple and well-supported by now.

Problem #1 fixed. (Not solved. I don’t have a definitive answer on what was wrong with the original Ethernet port, but spending an hour trying a new card is much preferred to a whole day troubleshooting.)

WordPress Comment Previews

Since setting up my local development WordPress blog in its current home, Zodiac, I’ve had a problem with individual post pages. The HTML would be cut off at the point where the comment section should appear. I didn’t have this problem on Prometheus where I first installed it. I figured out that it was related to my comments preview plugin, but couldn’t figure out why I was now having this problem. It bothered me and made it harder to validate new blog posts, but I let it go for a while.

Maybe inspired by my success in dealing with the Ethernet problem, I took another stab at this. I looked at the Filosofo Comments Preview plugin page. One of the posts in the help forum described a problem similar to mine, and I realized there have been newer versions of the plugin released. Well, duh, let’s see if that helps. And it did. Why didn’t I think of upgrading sooner?

The new 1.0.1 version is much improved and streamlined over the 0.7.8 version I had been using. The preview appears at the bottom of the comment list on the post page now, making a separate preview page (where it’s harder to peek back at what you’re commenting about) unnecessary, and eliminating redundant template pages. There used to be a lot of options and captcha stuff, but this is all gone now, which is fine with me.

Thanks, Il Filosofo. Great work.

Problem #2 fixed.

WordPress Trackbacks

Amy Stephen over at the prestigious (Free and) Open Source Community site is kind enough to link to some of my posts here, and she noticed that trackbacks stopped working about a month ago. I really wanted to fix this and be a good blog community member, but was defeated in my initial troubleshooting attempts. So it went on the shelf for a while. It’s one of those things that I think is important to have working correctly; I take some pride in running this web site and don’t want to be guilty of shoddy workmanship. But on the other hand, movintofreedom.org is kind of an obscure site and doesn’t attract a lot of links. How much time should I invest?

Perhaps further emboldened by having fixed two problems yesterday, I pressed on to look at this one. First, I was hopeful that it could have been a problem with the comments preview plugin, and that the newer version would see things working again. But no.

Back to Google. I found a couple of threads where people mentioned looking at the Apache logs. I had done this previously but went in for another look. I found that my trackback attempt from wordpress.com had gotten an HTTP response 406 “Not Acceptable.” Keying in on that, I searched [wordpress trackbacks 406] and found:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/94402, which led to http://wordpress.org/support/topic/110898 and the suggestion that the problem was with Apache’s mod_security. This can be disabled by adding to the .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>

And that did the trick! What a relief. Now, is this a smart thing to do, disabling mod_security? I previously ran in to problems with this module when it prevented me from posting an entry on my blog that contained the word “Perl.” So I was aware that it could be an annoyance. But I imagined it might be doing some good also.

I followed up with my host, SurpassHosting. I opened up a ticket about this a while back before I knew about the mod_security angle, and they suggested I contact WordPress support first. (At which point I had given up for a while.) Anyway, I followed up on my original ticket and mentioned that disabling mod_security solved the problem, so my guess was that they had configured it to be more aggressive sometime after May 20 which caused pingbacks and trackbacks to break. I asked them what they thought, and wondered if turning it off for my site could be a problem for the whole shared server I’m on. An admin got back to me with:

Mod_Security is an intrusion detection and prevention engine for web applications. Operating as an Apache Web server module, the purpose of Mod_Security is to increase web application security, protecting web applications from attacks.

By adding the entry ” SecFilterEngine Off ” in .htaccess file, all mod_security rules will be disable for your domain. We wouldn’t recommend this because it will help the attackers to exploit the vulnerabilities in any web application you used.

From the log we could find that the post header rules blocking your application. try to disable only the post rules by adding ” SecFilterScanPOST Off ” & ” SecFilterInheritance Off ” in htaccess file. Add the entry ” SecFilterEngine Off ” only if it is absolutely necessary.

So:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterScanPOST Off
SecFilterInheritance Off
</IfModule>

And that worked for my trackback test and for 50% of my pingback tests. That’s 1 out of 2 ping tests. I don’t know what happened to the first one — maybe Akismet swallowed it up. Day to day I don’t see a lot of (or any?) pingback or trackback spam in my Akismet holding pen, so I wonder if it gets removed before we even get to see it.

(Let me put in a final good word for SurpassHosting. I’m really happy with their service. I thought the request to try WordPress first was reasonable and I didn’t feel put off by it. I gave up at the time because I didn’t feel like digging just then. Surpass has been very responsive and helpful whenever I’ve contacted them. Which hasn’t been all that often; they’re pretty good.)

Problem #3 (hopefully) fixed.

WordPress 2.0.11 Update

I woke up today, still pleased with all of my handiwork from yesterday, still relieved to have the burden of tasks undone lifted, only to find that version 2.0.11 of WordPress was released overnight. Man, there is just no rest for the wicked.

But it is a fairly simple upgrade and easy to update the 22 files that had changed from 2.0.10. No ill effects noticed so far. I think it’s awesome that they’re supporting the 2.0.x line until 2010. I have no immediate desire to upgrade and it’s nice that I can count on security fixes for a long time.

WordPress is a super example of free software, I think largely because Matt Mullenweg really gets it. See: Price of Freedom.

Now,

If you notice anything else wrong with the site, please let me know. But not for a week or so, ok?

Related: system76 creative alternative support

On 19 July 2006, I posted my first real entry on this blog, introducing ‘Moving to Freedom’ BETA. (Previous to that there were a few fake test posts, now deleted, some of which still seem to be echoing around in Google, judging by complaints of missing pages I sometimes see in Webmaster Tools.)

I had some idea of what I wanted to do with the site, but was uncertain how I’d go about it or if I could really sustain this thing. I have to say I’m not totally ashamed of that first post nor of my efforts this past year. I think I can do a lot better, but I’m happy with how things have gone and enjoy writing here. Thanks to all of you for reading and emailing me and contributing comments; you make it that much more rewarding.

(And sorry to those who would like to contribute trackbacks but can’t right now. I want to fix that but am choosing not to invest time in troubleshooting at the moment.)

One of my main goals in starting the site was to spur myself on to really get going on moving to free software, and I think that’s worked out great. I’m using Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) as my main home machine right now. Still tons to do, but I’m here, baby! I also wanted to write about free software and help spread the word, both technically and philosophically. I think I’ve been able to do some of that, but this is an area I need to spend more time in.

So, how would you like to see some visitor statistics generated by Google Analytics over the past year? I started using Analytics on 5 August 2006, and here’s what happened from then through 21 July 2007:

Who Visited?

Daily visitors:

On the vertical axis, the middle bar is 400 visitors and the top is 800. You can see things really took off in February, when I wrote a few “how to” articles about encryption and VNC in Ubuntu and Fedora and started getting a lot of visitors from Google searches. The spikes in October are from articles I wrote for Free Software Magazine that received a lot of diggs and pageviews at FSM, with some spillover traffic following links back to here.

Where did you come from?

I’m happy to see pretty good coverage here, with 167 countries/territories represented. World domination can’t be far away. Here’s the top 10:

Who sent you?

Looking at the numbers below, you’ll see it boils down to Google, with 56% of my visitors coming from web search and 20% from image search. That makes Google responsible for 75% of my traffic. Yikes! Thanks, Google. (And please don’t ever forsake me.)

All of the separate image searches, e.g. images.google.co.uk and images.google.ca, show up in Analytics as separate line items. I’ve combined them all here, keeping only images.google.com separate.

Thank you referrers for your referrals. Much appreciated.

What are you reading?

Here are the top twelve pages according to pageviews. A quarter of my traffic goes to a single page: a “how to” for using “remote desktop” in Ubuntu GNU/Linux. Just sneaking in to the top twelve, I’ve been getting traffic from stumbleupon.com to my “about” page, which has boosted its position quite a bit over the past couple of weeks. Finally, thanks to Stacy Cashman for freely sharing travel photos at her site, the Rambling Traveler. My post of her pictures from Santorini, Greece accounts for over 10% of my pageviews.

So it’s the “how to” posts that really drive traffic to this site. I’ve been very happy that some people have found my write-ups useful, and that I can give a little bit back this way. I’d like to do many more of these, but they take so much time of which I have so little right now.

Images have also been popular and I’m glad to freely share them under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Free culture!

What kind of surfboard do you use?

What’s under your hood?

Happily, GNU/Linux is making a strong showing. The percentage really picked up when I started writing the HOWTOs. For a time I was seeing more than 50% of visitors using GNU/Linux, but that dropped off about the time I started getting more Google images traffic.

How big is your window on the world?

This one is interesting to me from a design perspective. With 35% of people at 1024×768, that tells me I should continue to make large graphics in my center column be a maximum of 600 pixels. I try to make things look reasonable at 800×600, but with that being only 3.22% of the user population, I’m not going to stay up nights over it. Of course, many people run their browsers at less than full screen, but I’m not going to give away all my real estate just for those people.

Subscribers

Lastly, here’s FeedBurner’s graph of subscribers since 22 September 2006:

Not to sound ungrateful, but I’d like to see this grow in to the tens of thousands. Is that too much to ask, people?

Thanks!

Hope to see y’all back here next year!

“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.)