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.
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.
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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 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.)
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.
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:
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…
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It’s time for another meta article. These are just articles where I take a bit of a break and write about the site itself. Some of them have been a little tough to write, but this one promises to be pretty darned easy. (I try to avoid swearing on the site, but sometimes I notice I did when I get to the editing phase. In real life, I swear like a trooper, depending on the company I keep.)
You won’t learn anything major from this article, and none of what you learn will be about Linux! You have been warned!
Well, I haven’t written the article yet – but that stands to reason! I don’t plan on writing anything even remotely educational in this article. I won’t even have to use the code blocks for anything – and you won’t even need to open a terminal! That’s right, it’s an article where you do not have to crack open your terminal. (I cut and paste that instructional ext, mixing it up a little from time to time.)
So, well, I do kinda wish I’d started these meta articles off by numbering them. Then I could kinda keep track of how many I’ve written. I suppose I could still filter it and figure that out. Lemme check…
I’ve used the meta tag for some pretty silly stuff – perhaps by accident. This would be like the 8th one that’s really about the site itself. Maybe I’ll remember to call the next one “#9”. There are a couple of other ‘meta’ articles where I’m not quite sure why I used the tag or title. Ah well… It was probably wine.
The State Of Linux-Tips #8:
So, not that long ago there was an article that I posted without disclosing any details. Let’s just say lessons have been learned. I think even Google noticed, ’cause my traffic hasn’t really grown any since the last time I wrote one of these.
In fact, pretty much all the same data from the last one would apply to this one. In a few areas, my traffic actually decreased a little – not much, but a little. The gains made with keywords like ‘apt purge‘ ranking pretty high seem to be countered by fewer clicks on the other articles.
Basically, it’s a wash… I think Google punished me for about a month, because traffic seems to be increasing again. You can help with that, you know. Share the articles on your favorite social media sites and that’ll help a great deal – more than donating or unblocking ads.
Speaking of ads, I got some money from AdSense and I see no reason to suspect the bills won’t get paid. Well, they’re gonna get paid regardless. So, there’s that, which is nice!
Literally, the same popular content from last time is the same popular content from this time. It’s almost as if Google put me into stasis, or something. So, I do believe I’ve learned a lesson regarding publishing content from other people with different objectives.
Speaking of which, you can also help by writing an article. I’ll clean it up and make it suitable for publication, including formatting and digging for links as needed. That’d be great. It’s summer and I’m pressed for time. So, that’d really help. You might want to make sure that it’s not something I’ve already covered! We’ve got a ton of content already.
Closure:
That’s it, really! I just wanted to touch base with an easy meta article. Normally, they’re a bit more complicated than this. This time, nothing major has changed. Even my drop in traffic is closer to just staying the same and not increasing in traffic as I have been. It’s down like 1.3% – or pretty much a rounding error. However, the site has been experiencing linear growth – which, mixed with other numbers, makes me think we won’t be seeing a repeat of the article shared a month or so ago.
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.
I like to do a meta article once in a while, a bit of a break from the normal writing and the chance to just speak about whatever is going on with the site itself. Today, today is one of those meta articles.
More than a year ago, I set out to put my notes online. More than a year later, I’m not even close to complete – and I’ve consistently published an article every other day for just about a year. I still have tons of notes.
The site started off on a .gq domain – a free domain – that was universally hated by every search engine on the planet. On top of that, getting a .gq TLD email through spam filters was pretty much impossible.
At one point, I decided I’d take the project a little more seriously and moved to a .us domain name. You could say that that’s when Linux Tips was truly born. I also decided to reset the clock and to start the year over again. I figured the new site would be motivation and that I could probably keep it going without missing too many days. (Note: I’ve so far missed no days!)
And, like all good things, that year is coming to an end. The very first article on the new domain was Welcome To Our New Home! – on April 16th, 2021. For those who can’t use a calendar, or use a different calendar, that means we’re just about 2 weeks from the official end of this project.
Many of you will have read the comments in my “Closure” sections and already have guessed what I’m going to say next.
The Future:
I plan on keeping the site going. I plan on continuing to put my notes online and the interesting things I discover.
You might ask why, and I think I’d point to a few reasons (among the many).
I am learning so much.
I am still having fun.
The results have been amazing.
Not a day goes by these days without at least a couple hundred unique visitors. It’s not unique to get twice that many – enough so that I’m now crossing into a position where I am just going to pay for CDN services. (I’m happy with the company I’m currently using and their rates are reasonable.)
Technically, assuming my cost for my time was zero, the site has made a few bucks with the Google Ads. It’s reaching the point where it’s likely to cover expenses – including covering the CDN. I’ve long since come to grips with the fact that it’ll never pay me for my time – and I’m okay with that.
By the way, the CDN isn’t because I worry about bandwidth, it’s because it makes the site faster to load. Google loves a site that loads quickly and this site now ranks pretty high for a bunch of keywords and phrases. Making sure the site is responsive is a definite part of modern SEO. (These are things I’ve mostly had to learn on the fly. Like I said, it has been pretty educational.)
Actually, for the month of March, the site averaged ~250 unique visitors per day. It chewed through about 10 GB (not much) bandwidth – but most of that was CDN bandwidth. The CDN company lets me pay for what I use and not some flat rate, which is nice.
So, you can assume I’ll still keep the site going. Granted, I still have a couple of weeks to decide and may change the publication schedule – but the site’ll remain here and get additional content.
Some Meta Stuff:
Seeing as I’m here, I might just as well give you some other numbers. It seems like the thing to do, and I’ve done something like this in past meta articles. Traffic has steadily increased. Traffic has steadily improved by every metric, with people spending more and more time on the site. Truth be told, I’m quite amazed at the success. At one point, I was legitimately happy when I’d get 25 visitors in a single day.
I mentioned search engine traffic above and, like the most recent norms, the vast majority of unique visitors came from search engines. Google alone sent me ~5200 visitors – surprisingly some of them were repeat visitors.
A much smaller number of visitors – but still the most from any site other than a search engine – was (of course) Linux.org. It’d be nice to get some more traffic from other places (while not losing traffic from Linux.org). You can help with that!
You Can Help!
I know y’all have social media accounts. Well, some of you… You can easily share to the major social media sites. I made it really, really easy. There are quick links to do so at the top of every article. If your favorite social media site isn’t there immediately – it might be in the menu under the plus arrow – pointed to in the following image.
The big ones are listed (I can add more at request) and the rest are hidden.
There are literally like 100 social media sites hidden under the arrow and by clicking on the more option. When they say ‘more’, they aren’t kidding. There are sites in there I’ve never even heard of before!
If you participate on Reddit, you can share it in the Linux subredits without making me look like a spammer! I’d do it myself, but that’s just bad form. Actually, I have done it myself – and had some solid results – but it felt kinda icky and one subreddit banned me without warning.
There are still other ways to help… You can donate, you can write articles, you can just vote on the articles, you can leave comments with additional information, and you can sign up for the newsletter – that only sends messages when new articles are published.
If you want to help in some way, just let me know. I hate proofreading but I do it anyhow. A skilled editor would be pretty sweet. Some more guest articles would be fun. Oddly, I get emails asking me if they can pay me for a guest article (and the nofollow links in it), but I decline those offers.
I’d accept the articles if they were topical, but I just can’t seem to figure out how investing strategy would be topical on this site. So, I don’t get to charge for those. I’m told they pay pretty well for a site such as this – like a few digit sum worth of money. I just really don’t want to sully the site with guest articles that don’t fit the subject.
Closure:
So, yeah… The site’s almost certainly going to keep going. I might relax a little and take a day off now and then, but that’s fine. Heck, I still have articles on the original site that haven’t migrated to this site. I suspect I have many articles left in me and I’m not yet bored to tears with the project.
It hasn’t always been easy. But, I’ve not missed a single day, even with a pandemic and internet outages. Even when sicker than a dog, you’ve had an article every other day. A couple of ’em weren’t all that good – but there were articles. I’ve even made a few mistakes along the way, but I love all the feedback I get that tells me when I messed up.
If the site is missing features, let me know. I might be able to do something. I’d toss up a forum, but I don’t want to be seen as competing with other forums. I have thought about chatting and setting up a few chat rooms. All the acceptable scripts are a bit more than I feel like paying, so I’ve never done much with it other than research it.
Anyways… One year is pretty much done. I don’t know what the future holds, but you can help shape that future. All you gotta do is step up and opine or offer to help.
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.
