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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 #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.

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…

Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #11

Today’s article is yet another meta article, in which I discuss the state of Linux-Tips. It’s basically an easy day for me and an article that lets you know how the site is progressing. It’s generally an easy article to write and I appreciate that.

This is a pretty long article. Longer than most. I do encourage folks to read it all, but I doubt that’ll change anything. 🙂

As folks may know, I pay a lot of attention to the site’s statistics and those statistics influence how I do things. I try to optimize the site, as best as I can, for the viewer. For example, the day this article will be published is on a Saturday. That’s the day I consistently get the least amount of traffic. So, that’s the day I’ll cover the state of Linux tips.

I’ve actually been wanting to write this article for a while. I’m really excited about some of the changes going on, especially now that Google has taken me out of the dog house for accepting a paid article. Yes, Google, I learned a lesson!

While you might not like that I optimize for Google, that’s where I get the majority of my traffic. I don’t get squat from other search engines, but Google loves my site! For a blog, I’m doing VERY WELL in the traffic growth department. We’ll give you some details below.

So, let’s just jump into the meta stuff and see where that goes.

The State Of Linux-Tips #11:

Let’s just get this started by sharing this:

Oh my! The site’s traffic is increasing rapidly. For example, in the past 28 days (the easiest stats for this), the site has shown up in 227,000 searches. Out of all those, nearly 4,000 people have clicked on those search results and visited Linux-Tips! (That’s actually a good percentage.)

Last month, the month of September, was the first time I’ve exceeded 10 GB of traffic. Now, the site’s mostly text with almost no images and almost no videos. That’s a lot of traffic, and it took over 9,000 unique visitors to reach that level.

To put that into some contrast, in January of this year I had a total of 6,400 unique visitors.

Also, in May I hit 7,800 visitors – but then Google threw me into the doghouse for the paid article. In June and July, I got about 7,200 unique visitors. In September, those visitors would visit 14,900 times! It’s amazing how fast the site is growing now that it’s out of the doghouse.

I should also mention that I was getting, in the previous 28 days as a running total, no more than 3,200 visits from Google. In less than the past month, that running total is what is represented by the 4,000 clicks mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago. Google considers this a ‘high traffic site’.

My most popular pages are:

How To: Disable Sleep And Hibernation on Ubuntu Server
How To: Restart TeamViewer From The Terminal
Let’s Learn How To Change The Default Terminal

Previously, the ScreenFetch vs Neofetch was the most popular article, and today it continues to get the most search results. Direct visits can sometimes outnumber that, so that’s why the stat might look a little weird.

I still use a CDN, a Content Delivery Network, for a variety of reasons. The biggest reason is that it means the site loads faster for people around the globe. When you load the site, you’re getting a cached result from a server somewhere near you, instead of needing to access my server directly.

The CDN recently stopped a DDoS attack. There was a CDN free tier but I am no longer in a position where the site fits the free tier, so it costs me even more money. As far as I know, it’s only useful for WordPress sites that use LiteSpeed as the server. That fits this site, so I use it. It works brilliantly, but I now use enough traffic to also have to pay for the CDN service.

It’s worth every penny, given how the site didn’t stumble in the slightest during the attacks. So far, donations only add up to like $10 USD. I do appreciate them and put the money towards hosting and the CDN. There aren’t any other real expenses. Ad revenue does help.

attempted DDoS attack — They gave up not long after, or so that’s what it appears to be. Good… It wasn’t working.

The site’s busiest days are Tuesday through Thursday. I’m not sure why Monday isn’t all that busy? Maybe folks encounter the problem on Monday and finally find my site on Tuesday? I really don’t know. I do know that I get a lot of traffic from within corporate networks, so that’s professionals searching the site – or entertaining themselves while they should be working.

There really aren’t that many newsletter subscribers. I’m thinking about making it pop up a notice when people visit, but that seems like it might be annoying. On the other hand, it’d likely result in more folks subscribing. Do you find those newsletter popups annoying? Do you sometimes see them and decide to enter your email? I know I do, but I’m sympathetic to others running websites.

From watching the way people work through the site, few scroll down far enough to actually see the newsletter. Putting it at the top seems like a worse idea than a popup. If you have any thoughts on the matter, feel free to leave a comment. I could use some input.

Anyhow…

Closure:

As you can tell, I’m pretty happy about the growth. Not a whole lot of folks click ads, so the site really isn’t making much of anything for ad revenue, but it does make a little. Then again, money wasn’t really the point. I do want the site to at least break even, but I dunno if it’ll ever do that. That’s all I really care about. I don’t want to make money, I have enough. I do want the site to break even, just as a matter of principle.

Either way, this is the most excited I’ve ever been about a meta article. Things are going great, according to all the stats I keep. As for the stats, don’t worry, I couldn’t single anyone out if I tried. I don’t store any personal information because it just seems like the right thing to do. Your privacy is reasonably assured when you visit. I too value my online privacy – sometimes. Other times I’m an open book, but I like to pick when and where that happens!

Also, in case anyone is confused… I do store any information you give me. But, I only keep what I need to make the site work. I figure if I don’t store information, I can’t lose the information. I obviously store your email address if you sign up for the newsletter or register for the site. It’d be pretty hard for those things to function without that.

The rest of it is information I really don’t care about and don’t care to keep. If you give me your address so that I can send you something, you can be certain that I deleted it afterwards ’cause I don’t want to be in charge of securing that securely.

Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #10

This is going to be another meta article, where we cover the state of Linux-Tips. This is the 10th such installment, I do believe. I did go back and count at one point, but not all that well or that deeply. Not all meta articles have been the state of Linux-Tips. So, this is #10, even if it’s not #10.

I think the big news is that we’re out of the doghouse with Google. Last month we averaged a few hundred unique visitors every day. This month looks like it’s going to be even better. I dare say I learned my lesson.

The site still chews through a bunch of bandwidth, for a site like this. We chew through the CDN data pretty quick. Fortunately, I can cover it when it inevitably goes over the current level.

I actually got a donation! It was for $5.00. PayPal decided I’m a business account, so they happily took their fees from it. I no longer have access to ‘Friends and Family’ payments. Damn it, PayPal! Though, in their defense, I am a business – and conducted quite a bit of fee-free business through them in the past. For the services they provide, it’s really not that expensive. Sign up to be a credit card processor and check out those fees!

I was pretty pleased with the donation. I don’t need the money, but it gave me a sense of purpose – of value. It felt good to know I was appreciated. That makes TWO donations! I’m gonna be rich!

Some Meta Stuff For Linux-Tips:

In the past 28 days the site has shown up in Google searches 180,000 times. Only a little over 3000 people clicked. That was improving from my days in the Google penalty box.

(Keep in mind that Google actually sucks at some of these numbers. I have the raw server logs. They really, really suck with some of them. We’ve actually shown 55,000 pages so far this month alone.)

Most of my traffic comes from Google. They tell me that the vast majority of people are on desktops. The vast majority of visitors arrive from organic search.

The most popular pages have changed. Here are the three most popular pages:

How To: Disable Sleep And Hibernation on Ubuntu Server

Repair Your Linux Filesystem With a Live USB or DVD

How To: Restart TeamViewer From The Terminal

Though, screenfetch vs. neofetch seems to be the article that shows up in search the most.

Since I’ve was let out of the Google penalty box, I haven’t had a day with less than 200 unique visitors. (That’s a good amount for a fairly new site that doesn’t do a lot of SEO and does no paid promotion.)

We’re sitting at 260 articles, with one being hidden. We’ve had a new article every day since the site first started. Obviously, we’re well past the year I originally set aside for the project.

There are ads here on Linux-Tips and they get the occasional click. Most of my readers are technical users and tend to block ads. It’d be pretty sweet if you’d whitelist this site in your ad blocker. They’re just Google ads. They won’t hurt you. If you were really trying to hide from Google, you’d block their analytics. Meh… Or not… It’s up to you. I’ve long since decided that finances aren’t that important. ‘Snot like I’m going to stop paying in the near future.

Lemme think…

Closure:

Anything else? No? It had been a while since I last did a meta article. I should do them once a month or so. They’re easy enough to write, but they don’t really contain any useful information.