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: 2020

    Blog Summary: 2020

    You can’t make up results like this for a techie kind of blog:

    Blog Top Post Summary - 2020-12-31
    Blog Top Post Summary – 2020-12-31

    Given my demographic cohort, bedbugs suddenly seemed downright friendly.

    Overall, this blog had 109 k visitors and 204 k page views. The ratio of 1.8 pages / visitor has been roughly constant for the last few years, so I assume most folks find one more interesting post before wandering off.

    My take from the increasing volume of ads WordPress shovels at those of you who (foolishly) aren’t using an ad blocker continues to fall:

    Blog Ad Summary - 2020-12-31
    Blog Ad Summary – 2020-12-31

    The CPM graph scale seems deliberately scrunched, but the value now ticks along at 25¢ / thousand impressions, adding up to perhaps $250 over the full year. Obviously, I’m not in this for the money.

    The ratio of five ads per page view remains more or less constant. Because Google continues to neuter Chrome’s ad blocking ability, I highly recommend using Firefox with uBlock Origin.

    WordPress gives me no control over which ads they serve, nor where they put ads on the page. By paying WordPress about $50 / year I could turn off all their ads and convert the blog into a dead loss. I’m nearing their 3 GB limit for media files on a “free” blog, so the calculation may change late next year.

    Onward, into Year Two …

  • Hiatus

    Posts will appear intermittently over the next week or two.

    I’m still spending an inordinate amount of time studying the back of my eyelids while horizontally polarized in the lift chair. I can highly recommend not doing whatever it is that triggers a pinched lumbar nerve, but as nearly as I can tell, the proximate cause (shredding leaves) isn’t anything close to whatever the root cause might be.

    It does provide plenty of time to conjure solid models from the vasty digital deep:

    Wheelchair Brake Mods - solid model - build layout
    Wheelchair Brake Mods – solid model – build layout

    The wheelchair brake lever seems to have been designed by somebody who never actually had to shove it very often:

    Drive Wheelchair Brake
    Drive Wheelchair Brake

    At least I can fix that …

  • Hiatus

    ‘Tis the season of leaf shredding and yard cleanup, with a generous helping of home chores and maintenance on the side, so I’ll be posting intermittently for a while.

  • Comment Spam Attack

    Comment Spam Attack

    Of late, the blog has been getting 500 hits per day, with 60-ish on the main page and 30-ish on the post of the day. The “Hot Topics” posts (over in the right column, down a bit) account for a scant hundred more hits, with the remaining 300 hits distributed in onesies and twosies along the very, very long tail of 4200 posts.

    Then this happened:

    Spam Attack - Page Hits
    Spam Attack – Page Hits

    It seems a spammer noticed my posting activity and unleashed either a script or, more dismally, a stable of low-wage third-world workers to make a comment on every single post in the blog.

    The Akismet scanner flagged three dozen comments made on the most recent posts, with the remaining 4500 (!) page views producing zero comments, because, some years back, I had disabled comments on posts older than a few dozen days. I disliked doing so, because I value comments from folks who contribute to the discussion, but …

    The IP addresses seem to point back to compromised servers and pwned Windows boxes in the US, with very few foreign sources. The comments themselves consist of the usual gibberish, often run through a thesaurus (known as “spinning”) to improve the odds of evading the detectors. The payload seems to be the URLs attached to the random user names, all pointing to sites touting Vietnamese (!) scams, Russian pharmaceutical sources, online gambling dens, and the like.

    And then, after two days, it was over.

    Which is why I really really do not want to manage my own blog infrastructure, infuriating as WordPress-dot-com’s editor might be.

  • Blog Theme Shuffling

    Blog Theme Shuffling

    Over the next several days, I’ll be screwing around with trying out different blog themes, because WordPress has “deprecated” the theme I’ve been using since about 2011; it no longer works well with their most recent infrastructure. There being no way to tell how any given theme will look, how difficult creating posts may be, or (in truth) anything about a theme without actually running it, I’ll be doing live-fire exercises while posting odds-n-ends projects from the shop.

    Some themes strongly suggest require a logo, so you’ll see this monstrosity until something better comes along:

    Logo - Isolated 0D3
    Logo – Isolated 0D3

    Speaking of themes, you’re looking at a “free” blog on wordpress.com, not something I’ve conjured by installing the open-source blog infrastructure from wordpress.org on a server, which means few things you (think you) know about a “WordPress blog” apply. In particular, free blogs on wordpress.com lack access to the universe of themes & plugins applicable to a DIY FOSS installation.

    (I think) I’d be perfectly happy to compose posts in Markdown (or some such) and slam them into a static site generator (Hugo / Gatsby / whatever), rather than slog through WP’s GUI editor, but I think my usual post-a-day pace conflicts with the fundamental assumptions of a “static site” generator.

    I value blog comments from real people (you all know who you are and I thank you!), but blogspam presents a clear & present danger. Right now, Akismet kills nearly all the hundreds of spam comments per day; it’s obvious any blog comment system must include robust spam filtering. The alternative of, say, running a separate email list for comments seems far more trouble than it’s worth.

    I absolutely do not want to sysop my very own blog configuration on a rented server / VPS / Digital Ocean Droplet / whatever. Things like WPengine.com would be attractive, except that this blog’s very long tail generates enough traffic to come very close to the 25 k visit/month upper limit of their “startup” plan; I’m reluctant to pay $100/month for the 100 k visit/month “growth” plan just to host my shop notes.

    If you have recommendations / experience / horror stories concerning FOSS blogging software, add a comment or send me a direct note through the form at the bottom of the misleadingly titled “About” page.

    For the next few days, remember: there is nothing wrong with your television set.

  • Hiatus

    Between the ACM presentation, an upcoming Digital Machinist column, and homeowner stuff “not relevant here”, I’ll be posting intermittently for a week or so.

    Logo - Isolated 0D3
    Logo – Isolated 0D3

    Algorithmic Artifacts will be getting more attention!

  • ACM Poughkeepsie Presentation: Algorithmic Art

    In the unlikely event you’re in Poughkeepsie this evening, I’ll be doing a talk on my Algorithmic Art for the Poughkeepsie ACM chapter, with a look at the HPGL and G-Code transforming math into motion:

    Superformula - triangle burst - detail
    Superformula – triangle burst – detail

    The PDF of the “slides” lacks my patter, but the embedded linkies will carry you to the blog posts & background information:

    ACM – Algorithmic Art – 2020-01-27Download

    See you there! [grin]