The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Administrivia

Overhead

  • Blog Summary: 2012

    Despite all the techie stuff I think is more interesting, this blog evidently remains The Source for bed bug and appliance repair help:

    2012 YTD Blog Stats
    2012 YTD Blog Stats

    I can’t explain the popularity of the End of an Era: Knights in Shining Armor post, either, but it must have SEO out the wazoo.

    Who knew I have the definitive dragonfly and Giant Swallowtail Butterfly pictures?

    It’d be nice to get Slashdotted or Hackaday-ed for something techie, rather than bedbugs again …

    Surprisingly, most visitors arrive from image searches, rather than text searches:

    2012 YTD Blog Referrer Stats
    2012 YTD Blog Referrer Stats

    The largest non-search-engine referrer was Google Reader at 4000, followed by a Lifehacker traffic spike at 3000, and then everything else. As far as search engines go: Google and debris.

    In round numbers, 650 visitors get 1000 total views per day; the overall views/visitor runs around 1.75, which I interpret to mean most folks find exactly what they want on the first page. As nearly as I can tell from the daily stats, 300 of you visit the main page and post-of-the-day, plus another 100 click in from the RSS feed. The numbers don’t add up, primarily because RSS feed clicks don’t seem to enter into their totals.

    It’s definitely not a get-rich-quick scheme, that’s for sure…

    It’s still fun and I really do use this blog as my notebook: some of those searches come from me. I appreciate you folks helping me out with useful comments and suggestion: thanks!

  • Spammers vs. Turing Test: Inching Along

    Most of the dozen or so spam comments I delete every day consist of little more than gibberish. At best, a spam comment will have a poorly worded paragraph or two touting pharmaceuticals, handbags, shoes, or other junk, with absolutely no relation to the post. It’s easy to tell they’re generated by a script: keyword-heavy verbiage, bogus usernames, junk websites, and so forth and so on. Boring, is what they are.

    Recently an interesting comment appeared in response to that post on KG-UV3D audio levels which Akismet tagged as spam:

    The microphone and radio matching capabilities are terrific. Adjust the wide-range input level for optimum drive to the built-in microphone amplifier […]

    Fluent, idiomatic English that started out pretty nearly on-point for the post! The rest of the comment sounded like advertising copy, though. Well written ad copy, but ad copy nonetheless. Feeding a representative chunk into Google produced a link to the description of the W2IHY Two-band Audio Equalizer on the Official Website.

    Now, as it turns out, Julius lives up the river from here and I’ve met him several times. I also know he’s not spamming me, because the URL associated with the post points to some weird-ass Angola gold mining fraud that’s all too familiar from previous spammage. Oh, and the IP address resolves to a Tor server.

    As I observed there, eventually the spammers will become bright enough to hold an intelligent conversation and then they’ll be provisionally human. Depending on what they want to talk about …

  • Website Analysis: Trustworthiness Thereof

    For reasons irrelevant to this discussion, I wound up looking at http://widestat.com/softsolder.com, which gave this view of my blog (typos in original, emphasis mine):

    Softsolder.com has #12,773,578 traffic rank in world by Alexa. … Out of the 6 unique keywords found on softsolder.com, “chicken ark” was the most dense. … This site has Google PageRank™ 3 of 10.

    OK, so it’s not a high-traffic site. I can live with that.

    But … chicken ark?

    If you search herein for chicken you’ll come up with zero hits (apart from this one) in the posts. Unleashing Google with site:softsolder.com chicken digs up some comments, none of which discuss arks. I have absolutely no idea where Widestat came up with that, which makes me distrust their conclusions even more.

  • Another Dirac Delta: Moen Faucet Repair (?!)

    Can anyone explain how it is that, all of a sudden, Yahoo! Image Search generates 466 hits for my post on repairing our Moen bathroom sink faucet, a sleepy post in my Long Tail that’s been ticking along at one view per day since last December?

    The flash mob was here and gone within the span of an hour:

    View spike for Moen faucet post - 2012-04-05
    View spike for Moen faucet post – 2012-04-05

    Does Yahoo! Image Search have something like a featured image of the hour? I can’t find anything obvious, but I cannot imagine what else would cause that many views of a single page that lacks buck-naked celebrities, jackass stunts, or hideously embarrassing personal revelations.

    Given that all of their “trending image searches” show (typically female) human faces, I doubt that the grubby innards of a faucet would appear in that gallery.

    This has happened before from the same source…

  • It’s a Small World

    This quarterly tabulation doesn’t include the hundred-odd of you who click in through the RSS feed from wherever you may beq, but it’s in the right ballpark:

    Country Views
    United States 37459
    United Kingdom 4366
    Canada 4243
    Germany 2501
    Australia 2342
    Netherlands 1759
    Finland 1723
    India 1584
    France 1491
    Spain 1343
    Italy 1304
    Brazil 1157
    Poland 959
    Belgium 815
    Russian Federation 748
    Argentina 717
    Indonesia 627
    Portugal 614
    Turkey 591
    Sweden 582
    Thailand 559
    Romania 538
    Republic of Korea 528
    Malaysia 521
    Mexico 510
    Czech Republic 505
    New Zealand 496
    Philippines 476
    Hungary 468
    Japan 458
    Denmark 452
    Singapore 443
    Switzerland 427
    Greece 415
    Viet Nam 401
    Taiwan 385
    Ukraine 345
    Ireland 314
    Israel 304
    Norway 304
    Bulgaria 300
    Austria 295
    South Africa 276
    Lithuania 245
    Croatia 240
    Slovakia 238
    Slovenia 232
    Hong Kong 225
    Pakistan 203
    Serbia 198
    Colombia 176
    Latvia 160
    Egypt 159
    Estonia 136
    Chile 129
    Moldova 114
    United Arab Emirates 108
    Saudi Arabia 103
    Peru 86
    Tunisia 67
    Venezuela 60
    Sri Lanka 60
    Iceland 59
    Bosnia and Herzegovina 55
    Costa Rica 54
    Belarus 53
    Malta 53
    Ecuador 51
    Macedonia 49
    Cyprus 46
    Morocco 46
    Syrian Arab Republic 38
    Bangladesh 37
    Algeria 35
    Panama 34
    Puerto Rico 34
    Lebanon 32
    Trinidad and Tobago 31
    Iraq 29
    Jamaica 28
    Kuwait 28
    Uruguay 26
    Armenia 26
    Kenya 26
    Bermuda 26
    El Salvador 24
    Jordan 23
    Georgia 23
    Qatar 22
    Luxembourg 21
    Guatemala 21
    Cambodia 21
    Brunei Darussalam 20
    Mongolia 18
    Albania 18
    Dominican Republic 17
    China 17
    Bahrain 16
    Mauritius 15
    Nepal 15
    Monaco 14
    Oman 13
    Ghana 13
    Bolivia 13
    Sudan 11
    Honduras 10
    Nigeria 10
    Guam 10
    Libyan Arab Jamahiriya 9
    Paraguay 9
    Namibia 7
    San Marino 7
    Montenegro 7
    Maldives 7
    Macao 7
    Yemen 7
    Malawi 6
    Barbados 6
    Ethiopia 5
    Vanuatu 5
    Fiji 5
    Togo 4
    Netherlands Antilles 4
    Bahamas 4
    Cameroon 4
    Mauritania 4
    Nicaragua 4
    Botswana 4
    Norfolk Island 3
    Myanmar 3
    Uganda 3
    Andorra 3
    Belize 3
    Côte d’Ivoire 2
    Lao People’s Democratic Republic 2
    Mozambique 2
    Cape Verde 2
    French Guiana 2
    Swaziland 2
    Liechtenstein 2
    Azerbaijan 2
    Jersey 2
    Cuba 2
    Haiti 1
    Liberia 1
    Guyana 1
    Niger 1
    New Caledonia 1
    Zimbabwe 1
    British Virgin Islands 1
    Guadeloupe 1
    Northern Mariana Islands 1
    United Republic of Tanzania 1
    Senegal 1
    Antigua and Barbuda 1
    Madagascar 1
    Cayman Islands 1
    Kyrgyzstan 1
    Afghanistan 1
    Saint Lucia 1
    Papua New Guinea 1

    Mad props to whoever clicked in from Afghanistan: I hope you found whatever you were looking for!

  • Blog Hits: Dirac Delta

    The admin pages for this blog have a “sparkle bar” along the top that shows the hourly hit rate, which is usually a simple diurnal cycle: most activity happens during the Western Hemisphere daylight hours.

    Yesterday was different:

    Blog Hourly Hits - 2012-05-19
    Blog Hourly Hits – 2012-05-19

    In the space of about 10 minutes, my sleepy post about a bicycle saddle advertisement received 207 hits from “bike riding” at Yahoo! image search. For the last two and a half years, it’s been ticking along at about 1 hit/day, so I think that spike represents a nice example of a Dirac Delta Function in action.

    I no longer even pretend to know what’s going on…

     

  • Did You Notice Any RSS Feed Problems?

    Normally, about 100-150 people arrive here every day through the RSS syndication feature, mostly looking at the daily post.

    Over the last two weeks (more or less), that number dropped to 10-50. I prefer to believe something has gone wrong with the WordPress RSS mechanism, rather than that 100 readers suddenly vanished. Of course, the wordpress.com Happiness Engineers can’t find anything amiss…

    If you use the RSS feed and experienced any recent problems, please leave a comment explaining the situation.

    Thanks!