404

I admit it was very tempting to celebrate the 404th post on this blog, rather than the 400th. Just like 1024 instead of 1000.

Incidentally however, recent events mean that the 404 jokes may turn into reality as two proposed bills are discussed and probably passed in the US.

Normally we stay away from from politics here at the official WordPress project

but the proposals of SOPA and PIPA have serious impacts on the way we can use the internet. From the Wikipedia article:

Threat to online freedom of speech

Negative impact on websites that host user content

Weakening of “safe harbor” protections for websites

General threat to web-related businesses

Threat to users uploading content

Threat to internal networks

Threat to free and open source software

Ineffectual against piracy

Deep-packet inspection and invasion of privacy

Negative impact on DNS, DNSSEC and Internet security

No doubt that in recent days SOPA is covered more frequently in online tech magazines:

Help Stop SOPA/PIPA

Reddit is ready for SOPA and PIPA protest

Fighting Internet piracy: CES takes on SOPA vs. OPEN debate

Is a pro-PIPA lobbying group guilty of e-mail “content theft?”

Congress considers anti-piracy bills that could cripple Internet industries

How SOPA would affect you: FAQ

Over 40 Internet Companies Come Out Publicly Against SOPA (Including Us)

Anonymous will shut down to protest SOPA

reddit going dark for a day to protest SOPA online censorship bill

See Ars Technica for stories about some supporters of the bill

MPAA attacks Ars for “challenging efforts to curb content theft”

Smoking guns, dark secrets aplenty in YouTube-Viacom filings

At least one of the upcoming episodes of The Daily Show promises some fun. Can’t wait for January 18.

New Year 2012

This blog received 134.000 visits in 2011, totaling 326.000 since its begin in 2007.

I published 97 posts in 2011, totaling 395 since 2007.

The blog’s Table of Contents (created by wpxslgui) has been updated to include all posts up to December 2011.

Happy New Year 😉

300.000 Views, and some Spam

This blog as recently passed the 300.000 views mark, and I want to thank the regular and not-so-regular readers for visiting.

I noticed a slight increase in views recently, which is probably due to Google tweaking their search results, but who knows.

I also want to thank WordPress and Akismet for saving me from the deluge of spam comments throughout the years. The Akismet stats say that some 62.000 spam comments have been filtered, the majority of them in this year alone!

For some time I also ran a forum, but I had to close it again because it was mainly visited by spam bots, and the software did not provide effective mechanisms to prevent them from posting.

Most of the recent link spam is in the form

[…] (post title) « devioblog[…]…

so it’s fairly easy to detect. I also figure that huge amounts of comments from the same IP range on a large number of blogs is an obvious indicator of spam.

Some bots still pretend to be human, and congratulate me for my style, content or design

Did you design the design this well with the default design tools? Your design is incredible

We loved your website so much

Yes, thank you too. And some texts are simply meant to make it through the language filter

Thank you a lot for providing individuals with remarkably splendid possiblity to read in detail from this blog. It is often so excellent and jam-packed with a good time for me personally and my office fellow workers to visit your site nearly 3 times in a week to see the fresh items you have got. And indeed, I am always contented with the tremendous principles you serve. Selected 1 facts in this posting are ultimately the most effective we’ve had.

I loved as much as you will receive carried out right here. The sketch is tasteful, your authored material stylish. nonetheless, you command get got an shakiness over that you wish be delivering the following. unwell unquestionably come more formerly again since exactly the same nearly a lot often inside case you shield this hike.

In the last couple of days spam related to Windows and Office product keys and key generators made me wonder whether Microsoft and other software vendors also maintain blogs here or elsewhere, and use the IP address and URLs provided in the spam comments to identify the spammers?

Fourth Anniversary

12 month summary:

• Started the Series category to collect posts on the same topic

• New applications VS Solution Dependency Visualizer (web) and cmd.net (web)

• Updates to SMOscript (web)
• Preparing the release of the next version of dbscript (web)

The raw sums: 282,000 views, 375 posts, 6,500 downloads.

First Quarter Million

The first quarter million is the hardest 😉

Thanks for visiting this blog and finding it useful.

Surprise Surprise

The most successful month of this blog so far (most hits per day, most hits per month), happily escaping April Fools’ day, and then this:

Thanks 😉

200k and Referrer Spam

Thanks to you all I passed the 200.000 hit mark yesterday!

This blog has been target of referrer spam recently, but thankfully this has died off again.

The referrer was a blog behind an ad wall (does not seem to be a word yet) which contained the exact copy of a legit blog. With the “added value” of a blog ticker. Some things don’t make sense to me…

Update: More information and comments on the co.cc referrer spam on the LaMarotte blog and on the WordPress.com search page

http://en.search.wordpress.com/?q=referrer+spam&s=date&t=post

300th Post

300 posts in a little more than 3 years.

And a nice date, too: 11.1.11, or 1/11/11, depending on where you live.

I also updated the blog’s Table of Contents using my WordPress Export tool wpxslgui.

SO 10k

Total Reputation

Total Rep*	Users	Change
100,000+	17	0
50,000+	54	0
25,000+	140	+2
10,000+	645	+3

Third Anniversary

12 month summary:

Of course, there were a couple of releases of dbscript, my database versioning, documentation, and code generation application. Other applications such as SMOscript and oraddlscript were also updated for bug fixes or enhanced functionality.

I wrote wpxslgui, a tool to convert WordPress XML Exports into HTML and Word HTML. YuJisho is a CJK character web dictionary based on freely available dictionary data with a simple user interface and fast responses (below 1 second). checktsql is a small tool to check all T-SQL objects in a MS SQL Server database for validity and reports error caused by referencing missing objects.

Projects I worked on using Entity Framework and NHibernate also generated a couple of entries.

The raw numbers: 162,000 views, 285 posts, 4000 downloads.