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News: Linux-Tips Has Reached It’s Two Year Anniversary!

The headline says it all, Linux-Tips has reached its two-year anniversary! Let me tell you, it has been a whole lot of work! Oh, man, has it been a lot of work. If you want another meta article, read on to appreciate the news with me!

A bit like Sisyphus, there’s always another article two write – and the boulder never reaches the top of the hill. As I finish one article, I’m already starting to consider what the next article will be.

But, I’ve had some help. Out of the 366 (this will make the total 367 published articles) posts, about 10 will have been from other people. I’m grateful for every single one of those. Man, am I grateful…

I suck at making images, or I’d make a celebratory image to show the joy of reaching this milestone. So, use your imagination and pretend I created such an image – and did a good job at it.

I’m aware that this is the 2nd meta article in a row.

I do not care. Nope. I care exactly none. I have none cares.

See the first article was:

Welcome to Our New Home!

The first article with real content came one day later (instead of the usual two days later) because it seemed like the thing to do at the time. It’s an article I’ve referenced a couple of times, but it never got much attention. I used it as the litmus test when checking to see if the site was being indexed in search engines. So, at least it served some purpose!

How To: Generate Sufficiently Complex Passwords In The Terminal

We’re older than two years, as there was an earlier site. That site still exists, but many articles will automatically redirect to here. That original site was the motivation to start this site. That site was the motivation to write a new article every other day. That site is:

Original Linux-Tips

Celebrating a Two-Year Anniversary!

Before starting this article, I did some checking…

The site’s articles total more than 270,000 words. That’s a whole lot of keyboard pounding! I regret nothing!

If you read 250 words per minute, it’d take more than 18 hours to read the entire site, from the first post to the last post! Good luck with that!

The site has shown millions of pages to hundreds of thousands of people. Only about 180 comments have been written, but that’s not bad for a site of this nature.

I don’t even want to guess how many hours I’ve invested in creating, maintaining, and curating this site. Depending on the article, we’re looking at about an hour as an average – counting research, writing, formatting, and editing. Things then get scheduled for automatic publication, ensuring I have a new article every other day.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The article gets shared and I deal with questions, suggestions, and general feedback. I pay attention to search engine optimization, doing my best to rank well in the search engines (I’ve given up on ranking at Bing). I also then pay attention to the ads, though that’s not all that tough. Most of you have blocked ads and not whitelisted my site. (Hint! Hint!)

Today, the site ranks near the top for a whole lot of search terms. Alas, they’re not the most popular search terms – but it’s nice to see the site in the top position for some words and phrases. It might seem like a small thing, but it’s big to me!

Man, if you only knew…

While the site looks nice and simple, there are a whole lot of changes between this and regular WordPress sites. (WordPress is the software that runs the site, which I use as a CMS more so than a blog.) For example, there are seventy-something plugins. Those all must be maintained.

Further, there are daily backups, a duplicated process with weekly updates being done in triplicate. Fortunately, those are processed more or less automatically, though I do sometimes need to test them to ensure they work. Those have to be monitored.

There’s always something that needs to be done and seldom is there enough time (and motivation). Still, I take a bit of pride in keeping my site secure – and keeping private any information you share with me. Heck, I probably pay even more attention to security because I am responsible for some of your private data.

Wow…

You know, I started this project not knowing where it would lead me. I don’t think I expected to make it two full years without missing a single publication date. I don’t think I expected to make it a full year. I also didn’t expect the results, and those results (including the feedback) are what seems to keep me motivated to keep this project going.

I complain about the cost, but it’s not too expensive. It’d be nice if it paid for its expenses, but that’s fine. I think you can be pretty sure that I’ll find a way to keep the site up and running, regardless of costs. Y’all chewed through a bunch of CDN bandwidth last month, but it looks like it’ll be cheaper this month.

Meh… It’s not too expensive, though this site consumes enough resources to warrant moving it to a VPS. Right now it’s still on shared hosting. I could probably find someone willing to sponsor the site (a hosting company) given that it’s all about Linux. I don’t think I’m going to bother doing so.

All-in-all, I think the majority of articles have done alright. Boy, have I whiffed on a few of them. Fortunately, someone’s always willing to chime in when I’ve made a mistake! (I’m very, very grateful when people do so and I try to make any necessary corrections promptly. I am not perfect, however.)

So…

Yeah…

That’s it… It’s been two ****in’ years! I’m as surprised by this as you are!

Closure:

I think I’ll have a glass of wine or three to celebrate the two-year anniversary. This isn’t the kind of article to bother optimizing for search engines, which is nice. I will kinda proofread it, though lately I’ve been cheating in that department and using Grammarly. That helps and has impacted my writing style – in a good way.

But, perhaps there’s an article in that? Some future articles, perhaps? LOL Maybe I should sign up as an affiliate and then write the article while using affiliate links?!? You never know. Heck, I don’t even know. So, if you did know, you should tell me so that I would know… That sounds reasonable!

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 site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Meta: The State Of Linux Tips #16

This is going to be published on a Sunday, so it’s a fine day to do a simple meta article. It’s an article about the state of Linux tips. Basically, it’s a lazy article for me, where I just share some stats with you. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, read on…

There will be another meta article coming up, as we’re soon going to cross the two-year mark. So far, so good… We’ve managed to have an article every other day, which is nice. But, we’ll talk about that in a few articles down the road.

This is just a recap of what last month was like, more than anything else. At least that’s how I’ve done the majority of these things, though I never really know what I’ll write in one of these.

Meta Stuff:

So, the CDN I used raised its prices. I now pay double what I used to pay. You can donate to the right. If people do not donate, the site’s going to stay up and running. I’ll do it without your help if I’ve gotta.

This of course coincided with the site getting the most amount of traffic it has ever had. We used a combined 35 GB of traffic – which isn’t much for many larger sites but is pretty insane for this site. We had more traffic in March than we had in February and more traffic in February than we had in January. (There’s a bit of a pattern there.)

Speaking of patterns, this month appears to be getting slightly less traffic than was seen in March. That’s unusual. The site has experienced fairly consistent growth, but this month appears to be ever so slightly less active. I do not know why and, frankly, don’t feel like trying to figure out why.

There are bound to be some times when we don’t experience growth and the site is still getting a lot of traffic – meaning we’re helping a lot of people. We’re helping thousands and thousands of people every month. That’s a great thing and it far exceeds what I expected when I started this out.

Some Stats:

So, things are a bit different this month. @BrickWizard would appreciate knowing this, I think. These are the most popular pages:

Find Out Which Display-Manager You’re Using
How To: Disable Sleep And Hibernation on Ubuntu Server
How Do I Install Linux (A General Guide)

The most popular browsers:

Chrome 82.5%
Unknown 14.5%
Firefox 2.2%

(Firefox is struggling in the market perhaps?)

The most popular operating systems:

Linux 94.4%
Windows 3.2%
Macintosh 1.5%

Other Stuff:

More than 13,000 people visited.
They visited about 19,000 times.
They mostly visited on Monday and Wednesday.
They mostly visited from 15:00 to 22:00 GMT.
Most traffic came from Google searches.

Closure:

So, there you have it, it’s another meta article that lets you know the state of Linux-Tips. I try to remember to do this every month, but I don’t always manage to do so. They’re not very interesting articles from a search engine perspective, but that’s okay. I might as well share the information as they’re generally well-read articles.

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.

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…

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.