meta Archives • Linux Tips

Meta: The State Of Linux Tips #23

Today’s article is just a meta article, an article that I fail to write every month. The more astute readers of this site will see the #23 and realize how bad I am at keeping to a schedule. Writing meta articles isn’t fun. Writing meta articles doesn’t result in sharing valuable information. These meta articles cover the state of Linux Tips. That’s it.

So, things are going well… Things are going very well from many perspectives. Things are going better than ever!

Why not just throw some data…

For the past year or so, I’ve used a browser extension that helps me write better. It also has a weird feature that sends a weekly message that lets you know how you’re doing. I’ve not yet shared that data, so let’s share that!

Some Meta Stats:

This is just for the past week…

I wrote more than 91% of the rest of the users.
At the same time, I was more accurate than 73% of their users.
For better or worse, I used more unique words than their other users at 93%.

Amusingly, I used about 3500 unique words in the past week and that’s somehow enough unique words to stand out. I didn’t think my vocabulary was that expansive, but I’m constantly assured it is.

Anyhow, my “tone”, as determined by the plugin…

I’m 19% informative.
I am also 17% assertive.
Then, I guess I’m 13% direct and 10% confident.

I have no idea how they came up with those numbers.

Anyhow, there are some writing stats. Keep in mind that I write for more than just this site. I write a lot of text elsewhere.

Some Site Numbers:

So, we’ve seen some income in sponsored articles, which is nice. Not relying on Google is okay. It’s less income than Google was, but at least you’re not currently wading through ads. We may have ads again in the future, so we’ll have to wait and see. If you don’t want to see ads, you can always donate. 🙂

We’re currently averaging over 1,000 visits per day. I’ve noticed that we surge ahead and then sort of taper off. It’s like we have some record-breaking months and then we slowly taper off just a little. Then, we have new record months. Last month was not a record-setting month but it was still well over 1,000 visits per day.

Most of my traffic comes from the United States – which would be expected.
You tend to visit for 228 seconds each time you visit.
The average viewer is using Chrome, Chromium, or a Chromium derivative.

These are the most popular pages:

How To: Remove AppArmor From Ubuntu
How To: Convert JPG to PNG
How To: Disable Sleep And Hibernation on Ubuntu Server

Those change around a little but they seem to be the most common.

For the record, most of my traffic comes from Google.
That’s followed by DuckDuckGo.
The next is traffic from Linux.org.

About 92% of you are using Linux already.
Less than 4% of you are using Linux.
Just about 3% of you are using a Mac.

So, those numbers make perfectly good sense. Getting good numbers from your statistics isn’t an easy task. Various stat applications excel at different things. But, those numbers are fairly similar to what I see elsewhere.

Closure:

That’s right. This was just a meta article. Things are going okay, or at least way better than I ever expected. I don’t have any sponsored articles lined up so we’ll have to see how that goes this month. I’ve changed my policy quite a bit, letting folks know that I can be flexible. So, we’ll see what happens.

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: I’ve Been At This For Three Years!

I have not done a meta article lately. I don’t find them interesting to write even though people seem to show some interest in them. They’re a pain to write and I can write a regular article easier than a meta article.

After all, my normal meta article is just updating you on how much traffic the site gets and how much bandwidth the site uses. I also tend to toss in some stats about where the traffic comes from and what that traffic looks like.

That’s not all that fun and can be a pain to write.

So, let’s get that out of the way…

February wasn’t as great but January was awesome. Last month saw a new level reached – where this site averaged more than 1000 visitors per day.

visit statistics — Yup… There are a lot of you these days…

I guess the next major threshold will be when I get 1000 unique visitors in a month. Quite a few of you visit more than once, those are the ‘visits’ in the chart. The unique visitors are just that, how many unique people visit the site.

Sure enough, my traffic still comes from Google – even though I no longer use AdSense. As far as search traffic, the next two most popular search engines (for this site) are DuckDuckGo and StartPage.

The most popular operating systems are Linux, MacOS, and Windows. I suppose that makes some sense. Some of what’s on this site applies to MacOS as they’re a POSIX-compliant operating system.

The most popular browsers are Chrome (and those that identify as Chrome), Unknown, and Safari. Firefox isn’t well represented here. They’re 4th on the list with about 19% of my traffic.

My legitimate traffic comes from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. China and Russia are in the stats, but they’re mostly bots. Finding accurate stats to pick between them can be difficult. So, the above is about what I can figure out.

Yeah, I regularly consume 50+ GB of traffic per month. Considering the site is pretty much pure text, that’s a lot of writing. There are millions of words on the site now and I’m still not out of ideas.

Anniversary!

This is our third anniversary! Three years!!! Whodathunkit?

This was the first article:

Welcome to Our New Home!

I’ve had some guest articles along the way (and at least another one coming when I can schedule it). Most of the articles, 99.999% at least, have been written by me.

We don’t get a lot of donations but we get a couple here and there. That helps cover the costs, plus people can now advertise here on the site. That’s helpful. I do love my CDN though it (and hosting) are expenses.

This has taken a whole lot of my time. I value my time, but I guess I also value the site. Otherwise, I’d have stopped publishing articles. One of these days I’ll quit but I plan on keeping up with the schedule for the time being.

That schedule? Well, you get a new article every other day. Most of those articles don’t contain any major errors, which is nice. I can’t be perfect all of the time, but I do my best. You’re welcome.

I’m working my way towards a million visits. That’s nice.

Here are the most popular articles:

How To: Remove AppArmor From Ubuntu
Change Between CLI and GUI Mode
How To: Disable Sleep And Hibernation on Ubuntu Server

Once upon a time, I was stoked to see 20 visits in a day. So, I guess I’ve built something here. Pardon me, but I’m a wee bit proud of my accomplishment. It has come a long way.

As such, I’m just going to keep this short.

Thank you. Thank you for your readership and encouragement. Here’s to another year. I think I’ve got another year of this in me. We’ll have to see. I’m bound to miss a day eventually, but this is three years without doing so (technically).

Closure:

That’s all, folks. I appreciate you.

Meta: The State Of Linux Tips #22

I don’t want to write a meta article today, but I said I would. I don’t prefer them, but I started writing them and continue to write them. Sometimes, though more seldom than not, they’re a small break between other articles. However, they’re mostly just a waste of time and energy.

But, I said I’d write this one today. By pure luck, it’s also a fine time to wrap up the end of 2023.

See…

THIS IS THE 500TH ARTICLE ON LINUX-TIPS!

That’s right. I’ve published 500 articles, many of them at an acceptable standard! Some have been abysmal and others are hits in the search engine results.

When I started this project, I did not know I’d keep it going this long. Even when Mother Nature conspired against me, which she’ll be doing again this coming Wednesday, I was able to cheat and at least claim that I had an article published. They were garbage, but they were articles that informed. They told you why you were getting no articles!

Mother Nature is entirely to blame. She does what she wants and there’s not a whole lot we can do to stop her when she’s bent on causing destruction. It is what it is, I suppose. Given my geographical location, I’m surprised that Mother Nature hasn’t caused more trouble. So far, we’ve been fairly lucky and able to get articles published.

A Quick Blurb About 2023:

So, in 2023, we experienced a 61% increase in unique monthly visitors and we experienced a 68% increase in monthly visitors.

Combined, we’ve used more than .5 TB of traffic. CDN traffic was about 350 GB of traffic. Backend traffic was about 135 GB of traffic. That’s a lot of bits and bytes!

Linux-Tips received $25 in donations over the year. This is definitely not a get-rich scheme. Any ad revenue goes straight to the CDN provider. Fortunately, they’re not all that expensive. You buy credits ahead of time and I’ve got a solid chunk of credits, though they’re wearing them down. It’s a new year, so I’ll add some more credits soon.

Google sent more than 116,000 visitors to Linux-Tips.
Google also accounts for (Chrome/Chromium/clones) 80% of the browsers.
Firefox is about 3.5% of the browsers.

Sites besides Google send me traffic!

Linux.org sent me more than 17.5k unique visitors and more than 51k visits.
Reddit sent me just 894 people – but they’re sort of 2nd on the list.
The real 2nd on the list is the old .gq site, but we’ll ignore that.

Here Are The Leading Articles:

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

What an odd assortment. You never know what search engines are going to like and you never know what people will be searching for. Ah well…

I also get some weird search engines.

You spend an average of 246 seconds on a page.

Most of you are from the US.
Most of you are technophiles.
Many of you are professionals.
Many of you are middle-class or higher.

I Get Other Traffic:

I get traffic from places I didn’t think I’d get traffic. These are some of the odd search engines out there, some of which give good results…

DuckDuckGo sent more than 6k visits.
StartPage sends about half of that.
Yandex sent about 1k.

I wasn’t indexed in Bing until recently. They sent like 500 people.

Those are tiny fractions of the overall traffic, but that’s okay. I’m happy to be helping people from all over the world. I even get traffic from China’s search engine.

The top 3 countries that send traffic would be:

United States Of America
Russia
India

However, that includes malicious traffic. The majority of malicious traffic also comes from (or uses a VPN and appears to be from) two of those countries. I’ll leave it to the reader to pick which two and I’ll leave it to the sociologists to decide why that is. We will not be digging into it in this article.

And, man… I get a lot of malicious traffic.

Just for one example, I’ve (not personally, it’s automated in many ways) dealt with more than 60,000 spam attempts in 2023 alone.

In just 24 hours, the site will be attacked 2,500 times – excluding spam attempts. Sometimes this number will double.

Don’t worry. This place is a fortress. You can knock on the door all day long and we should be good to go. And people do just that… They knock loudly and often! I use a multi-layer defensive system that has so far prevented unauthorized access.

Closure:

So, yeah… It takes longer to write this sort of article than it does to write a regular article. There are all sorts of other facts and figures I could share, but that’s enough for an overview and I don’t want to invest that much time. I’ve invested enough in an article that’ll be appreciated by a few dozen people.

I think the important takeaway is that this is the 500th published article on Linux-Tips. If it wasn’t for your readership and encouragement, I’d have quit this long ago. So, thank you! Thank you to those who read and comment.

Thank you to those who contributed thoughts, insight, additional information, donations, and ad revenue. Every little bit goes into the CDN kitty. LOL It’s not enough to pay for the base hosting, so I just kinda ignore that and it’s automatically deducted so I don’t think about it.

It will be a while before we’re at 1,000 articles – but we just might get there. I suppose our next major milestones will be 600 articles and the 3-year mark. The 3-year mark is coming right up. It will be in April. It’s hard to imagine that I’ve been doing this for that long, but I have proof that I have! I have lots and lots of proof that I’ve been doing it for this long.

Heck, I can use this as proof in a courtroom. “No, your honor. If you look at my life you’ll see that I don’t have time for committing crimes! I’m too busy doing other stuff! A giant portion of my time is spent with the Linux community.”

I think that’d work in any reasonable court!

Ah well…

Meta: Happy New Year From Linux-Tips!

So, it’s the start of a new year from Linux-Tips! Hopefully, your life is going well and you have grand plans (that you’ll accomplish) in the coming year. Now is the time to make those promises to yourself, or so they say. I’ve never had much luck with New Year’s Resolutions, but you might.

Which makes me ask this:

What plans do you have for your Linux computing in the new year?

You could resolve to learn Bash scripting or spend more time in the terminal. If such is your goal, you could resolve to spend time helping your favorite project. Another goal could be learning something new throughout the year, specifically about Linux.

You could also resolve to read this site every other day by signing up for the newsletter! LOL! You could even donate to cover some of the bandwidth costs at Linux-Tips! If forums are your thing, you could head on over to Linux.org to sign up for an account. There are all sorts of things to get you started on a new year’s worth of Linux learning.

Me? I’m going to keep doing what I do. I’ll continue writing more material for Linux-Tips. I’ll continue working within the community, as I already do. I enjoy giving my time to the community and so I do.

This site? I don’t want to turn this into one of those meta articles, but we’ve experienced 61% growth in unique visitors and 69% in visits. That’s pretty sweet considering the number of people complaining about Google’s more recent updates. (I get the vast majority of my traffic from search engines, specifically Google.)

So, we’ve had a pretty good year. I’ve enjoyed watching the growth and I’ll soon be posting the 500th article (which will be a real meta article). That’s an exciting accomplishment, in my opinion. Feel free to share your opinion.

Let’s have some fun in the terminal to celebrate the new year!

Happy New Year In The Terminal:

First, we want to install Figlet (FIGlet, technically – I think). You’ll need an open terminal, but that’s often accomplished by pressing the CTRL + ALT + T buttons on your keyboard.

With your terminal now open, follow the appropriate instructions:

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

sudo apt install figlet

1	sudo apt install figlet

RHEL/CentOS/etc:

sudo yum install figlet

1	sudo yum install figlet

So, yeah, that’s all that I can be sure of. Your distro may have this as well.

But, when you get Figlet installed, type the following into your terminal:

figlet Happy New Year

1	figlet Happy New Year

You should get an output similar to this:

$ figlet Happy New Year
 _   _                           _   _                __   __              
| | | | __ _ _ __  _ __  _   _  | \ | | _____      __ \ \ / /__  __ _ _ __ 
| |_| |/ _` | '_ \| '_ \| | | | |  \| |/ _ \ \ /\ / /  \ V / _ \/ _` | '__|
|  _  | (_| | |_) | |_) | |_| | | |\  |  __/\ V  V /    | |  __/ (_| | |   
|_| |_|\__,_| .__/| .__/ \__, | |_| \_|\___| \_/\_/     |_|\___|\__,_|_|   
            |_|   |_|    |___/

$ figlet Happy New Year

_ _ _ _ __ __

| | | | __ _ _ __ _ __ _ _ | \ | | _____ __ \ \ / /__ __ _ _ __

| |_| |/ _` | '_ \| '_ \| | | | | \| |/ _ \ \ /\ / / \ V / _ \/ _` | '__|

| _ | (_| | |_) | |_) | |_| | | |\ | __/\ V V / | | __/ (_| | |

|_| |_|\__,_| .__/| .__/ \__, | |_| \_|\___| \_/\_/ |_|\___|\__,_|_|

|_| |_| |___/

There… (Hit the expand button, if you must. And you probably must.)

A nice and easy way to celebrate New Year’s Day is with your Linux terminal and an application known as Figlet. You’ve learned nothing of importance. You’ve spent little time. And, well, you’ve got a holiday to celebrate or recover from. (Unless you’re on the other side of the planet, in which case this is a day late.)

HINT: Use man figlet to find the many other text formatting options. This should keep you amused for at least a few minutes. There’s more to the output than what I’ve demonstrated in a simple holiday article.

Closure:

Well, we’ve learned to use Figlet to celebrate the new year in the Linux terminal. It’s something so simple, that anyone can do it – assuming it’s in your default repositories. If it isn’t, you could try the Toilet application or you could compile the application. Both of those seem reasonably fun.

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…