Meta Archives • Linux Tips

Meta: The State Of Linux Tips #15

Today’s article is just a meta article, one where we cover the state of Linux Tips (this site). It’s just a chance to sit down and share what’s going on with the site, a chance to not write something technical. So, for another meta article, read on!

This will be mostly about the month of February. See, I didn’t write any meta article(s) in February. It just didn’t cross my mind and it was a shorter month than the months surrounding it. So, I suppose, this will be about February.

I try to write these meta articles once a month, but they’re never really formally scheduled. They just get written when I remember to write one and when I have the urge to do so. I should probably pick a specific day of the month and write them on that day, but where’s the fun in that?

So, about February…

The State of Linux Tips:

February only has 28 days. Because of this, Linux Tips did not have more traffic than the month before. If February had been 29 days, I’d have had slightly more traffic than was had in the month of January – which has 31 days. (Traffic for this month appears to be breaking all sorts of records.)

Like always, the vast majority of my traffic came from Google. However, that number has jumped a great deal. I had about 6200 visitors from Google in the month of February. The site’s getting more and more popular, or so it seems.

In February, I had 12,655 unique visitors. In January, that number was 12,885 unique visitors. So, if February had been just a few hours longer it’d have had more unique visitors than the month prior. I’m going to put that one in the ‘win’ column!

Google’s definitely taken me out of the doghouse, but the ad clicks are worth less than they used to be before they put me in the dog house. Amusingly, this coincides with my CDN deciding the amount I had been paying is an ‘introductory rate’ and will be doubling the cost. I bought a bunch of credits, hoping that they’ll still be worth the same as they are now.

That’s not actually a complaint. They provide a great service and the cost isn’t that much. I know, I ask for donations and I have ads, but the reality is that the site will remain online for the foreseeable future.

The expenses aren’t so great that I can’t handle them. If they ever do become more than I’m willing to pay, I’ll be sure to let folks know and let folks decide how much they value the site. But, really, don’t worry about it all that much. We’re good!

Some Linux-Tips Numbers:

Hmm… How about the three articles AWstats tells me had the greatest traffic numbers?

Find Out Which Display-Manager You’re Using
Screenfetch vs. Neofetch, You Decide!
How To: Restart TeamViewer From The Terminal

That’s a bit interesting, as here’s what Google says were my top 3 pages:

It agrees with the #1 slot.
The #2 slot (according to Google) is the TeamViewer article.
How To: Stop, Pause, and Resume Processes Running in Your Term

But, Google’s not very good with counting traffic. Google seems to me to not count anyone that doesn’t allow the Google cookie. So, if you’re blocking ads appropriately, you are also probably blocking the cookies from the blocked sites. That means Google isn’t very good at counting traffic.

For example…

According to Google Analytics, my monthly visitors for February was a total of ~4800 people. (That’s pretty amazing, as the previous month was like ~4200.) It does say that I was in the search engine results some 365k times. But…

In reality, I had almost 13k unique visitors and a total of ~17.5k total visits.

So, for all the complaints about Google tracking people, they’re not very good at it. Also, they really suck at figuring out what kind of ads I’d like. I’m not allowed to click on them, but I do see them. They’re seldom for anything I’m interested in.

Still, you should whitelist this site and Google wants you to only click on ads that are of legitimate interest to you. Don’t just click ads to be nice. I appreciate that, but it’ll just screw me over in the end. As it is, Google loves to call clicks invalid for reasons I do not know.

Closure:

There’s still a lot going on here. There’s still more articles to write. I could use a bit of a break now and again, so speak up if you’re wanting to write an article for the site. (And you’re not looking to use my site to boost the ratings of unrelated sites, of course…)

We’ll see when the next meta article comes along, but it probably won’t be in the month of March. It could be, I dunno… Oh, and I chewed through about 20 GB of bandwidth with 5 of those GBs being gratis.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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Meta: The State Of Linux Tips #14

I try to do this every month, and this month’s no different, it’s time for a meta article about the state of Linux Tips. This is only the the 14th installation, so I’m obviously not very good at doing this every month. Still, they’re easy enough articles to write and it’s a good night to write one.

So, if you’re interested in what’s going on here at the site, read on! If not, there will be a more informative article in just two days. Well, assuming I keep up the current publication schedule.

Speaking of which, this is the 324th article to be posted at Linux Tips. I’ve had a few helpful articles along the way, but have managed to keep the publication schedule up for this entire time.

I didn’t expect to make it this long. Indeed, it was pretty amazing when I did it for just a year. Here we are, finishing up the second year. Ho hum…

Some Numbers:

Traffic still expanded in December, but the growth was slower than it had been lately. We can be reasonably sure that this has to do with the holidays. Still, it was nice to see the growth. For example, for December:

There were more than 11,600 unique visitors.
They visited more than 18,700 times.
We consumed about 18.5 GB of bandwidth.
Russia was the 2nd most user of my traffic.
96% of my traffic used Linux.
86% of my traffic used a browser that identified as Chrome.
Linux.org provided about 2% of what Google Search provided for visit.
Linux.org provided the most repeat visitors.

As you can see, there’s not much that has changed.

This month, January 2023, looks to be similar with regards to unique visitors – but might actually have slightly fewer people in the ‘visits’ column. Again, it’s likely due to the holidays. Quite a bit of my traffic comes from work-hours in the US. So, the holiday slowdown certainly would explain that.

I’m going to skip the next section and just bring this to a close. The reason I’m skipping the next session is that it literally hasn’t changed. The most popular pages are still the most popular pages.

Also, we’ve captured the number 1 slot at Google for ‘ask a good support question’, which is nice. That doesn’t attract a lot of clicks, but there are some. It’s a nice page to have ranking that well.

Meta Article Closure:

I see no reason to drag this article out. Exactly the same articles are as popular as they were the month before this. You can click back through the Meta Articles if you want. I’ve never had a site this popular, so I’m not sure if that’s normal. It seems to me that it’d be fairly normal.

Until next month…

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Meta: The State Of Linux Tips #13

Today’s article is just a quick one, a meta article. I try to write one of these every month, at the most, or when things happen around the site that I think folks would be interested in.

So, for a while, there were no Google ads. It turned out a site I added to my AdSense account was considered ‘invalid traffic’, which is a vague term that seems to mean it’s whatever Google says it is when they say it. I resolved that issue.

At that point, ads were being shown again – and I know folks clicked on ’em. My readers are kinda creatures of habit, so I’m positive there were clicks. For whatever reason, Google gave me no credit for those clicks.

Then, the pay period ended…

It could be coincidence, but the site started generating ad revenue when the pay period ended and a new one began. The site has since been getting credit for your clicks. While I like your clicks, I want to remind folks:

Do not click ads to make me happy. Only click ads if you’re truly interested.

If you’re legitimately interested, feel free to click an ad or two… Otherwise, just don’t click. Thanks for both!

Also, I’ve tried to enable a new feature. It’s provided by Google and it’s a nag for those who block ads. This should be EASILY dismissed and not nag you all that often, like once a month or something like that. If the nag in any way interferes with the functioning of the site, please let me know.

For whatever reason, I can’t seem to trigger the ad block nag screen. This makes it difficult to debug.

Meta Stuff:

So, I originally thought the ‘invalid traffic’ was because this site, Linux-Tips, was getting massive increases in traffic. After all, nobody would define ‘invalid traffic’ well enough for me and the site was definitely growing at a good clip. I figured this was the problem, but I was wrong. It was the other site that I added.

What is this massive traffic? Well, it’s not massive when compared to the big sites, but it’s definitely pretty respectable. Last month we had more than 10,000 unique visitors, and those people visited more than 18,000 times.

My stats are kinda wonky and I’m thinking it’s counting some bot traffic when it’s counting the pages displayed, because in November it claims we displayed more than 1.3 million pages. That’s a whole lot of pages for those visitor numbers, so I think it’s just not accurate.

The bandwidth has gone up accordingly. I now regularly exceed the free tier at the CDN (quic.cloud). Last month, but seemingly not this month, I had to make another deposit to pay for ‘page optimizations’. So, expenses pile up! You don’t have to donate, but you could if you wanted. I will not complain!

I pay for the CDN so that the site is pretty much always available no matter where you are on the globe, and so that it loads quickly from servers that are closer to your location than my actual server. A quick loading site with high availability seems to be a good idea to me.

Some Data:

The three articles that got the most traffic in the past 28 days is:

Find Out Which Display-Manager You’re Using
How To: Disable Sleep And Hibernation on Ubuntu Server
How To: Restart TeamViewer From The Terminal

I am not sure why those are the most popular articles. They’re not the pages I’d think would be the most popular, but I don’t actually have a clue what I’m doing with this whole SEO thing. I just smash buttons and hope something good comes out the other end.

The three most used search terms to find this site via Google, again for the past 28 days, would be:

screenfetch vs neofetch
permitrootlogin prohibit-password
restart teamviewer command line

That’s technically three out of the top four, as the first one is pretty much the same as what’s listed – it’s just in reverse. Lots of people wanna learn about the differences between the two (screenfetch and neofetch) via Google. Again, don’t ask me why.

So far this month:

The busiest day is Monday, by a good margin.
The vast majority of my traffic is from the United States.
The average person spends 199 seconds (3 min 19 sec) per visit.
96.1% of my visitors are using Linux.
85.5% are using a browser that identifies as Google Chrome.
Google search accounts for most of my traffic.
Linux.org accounts for the second most, but it’s truly dwarfed by Google results.
Last month we used ~25 GB of bandwidth.

Got any other numbers you’re interested in? If so, leave a comment. I’ll be happy to let you know – if I actually have those numbers. It’s also important to realize that every single stat application (especially ones like Google Analytics) is horribly inaccurate. I rely on AWStat the most, because it’s the closest to accurate for some of these numbers. Google Analytics should not be even remotely trusted – but still has some useful information, useful for spotting trends.

Closure:

And there you have it, you have another nice meta article. I’d actually planned on another article, but I decided I’d watch American football and just write a meta article. It seemed like the thing to do. The next article will be published on Christmas day, so we’ll see if we can do something festive for the holiday.

Thanks for reading my meta article! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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Meta: The State Of Linux Tips #12

Today’s article is just another meta article. It will not be all that long, as not a whole lot of the favorite articles – or even numbers, have changed. This will be published on Sunday, a day when I don’t get a lot of traffic.

Well, some things have changed.

See, if you view the site with ads enabled, this site whitelisted in your ad blocker, and you’ve been clicking ads – please don’t click on ads just to help me out. That’s not how AdSense is meant to work.

If you can’t tell, the ads have been suspended while Google researches the site for ‘invalid traffic’. I’m not sure what that means, but some searching says it could take a month or so for ads to be resumed. Invalid traffic also includes purchased traffic, something I’ve never done.

I can’t help but wonder if many of us use a VPN to connect? I do. Maybe that’s the kind of traffic, but I can’t imagine Google not knowing how to recognize VPN traffic and to adjust accordingly. That doesn’t seem like invalid traffic to me.

So, don’t click ads to help me out. Ads should only be clicked if you’re genuinely interested in the subject. Otherwise, it screws over the people paying for the ads.

More Meta:

So, last month we kinda had a blow out. In the month of October, we served almost a million pages to about 16,000 viewers. The pages number is kinda wonky, so that probably includes bots. But, for the first time ever, we had over 10,000 unique viewers.

Other than that, not much has changed. The three most heavily visited pages are the following:

Find Out Which Display-Manager You’re Using

Screenfetch vs. Neofetch, You Decide!

How To: Disable Sleep And Hibernation on Ubuntu Server

About 97% of the traffic is using Linux – which is interesting. For a while, it was a lot of Windows users. I never did quite understand that. Windows users are down to like 2% of the traffic.

About 80% of my traffic is from the United States, and about 20% has IP addresses from Russia. It’s safe to discount those Russian numbers as they’re likely bots and people attacking the site. We get a lot of attacks here.

Chrome (and probably others that identify as Chrome is the most common browser. About 85% of you are using Chrome, Chromium, or a derivative like Opera or Brave. Firefox is only about 12% of my traffic.

What Else & Closure:

So, yeah… We’re about at the 300 article mark. That’s a lot of writing. If you feel like writing an article, let me know. This is the meta article for the last month, so November looks even better.

Why is this article late? I typed a bunch of it up and then just plain forgot to proof it and write this part of it. I then didn’t schedule it. So, it’s a bit late, but not terribly late. It also means I got it out in time to not have skipped a day!

I’m not sure how much longer we can go without skipping a day. Winter is definitely coming and I will have connectivity issues as well as losing mains power on a regular basis. I should probably get a few articles ahead and then saving them for any major infrastructure outages that will occur.

Anyhow…

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Today’s Article Is Just A Lubuntu (And Ubuntu) Membership Update

Today’s article is just going to be a short article about my Lubuntu (and by extension Ubuntu) membership status. It’s only a news/meta article and you can safely skip it. Or you can read on… I don’t mind… It’s just some news.

For starters, you can see when I first joined the Lubuntu team originally:

Meta: I’m Now An Official Lubuntu (And Ubuntu) Member!

What I do, more often than not, is do the live testing for the daily .iso. It’s tedious work, but I enjoy the challenge and have the time. You might want to read:

What it’s Like To Beta-test Linux, Specifically Lubuntu

Now, I do my testing with Lubuntu. I’m also an Ubuntu Member. This is because I have to be an Ubuntu Member to be a Lubuntu Member. If you’re an official member of some of the more recent flavors, that’s no longer true. You can be an official member without official Ubuntu membership.

Membership lasts a a year. My year was up and I submitted a renewal application. I was once again accepted as an official member.

So, I’m an official Lubuntu (and Ubuntu) Member for another year. Yay!

I’d like to take a moment to invite others to join in helping out their favorite distro. You don’t have to dedicate all your time to it. You don’t have to be a programmer. If you want, you can get involved – and make an appreciable difference.

So, thus ends this article. I need an easy day once in a while, and now you know my membership status has been renewed. Enjoy the easy day!

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