Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #21

It seems like now is a good time to write another article about the site itself, because I’ve not done a meta article in over two months. Yeah, it has been that long since I last did a check-in to let folks know how things are going. Every time I’ve thought about writing a meta article, I’ve decided to write something else.

The thing is, there’s not much to write about. Things are going very, very well. At least I think things are going well. It’s quite amazing how far this site has come and I have you, the regular readers, to thank for that. I have you, those who have contributed, to thank for that.

When you point out a problem in an article, you make the site better. If you choose to comment, it provides motivation. Those who voice their appreciation give me the confidence to continue. Without you, I’d have long since run out of any shred of desire to write.

Thank you! Really, thank you!

So, what do I mean when I say that things are going well?

Some Numbers:

In November, more than 17,500 unique visitors visited the site and did so more than 26,000 times.

I remember when I was stoked to see 20 visits in a day.

Once upon a time, I didn’t have to pay extra for bandwidth. In November, this site went through nearly 70 GB of traffic. LOL If you want to donate, that’s where your donations go – into paying the CDN. Fortunately, the bills aren’t that high.

Advanced Web Statistics claimed that I showed about 1,300,000 pages – but that seems unrealistic. I’m pretty sure that’s counting bots. Bots account for a bunch of my bandwidth, but the stats I share with you do their best to only include real human visitors.

This will be article #482.

I’ve not missed a day yet, though I remain convinced that I will – and I’m okay with that. So far, I’ve just been lucky. Eventually, Mother Nature and my infrastructure will cause me to miss an article. So far, there has been at least one article every other day. That was the schedule I decided upon when I started the site. That is the schedule I’ve followed.

Sponsorship:

I get so many requests to link to this or that. People constantly request that I allow them to write a ‘guest’ article. They do this because they want a link on my site and that helps with their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) goals.

If you look at the top of the page, you’ll see a new link up there. Those are the rules and fees for me sharing an article or a link. I have intentionally priced them high. I mostly formalized this so that I can just respond to those emails with a link.

Man… So many SEO link requests… Most of them don’t even seem to know what the site is about. It’s like they just shotgun requests and hope for desperate blog authors. I am not desperate.

If you want to legitimately write an article that’s not to promote your site, feel free to do so. I’ll happily accept those. If you’re not doing it for SEO reasons, that’s fine by me.

Speaking of SEO, I’ve paid some attention to it lately. I’ve been learning more about SEO and trying new things. The site ranks pretty well for some keywords and phrases.

Search Engines:

I’m finally listed in Bing.

Bing sends me maybe 1% of my traffic…

I get traffic from all the major search engines – and some of the not-so-major search engines. Like, I get a few people from Ecosia. Weirdly, Duck Duck Go sends me the second-most amount of search engine traffic. The first is Google, of course. Bing and Yandex are respectively next, after “Unknown Search Engine”. That’s followed mostly by the regional Google instances, such as google.uk or google.de.

As mentioned above, I’ve done some on-site SEO work. They care about things like links, readability, load time, and stuff like that. This site ranks well in all those categories, as a general rule.

If you search for “ask a good support question”, you’ll likely find this site at the top of the list. Sadly, the people who most need that information will never search for that information. I’d call it irony, but it really isn’t ironic. It’s just a statement of the human condition, I suppose.

The site also ranks well for terms like ‘screenfetch vs neofetch‘, ‘Prevent SSH Root Login‘, ‘ls -l format‘, ‘restart teamviewer‘, and ‘sudo apt purge‘.

It’s a weird assortment. I have a hard time knowing what articles will be the most appreciated by Google. They tell me that I should know that before I even start writing an article, but I don’t worry about it.

Also, writing these meta articles takes more time and effort than writing regular articles. Search engines don’t even like these articles!

What Can You Do?

You can keep reading and keep commenting – even if nobody ever comments here. 99% of the comments here have got to be spam. I’m not kidding. I’ll get a dozen spam attempts a day – and that’s AFTER automatic filtering.

Bots can’t easily spam the site, so these are real humans wasting their time. I can’t imagine being so poor that I’d undergo a task with so little chance of success. I sort of feel sorry for these people, but not enough to let them spam the site.

You can donate of course. As I said, all the donations go straight to paying for bandwidth. You don’t have to. I’ve long since concluded that I’ll pay the bills regardless of how high they go. The site is not currently at risk of going under. Still, it’s an option.

You can unblock ads. I appreciate it if you do, but I understand if you do not. If you do unblock the ads, please only click on ads that you’re legitimately interested in. Clicking a bunch of ads is a nice gesture, but that makes Google angry. I do not like it when Google is angry! Google has been angry before. 

Closure:

Like I said, these meta articles take me longer to write than it takes me to write the average article. They’re kind of a pain in the butt and I almost regret doing the first few as that now makes me feel obligated to keep doing them. They may disappear entirely, but I’ll keep going for now.

The first few were easy, as I didn’t have much to say. Now, I have hundreds of facts and figures that I could share, but I’m not going to invest the time and effort to do so. If you have any questions about this sort of stuff, feel free to ask me. I just don’t want to invest that much time and effort into some article that’s going to be read by maybe 50 interested parties.

As always…

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.