Back in December of 2005 I added Google Adsense features to my site. As I said back then, I have no illusions of actually making money off of Adsense. Starting year three, my “a buck or two a month” estimate is holding remarkably true. I’m up to about $45 sitting in the Google coffers, waiting to reach $100 so I can claim my riches.

More interesting to me is the ebb and flow of statistics and traffic relating to my site. Back when I started with Adsense, a good day on my site was about 50 page impressions: now a good day is about 500 page impressions, and a “slow” day is about 150. So traffic is up, but arguably the number and variety of people exploring the web is also up.

But why do people come to my web site? I don’t do anything to “advertise” it, and I break one of the cardinal rules of building an audience for your blog: my topics are all over the map. A good blog is one that picks a specific topic and sticks to it: I, on the other hand, blog about whatever interests me at the moment. Yes, that means much of what you see here is related to technology (computers), computer games, and science. But there are personal rants here as well, and boring stuff about things that have happened around the house.

I have no desire to “restrict” my posting to specific topics, but I think I should do some work to better structure the site by category. I imagine it would be nice for folks interested in my, say, computer hardware, to have a well defined button to push to see that content. That stuff is actually pretty easy to corral here on this site with my current categories, but I don’t think everyone knows how to use those- expect me to make some changes there in the next year to make this easier. I’ll probably be using those buttons at the top of this page for this purpose: my challenge right now is figuring out what categories make the most sense for my visitors.

Why is this a problem? Well, if I look at my Google stats and my own local statistics software, the top handful of “hits” to my site based on keyword searches are:

• Mary Carey
• Teresa Noreen
• Asus M2R23 motherboard problems
• Battlefield 2142 vista
• exploding biceps

Well… I’m not partial to setting up categories based around “sexy women” or “exploding biceps”. And the really odd thing is: I have literally dozens of posts on computer hardware and games, and only a couple of posts regarding models / sexy women, yet somehow those posts drive more traffic than everything else combined. So I’ll have to give this some thought… maybe I need a “Girls Geeks Lust after” page?

The exploding biceps thing, though…that really freaks me out.

P.S.: your challenge for the day is to find the exploding biceps post on this site…

P.P.S: your other challenge is to post a comment on this thread telling me how you found this site, and what might make it easier to find what you want. My guess is, I’ll get zero comments on this topic, since everyone is here looking for partially-clothed women and exploding biceps…

I run several websites off of my one Linux server sitting here in my house.  I try to keep it reasonably secure: it’s behind a firewall with a limited number of open ports, I try to keep my software somewhat up to date, and I install code to intercept blatant attempts to spam or attack my site.

Unfortunately, I do maintain my server in my spare time, and I don’t put a ton of effort into it.  I realized a couple of years ago that my PHPNuke based sites were vulnerable.  The code itself is full of security holes, and is famous for providing numerous avenues of attack…particularly via SQL injection. 

In the past five years, my site or my server has been compromised several times.  Every incident started with SQL injection via one of my PHPNuke sites.  A few years ago, I migrated my main blog to WordPress, and it has been rock solid ever since…but the other sites are still vulnerable. 

During the worst such occurrence, the attackers actually managed to use this method to install a piece of software that allowed them to launch a terminal session.  From there, they successfully used my server for several days to send spam emails.  It was intriguing to follow their trail 72 hours after the fact and see what they had done.

My server is a lot more secure now than it was in 2003 when that last major attack occurred.  But my system is constantly being probed for vulnerabilities.  The latest intrusion was about two weeks ago- again, via PHPNuke and SQL injection.  I had that vector basically plugged for a couple of years, but apparently an update to PHPNuke unlocked the door just enough to permit a relatively minor intrusion.  This time, the bad guys installed a single pixel iFrame in the footer of one of my websites that attempted to launch a browser trojan impacting the visitor’s machine.  I cleaned it out within 24 hours of it being installed, and re-applied patches to PHPNuke that supposedly close the door once again. 

Since that day, my server has been brought to its knees three times in a row by what, based on the limited information I can gather, appears to be a very crude denial of service attack.  It could just be a coincidence, and I certainly could be reading the evidence incorrectly.  But it does make me wonder: why would someone put any effort into trying to compromise my tiny little server?  What is the point? 

Like the subject for this post says, the Internet is a weird place.

I’ve added a new feature to my blog.  If you look on the right side, you’ll notice a “Now Reading” section.  You can also just click this link to go to the main summary page.

I’m using Rob Miller’s “Now Reading” Wordpress plugin.  I even sent him $20 via Paypal- the plugin works and so far at least does everything I wanted- Thank you, Rob!  The data itself is apparently stored in mySQL, and you can add new fields (key-value pairs) to add more data beyond the basics.

I’ve loaded in 20 or so books that I’ve read in the last year.  This isn’t anything close to the full list of books I’ve read in the last 12 months- instead, I just looked over at the nearest bookshelf (where I keep the most recent ones) and read off the titles I could see.  Since the top shelf it two layers deep, that means even that method is missing quite a few titles.  I think I read probably forty books a year, give or take, with an average of 500 pages.  I’m going to try to keep track of what I’m reading reasonably accurately going forward.  We’ll see how that works out

There was a shudder throughout the Internet today: Robert Scoble, former Official Blogger for Microsoft and now writer/podcaster for PodTech.Net, didn’t receive an invite to a Microsoft developer conference.  A fellow at Microsoft by the name of Alfred Thompson responded saying (more or less) that Scoble isn’t the target audience for the conference anyway.  And Scoble was pissed by this response.

Most of you probably don’t know who Robert Scoble is, or care.  But in the world of Internet bloggers, he’s somewhere in the top 50 or so most “powerful”.  Tens of thousands of blogs used to link to him when he was Microsoft’s official blogger.  Back in his hey-day, he received millions of hits a year.  I suspect he probably got used to getting things for free just because he was who he was.

Let us be absolutely clear here: Microsoft didn’t say “Robert Scoble can’t attend the MIX07 developer conference”.  Despite Alfred Thompson’s somewhat clumsy post, they weren’t saying he wasn’t wanted.  What they did was fail to give Robert a free ticket. 

MIX07 isn’t, apparently, a “mass market” event: they want to target developers, not people who report about developers.  They don’t apparently care to get the event talked up outside of the attendees.  Right or wrong, that is their decision. 

I’m a developer for a fairly major company.  I do work in the rich media Internet space.  My opinion influences hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in investments.  But I don’t see Microsoft handing *me* a free ticket to MIX07.  And if I wanted to go, I’d have to negotiate with my management for months in advance to get budget assigned.   And let me tell you, I’d be a little ticked off if, when I got there after all that effort, I found two reporters for every three developers, and then discovered those reporters got there for *free*.

As much as I admire Robert Scoble, I have a message for him (not that he’ll ever come here to read it): get over yourself.  Yeah, Alfred’s post probably rubbed you the wrong way, but expecting free tickets to everything just because you are *the* Robert Scoble makes you look a trifle arrogant. 

[tags]scoble, MIX07, Alfred Thompson, arrogance[/tags]

This is a test post to see how Windows Live Writer works.  Windows Live Writer is an “off line” blog posting tool.  Naturally, it is designed to work with Windows Live blogs, but it also supports Wordpress and others.

Right out of the starting gate, it seems to have picked up my site’s basic settings (name, categories, etc) fairly accurately.  I see it supports tagging, but I think I’d have to do some futzing to get it to work with Ultimate Tag Warrior (the plug in I use here). 

UPDATE:  I found this post on the topic of adding UTW tag support to WLW by Pascal Vanhecke.  His guidance appears to have worked perfectly.  Thank you, Pascal!

Here is a picture which I drag and dropped into the posting, and a map which WLW also allows you to search for and add.

The following text is a block quote:

I am intrigued to see that it seems to pick up the block quote formatting from my site…perhaps by reading the site CSS?

It also has a web preview that presents a simulation of my website with the new post added- neat! 

The following tags are not actually UTW tags- this is a built-in technorati tag type from WLW

Some folks might have noticed my posting of a Youtube “video” (actually, it’s mostly an “audio”, but that’s being picky) here a couple of days ago.  The really observant probably noted that it didn’t work the first 68 times I tried to publish it.  I thought I’d share a little about what I discovered in that process. 

The normal “embed” code from Youtube itself doesn’t seem to work, at least not with IE7.  It looks like this:

<object width=”425″ height=”350″>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Hjhi_FHxY8k”></param>
<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param>
</object>

I did some poking around and found this thread of comments on the topic, which basically resolves that the underlying problem is that the Youtube embed code is improperly formed.  Within that thread is an alternate set of code that does work…it looks like this:

<object width=”425″ height=”350″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Hjhi_FHxY8k”><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Hjhi_FHxY8k” /><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent” /></object>

Interestingly, it appears that Wordpress likes to mess up the embed code even when it *is* correct.  I’d get it working, then edit the post and it would “break” the above code, removing some of the parameters.  Or at least that’s what it seemed to be doing. 

I finally got the post to work by turning off the rich editor in WordPress and using the second set of code above.  Hurray for persistance!

If you have no idea what tags are, or if you have never used WordPress, chances are you have no idea what Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) is.   You can probably skip this post, but in case you are curious: tags are like keywords to help categorize posts.  UTW is a plugin for WordPress by Christine Davis to help posters manage tags within their blog.  

If you have WordPress and know at least a bit about tags…get UTW.  Don’t hesitate- it really is that good.  Basically, it is totally invisible to me- it just works, and that to me is a sign of true elegance.  ’nuff said about that.

I use UTW here, and like it.  All of my posts are tagged, and I have a tag cloud in the right navigation bar.  I realized it was getting cluttered, with a couple hundred tags showing.  I wanted to just show the top 50 or so tags, at least for now…but it’s been months since I last did anything with UTW, so I forgot how.

A quick Google search led me to a great resource: Lorelle VanFossen’s Ultimate Tag Warrior for Dummies.  It had the answer to my question, and many other useful pieces of guidance.   Thanks, Lorelle!

I added Google AdSense to my blog in December of 2005.  As I said back then, I was curious how it would work for me.

I had no expectation when I started of making any real money.  My exact words back then were “… I’d be surprised if AdSense generates more than a buck or two a month for me”.  How prophetic…

To date, Google’s AdSense has generated $19.05 in revenue: that’s pretty much a buck or two a month.  For the curious, Google won’t pay out a red cent to you until your revenue tops $100, so the almost-$20 my site has “earned” in the past year isn’t even sitting in my wallet.  Five years from now, though, I’ll be rolling in the cash!

More interesting to me than the revenue is looking at the statistics Google Analytics generates.  About 90% of the visits to my site are first time visits; only 10% of the visitors come back a second time.  Hmmm: something to be said for having compelling content, I guess.  80% of the visits to my site come via Google searches: I think the sitemap feature, which keeps Google indexes of my site current, is helpful in that regard. 

What is the most “popular” content on my site?  A post I made entitled “The man with exploding arms” has been at the top of the hit parade pretty much since I first posted it.   Don’t ask me why.  Second or third place is usually something about Teresa Noreen,  and similarly usually one of my “techie” posts (currently my Vista posts are generating some traffic).  To be clear, a “highly rated” post on my site only generates about 300 clicks a month: the top five are all in the 100-400 visits per month range.

Is my site generating more traffic now than a year ago?  Unfortunately, I don’t have a full year of data yet.  Comparing two dissimilar months (E.G.: September to February) is generally not very helpful: different times of the year generate different amounts of traffic.  However, I compared May 2006 to February 2007 : if that’s any indicator, it looks like total unique visitors is up from about 50 per day “then” to about 150 per day “now”. 

Statistics are fun!  Okay, I’m weird…

I haven’t been posting here for a loooong time: over a month, I think.  So, what’s up?

In the past month, I’ve been doing the following things:

• spent a lot of time exploring Second Life
• caught and started recovering from a really bad cold.  I’m still sick, but gradually returning to normal
• worked
• took a weekend holiday with Irene for our anniversary
• posted some pictures to the gallery here from when my friend Chris was visiting

Nothing amazing or fantastic…nothing to suggest why I haven’t posted here.  And no guarantee that I won’t disappear again.

I mentioned previously that I had installed Ultimate Tag Warrior on my site.  In that posting, I implied that I had Ecto for Windows working with UTW.  The truth is, it only seemed to be working- in reality, Ecto was creating tags that UTW could work with, but it wasn’t able to read them back in for editing purposes. 
It’s been a bit of a struggle getting it to work…

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