meta Archives • Linux Tips

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.

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Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #20

Today’s article will just be a meta article, not a complicated article, and just the state of Linux-Tips. As you can tell by the numbering, I don’t remember to do this every month, but I try to. I figure it’s fun to share what’s going on behind the scenes.

The process of writing these articles can take as much time as it does to write a ‘regular’ article. They often take longer than that. That’s okay. I still try to write them.

Things are going well enough. The site continues to grow. The site attracts more and more attention. It is a slow growth, but it’s far more growth than I ever expected. Once upon a time, I was happy to see 20 visits (per day) in my logs. In the past month, we’ve had 4 days with over 1000 visits.

As you can imagine, this is expensive. It’s still well within the realm of affordable. The only two real expenses (I don’t count my time as an expense, though I probably should) are hosting and then paying for a CDN.

If you’ve donated in the past, thanks! You’re still invited to help pay for stuff – but, as I said, it’s still within the realm of affordable. There’s no chance I’ll close the site due to operating costs. Regardless of how large the site gets, I’ll keep the site up and running.

Hosting costs are up there. The server has been upgraded to 8x the RAM it had. I was running into resource limits and it was impacting the site’s public side. So, that had to be addressed.

How about some numbers?

Security:

I don’t talk about security much. I don’t want people to know a whole lot of what goes on behind the scenes, at least as far as security is concerned. What’s important is that I use a multi-layer approach.

Spam is mostly eliminated. If it’s an automated bot, it’s going to have issues posting here. However, some people in low-wage countries have people who are willing to spam manually. It’s a nuisance as I have to go through and remove it manually. It never gets published.

How about some numbers…

This is some automated spam protection:

Oddly, these next numbers are low, they’re usually about 10x this amount. I suppose that means the site’s not under attack today. It could also be that other measures have stopped the attacks.

There are many varied attacks when you run a WordPress site. — Those numbers are usually much, much higher. The low numbers make me happy!

As you can see, the next numbers show that I’ve managed to block pretty much all brute force attacks. This is yet another layer of security.

WordPress gets lots of attacks. — Those numbers are pretty good too, which is nice. I do not pay for the premium subscription.

The next is one of the first layers of security – where I keep the login portion of the site secure. The image won’t make much sense, in part. I have no idea what the graphic is meant to represent – but the three successful attempts were all me. (I use 2FA, so ain’t nobody gonna access the ACP.)

You need to block brute force login attempts. — These are just people who tried to brute force or password guess to gain access.

I really could use a competent WordPress administrator to monitor all this for me. Then again, I don’t think I’d want to cede control.

Popular Stuff:

I’m just going to use Google for the next section. I won’t bother showing the numbers because they’re inaccurate. Google doesn’t seem to count those that block their scripts, meaning they’re useless for some analytic numbers. They’re still proportionately correct and easily visualized, so they’re not completely useless.

The vast majority of my traffic comes from Google. Like, 90% of my traffic comes from Google. People sometimes wonder why I deal with Google and the reason is that it’s worth it (to me) to do so.

These are the top 10 pages found by Google Search:

On the other hand, according to Google’s Analytics (again, these numbers are skewed but still sort of useful), different pages attract the bulk of my traffic. That’s a bit unusual but neat.

Most active pages on the Linux-Tips site. — Those are (according to Google) the most active pages on the site.

So, there’s some new information for you.

Meta Article:

I suppose it wouldn’t be a meta article without some more numbers… Well, I have some more numbers! I love numbers and pay quite a bit of attention to numbers.

Also, I bought a new domain name and now I’m looking for motivation to write about being a WordPress admin. We’ll see how that goes, but I haven’t found much motivation yet.

This is the 450th article published on this site.
A new article is published every other day, so far without fail.
There are 341,874 words.
It would take you 22 hours, and 47 minutes to read it all.
The longest article is How To: Ask A Good Support Question.
There have been 206 approved comments.
So far this month there have been 21,226 visitors.
We’ve used 43 GB of traffic so far this month.

Closure:

Well, there are some numbers for you. I figured I’d spice it up a little bit and share some different information this time around. It’s just a meta article, after all. Taking, uploading, formatting, and filling in meta information for images can take a bit of time, so this article has taken me longer than normal. Imagine that!

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Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #19

Today we’re just going to have a look at some of what’s going on here at Linux-Tips, with an article about the state of Linux-Tips. It’s a regular thing that I try to do. I don’t always remember and I don’t always have anything new to share. So, as you can see, there are fewer meta articles than there are months the site has existed.

I almost didn’t write one this month but fate decided to be a cruel mistress…

See, I’m not always ahead of the curve. A lot of the time, I write an article the night before it is due to be published. I often have a spare article that can fill in if I am somehow prevented from writing that article. Alas, I do not have such an article, though I did consider updating an older article.

But, I mentioned fate. Fate is a fickle mistress and it was fate that decided my internet connection would barely work – when it did work. So, rather than take my sleep meds, I stayed awake late just so that I could write this article.

I had another article planned, but it requires some research and screenshots. Those have to be uploaded. My current connection speed isn’t all that dissimilar to dial-up rates. There will be no uploading of images tonight.

Sure, you might think that I’d learn my lesson and always have a spare article, but that’s just not going to happen. Nobody has been willing to write any articles lately, so that means I must write all of them myself. To do so with this consistency is, frankly, amazing. I dare say that I’m unique in these regards, especially with this time frame.

So, you get a meta article…

It takes longer to write these than it takes to write a regular article, but it’s less bandwidth than the article I had planned. I’m going to take my sleep meds and hope this is finished in time.

The State Of Linux-Tips:

This is a good thing…

During those moments of interruption, where I couldn’t even load the full page (it’s huge) to write the article, I was seeing 12 to 15 people online at the same time. That’s insane. That’s well and truly insane.

I used to be amazed if I had 20 visitors in a day. This month, I’m averaging almost 700 visits per day. I am so grateful for the opportunity to share my writing with that many people. Yes, those numbers pale against the big sites, but they’re huge to me.

So, not much has changed since the last meta article. The same browsers are performing the same as they did last month. The same web pages are proportionally the same as they are this month. To save me some time, why not read the previous article:

Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #18

The big news was in the last meta article:

Meta: Getting Indexed In Bing

I am so excited about being indexed in Bing! However, it means pretty much nothing in terms of the total number of visitors. They say that Bing has 3% of the search market, but that’s not what I’m seeing.

I realize Bing just started sending me traffic, but they’ve sent 85 visitors out of over 20,000 visitors. I mean, that’s great and all, but they don’t amount to much. Today has been a good day with over 1000 visitors. Bing’s traffic is a tiny amount – but I’m still so grateful and so excited.

You know, at the top of each article is a tool to help you share the articles with various link services and social media services. I should probably remove it as it’s wasted bandwidth. As near as I can tell, it has never been used – and it has been there since the very first day of the site’s existence.

Ad revenue doesn’t add up to a whole lot. We will chew through 35 GB worth of CDN traffic this month. I do get a donation now and then, and I appreciate it greatly. It goes straight into the costs of running this site. As I’ve said many times, regardless of the financial aspect, the site will remain running – until I either kick the bucket or run out of stuff to say.

I have done some SEO stuff. The site has a DR of 30 on AHREFS. SEMRush seems to also like the site. It’s interesting to pay attention to that stuff, but I have no idea what I’m doing. SEO is beyond my ability. Heck, I’m not even a qualified admin!

I did apply to be an affiliate of a service I love, but they not only turned us down they refused to send an email explaining why. I was pretty disappointed in the company, but I still use their product. Frankly, it’s the best in the industry. They approve sites with less traffic and they approve sites with far more controversial topics. Ah well…

So, yeah, not a heck of a lot has changed. Copy and paste the results from last month, add more traffic, add more articles, add more words, and you’ve got the same thing going on this month.

And that’s okay. It’s not explosive growth, but it’s consistent growth. As a businessperson, I’ve long since learned to appreciate consistent growth over bursts that can be inconsistent and harmful. The site’s in a good place right now and let’s hope it continues to grow.

Closure:

Again, I consider it quite an honor to get this much traffic. The list of things I do not know could fill a book, but I share what I do know. I don’t think we’ll ever suffer from a lack of article ideas. If we do, we can just repackage the old articles and pretend they’re new – just like all the other sites do!

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Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #18

Today we’re just going to have another meta article, as I like to do now and then. We haven’t had a meta article in quite a while. These are articles that are just a quick look at what goes on here behind the scenes, an article about how the site is coming along.

I would like to do a meta article every month but there’s not always something worth writing about. As such, I haven’t needed to write a meta article in going on two months. Not much has changed but now’s a fine time to write one.

So, things are going just fine. You may have noticed an outage. The outage was because we were being whisked away to a new server and things did not go as smoothly as planned. Things might have gone better, but I have a fairly complex setup and use a CDN that requires things like an IP address.

I couldn’t even log in to the WordPress control panel, so I knew something was wrong. I was initially concerned that we were hacked, but we weren’t. There had been a DDoS (or at least a whole lot of traffic), but that was at the server level, not the account level. Or, at least it wasn’t my site being attacked specifically.

So, we’re now housed in a New York data center. We moved from Dallas. You won’t notice because I use a CDN. Very little traffic reaches the server directly. You access cached content at a server in your geographical location.

There are endpoints around the globe that cache my content and present it to you. That’s why my site should appear to have nearly 100% uptime (barring server moves) and why the site should load quickly, irrespective of your location on the planet. Ideally, you never even need to know that the server is located in New York, but now you do.

I am sorry about the outage and the trouble caused. I take full responsibility. There’s no reason to think this will happen again in the near future. We should be just fine for the foreseeable future, though I may someday need to move to a bit more robust hosting. This is starting to get to be a large site.

A Meta Article:

So, things are going about as well as they were. Traffic ebbs and flows and we’re in the “summer slowdown” right now, which is when people spend more time outside and not online. This is a well-known internet phenomenon and appears to apply to Linux geeks as well. That’s okay, I’m still getting plenty of traffic.

I’ve decided to share a couple of pictures. They’ll explain a bit. However, you should be aware that web stats aren’t ever all that accurate. These are close enough…

Let’s look at the operating systems that visit Linux Tips:

Statistics - operating system — Those are the operating systems visiting the site.

Let’s have a look at the browsers used by Linux Tips visitors:

These are the browsers that visit Linux Tips. — Again, the accuracy is limited. Chrome will be browsers that identify as such.

So, those are the operating systems and browsers used to visit us here at Linux Tips. You can notice a trend. Those numbers have been pretty static for a while, or at least similar in their percentage values.

This will make the 414th article.
I’ve never missed a publication date.
There are more than 300,000 words in these articles.
The average is 769 words per article.
It’d take you 20h 43 minutes to read the site.
It’d take longer, as you have to wait for load times.

My most popular pages have changed recently. I do not know why. I do not understand the workings of Google. I try to practice good SEO and have a bunch of articles that rank okay for some search terms, but I don’t know why some are ranked higher than others – especially as I write almost all of them to a formula.

Anyhow, these are the most Googled pages:

How To: Quickly Restart The Cinnamon Desktop Environment
Pause And Unpause Your Terminal
Disable Printing And CUPS

I have no idea why those articles are now more popular, but they are.

Either way, I’ve already used up about 20 GB of traffic so far this month, and we’re not even 2/3rds of the way through the month. I did get a donation, which was pretty sweet. The CDN appreciated it. As I’ve said before, there are donation links on every page – but the site’s gonna stay up and running even if you do not donate. So, while they’re appreciated I’m still going to pay for the hosting and extra bandwidth.

Oh, most of my traffic (by far the vast majority of my traffic) comes in via search engines. But, Linux.org is where I get most of my direct referral traffic. Most of you use the “www” subdomain:

Most of my direct referral traffic comes from Linux.org. — See? Those Linux.org folks visit fairly regularly.

I don’t do much with Reddit. The links just get automatically published there, but it’s a small subreddit that pretty much only gets my posts. It has almost no subscribers. I don’t try to promote it. I probably should, ’cause Reddit has a whole lot of traffic.

Let’s see… I’ve covered almost everything, I think…

Oh, there are ads. If you would like to do so, you can easily whitelist this site in your ad-blocking extension. They don’t pay much, but it’s nice that they do.

Yeah, I think that’s about it.

Closure:

Well, there you have it… You have another article and this time it is a long-overdue meta article. They’re a pain in the butt to write and it’s easier to write about technical things, but I try to remember to write one every so often. Today just seemed like that day.

This time, I mixed it up and included some graphics. That’ll save me some time! (Actually, I probably could have typed out the necessary data faster than I could have taken the screenshot, uploaded it, edited it for publication, and inserted it into the article.) But, still, it’s something different.

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Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #17

Today you’re just going to get a quick meta article, where I go over the state of Linux-Tips (this site, obviously). It has been a while since I did the last one, so it’s time to do another one. I’m thinking I’ll keep this one brief. I’ve had an adventure today, dealing with some medical stuff, so a low-energy article is a good idea.

I try to do a meta article every month. I haven’t always managed to do so, but it’s a sorta goal. It’ll be fun to share what’s going on. It’s not all that informative, but I try to make it as interesting as this kind of article can be.

So, if you want a day off you can just skip this article. If you’re interested in what’s going on, read on and enjoy the meta article.

The State Of Linux-Tips #17

So, traffic really hasn’t grown or changed much. This month we’re going to do better than last month, but not drastically so. Google appears a little annoyed with the site again, but I don’t worry any more. Frankly, the site gets plenty of traffic as it is.

Someone did donate recently. I’m grateful for that. The funds went to pay for hosting, though I suppose they more specifically went straight to my CDN provider. Why is it worth the money to pay for a CDN?

The site loads quickly no matter where you are on the planet. On top of that, you’ve never seen a minute of real downtime. You might have seen a temporary screen while updates happened, but the server has pretty much 100% uptime. I decided to add a monitor fairly recently – but in that time the server hosting the site has gone down.

This site did no such thing. The CDN still presented you with static content, which is what this site mostly is. If you attempted to interact with the site during the outage, the CDN (it’s both WordPress and LiteSpeed specific) will cache your request and process it when the site is back online. So, you’ve almost certainly never seen the site go down.

Now that I said that, watch there be some big outage that takes the site offline for a few hours! Ah well… I’ll risk it. If you whois the domain, you’ll see the nameservers which will clue you in as to which CDN I use. They’re very specialized and likely won’t work for many of you. I think it’s worth it, but it’s an annoying monthly fee. (Even if I have to fund it entirely by myself, I will continue doing so. Donations are nice, but the site will survive without them.)

Anyhow, thanks for the donation! (I have to find the motivation to wrap the site up as a PDF to give away to people who donate, something planned for the future, but I’ll make sure it’s available for them. That seems like a good idea.

Some Stats:

So, like always, the VAST MAJORITY of my traffic comes from Google. I suppose the state of Linux-Tips depends heavily on the traffic.

Well, this might not seem like much, but last month we went through more than 35 GB of bandwidth. I’m having some issues with backups, so the site was also using almost 20 GB of disk space. That disk space consumption has since been reduced significantly!

Some Demographics:

Roughly 92% of my traffic is from Linux users.
Just about 80% of my traffic is from Chrome/Chromium-based browsers.
Roughly 80% of my traffic originates in the United States.

The top 3 articles read in the past month:

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

Other Stuff:

The site is attacked about 400 times on an average day.
Most of the attacks appear to come from compromised servers.
Only about 70 people have signed up for the newsletter.
AWStats claims I’ve displayed > 600,000 pages in May.
There are about 50 articles that show up in Google’s top ten listings.
As I learn more, I realize I have no business being a WordPress admin.
This changed! In May people spent an average of 171 seconds on the site.
One visitor was using Symbian OS.
Four visits were from someone using Sun Solaris.
We’re now over 280,000 words on the site.
It’d take you 19+ hours to read all of that.

Closure:

And there you have it… You have another meta article, an article about the state of Linux-Tips. You probably didn’t learn anything important, but now you know what’s going on here and what you can expect in the future. I expect to continue to write these articles for the foreseeable future. Don’t forget that I accept on-topic guest articles. (I get so many requests for stuff that’s not on-topic. I’ve stopped responding to the people too lazy to read the site and understand what’s going on here.)

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Tag: meta

Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #21

Some Numbers:

Sponsorship:

Search Engines:

What Can You Do?

Closure:

Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #20

Security:

Popular Stuff:

Meta Article:

Closure:

Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #19

The State Of Linux-Tips:

More:

Closure:

Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #18

A Meta Article:

Closure:

Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #17

The State Of Linux-Tips #17

Some Stats:

Some Demographics:

The top 3 articles read in the past month:

Other Stuff:

Closure: