State of the domain

As I did last year, I’m again reviewing the year from the perspective of blueslugs.com.

Overview. Over 2005, we served up a total of over 8.3 GB of data, through our standard static DSL line: almost an order of magnitude higher than last year. 5.6 GB was blueslugs.com, while the remaining 2.7 GB was from the new domain, highmaintenancemom.com, which is Dina’s electronic motherhood site. HMM only came online in April, and has been steadily building in traffic. Log analysis translates to over 930 000 hits and over 45 000 visitors. Over the year, 36 blog posts were written on ``As I did last year, I’m again reviewing the year from the perspective of blueslugs.com.

Overview. Over 2005, we served up a total of over 8.3 GB of data, through our standard static DSL line: almost an order of magnitude higher than last year. 5.6 GB was blueslugs.com, while the remaining 2.7 GB was from the new domain, highmaintenancemom.com, which is Dina’s electronic motherhood site. HMM only came online in April, and has been steadily building in traffic. Log analysis translates to over 930 000 hits and over 45 000 visitors. Over the year, 36 blog posts were written on``

Content. The most popular page on the site this year was the introduction of tag(1), a Unix-like command for tagging files. I have a long overdue post that analyzes the incoming traffic associated with the post, which hit a few of the “emergent importance” sites as well as getting mentioned on some individual blogs. (I have an equally overdue response regarding some of the technical and quasi-social analysis of the utility of tag(1).) Pages from Benjamin‘s alphabet book are still regularly requested: the alphabet page trailed tagging by only a few hundred hits. (Each had over 16 000.) The grammar page is the top individual page, but the country flags and mathematicians images get pulled in via search terms. Search engine passes and syndication feed pulls are as or more regular than ever.

Beyond the tag(1) release, I ported Audacity to Solaris x86, which helped a few people, based on downloads. The dockapps I wrote a few years ago still get pulled regularly. Most of my Solaris posts are published at my work blog, but I’m still exploring “personal (Unix) computing” posting as a topic to cover here.

My Redwood City writings dropped off; I must get back to this topic, as the downtown theatres are nearly full built, and the commercial changes—new restaurants!—have already started. Or maybe midterm elections will prove interesting…

System. As chronicled, we unexpectedly had to replace the server due to hardware failure. This system is, of course, faster than its predecessor and, even with the higher load of the two sites, is essentially idle. The site data is on a UFS partition with triple mirroring via SVM, but I expect to experiment with ZFS after the next software upgrade.

The system is presently running Solaris 10 03/05 with appropriate patches; the current Web stack was built by hand, as HMM software requirements required somewhat atypical settings. Expect to receive bits served from Solaris Express builds in the next few months.

Future. I doubt we’ll launch another site this year, so I expect no new leaps in traffic. One possibility is a DSL upgrade; I believe the higher speed version approximately twice guaranteed bandwidth, but I haven’t heard anyone talking about what they’re actually getting. Although I like having a camera phone, the camera I bought takes such better pictures that, if I’m going to post pictures, they’ll be taken with a real camera. And I would like to get the backlog of partial posts under control—I started a notebook for post ideas, but I seem to be filling the book, rather than the blog.