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2,222 Blog Posts

2222 Posts

TODAY, after 18 years (this blog started in 2004), I am publishing the 2,222nd blog post. Over at Techrights we’ve just exceeded 34,000. TuxMachines approaches 170,000.

Techrights at 34k

Techrights at 34k
We’re made it!

I didn’t think we’d get here, but here we are. The “over 9,000″ jokes seem like only yesterday (I can still recall the IRC conversation about exceeding 9,000 blog posts) and since then, one grand (1,000) at the time, we kept climbing higher.

We have a large trove of material left to publish, but we’re pacing it down somewhat so as to not overwhelm readers. It’s strategic, too.

This past week we worked on developing a new CMS (a very simple one, but also very lightweight). We can’t wait to take it live. It’s probably safe to say that Techrights will still be around a decade from now; if the World Wide Web perishes, we still have IRC, IPFS, Gemini, and daily plain-text bulletins that can be dispatched in all sorts of ways. In a way, we’ve already secured our future.

This post will be the 33,999th one. Next up is the “real” 34k.

Tux Machines Improvements

roy rianne

OVER the past couple of weeks we have made major visual changes in Tux Machines, including modernisation that keeps up with new browser technologies like CSS3. Traffic in the site is growing fast and we hope to gain readers who are as passionate about Free software as we are.

Twitter is Dying, Twitter ‘Clones’ Died Long Ago

DYING is a crude term, I admit, but when something circles around the toilet’s spiral, then you know it’s inevitably dead. Based on some Web statistics I prefer not to name, while Twitter boasts expansion in the number of registered users (this number can hardly even decrease), it sure seems like fewer registered users log in or are being actively followed. This can be also felt by many existing (and sometimes long-lasting) users in the form of communication, participation, and “engagement” as marketing people like to call it. Before I joined Twitter I had posted a fair deal in Identi.ca, but ever since they moved to a new version of their software a lot of people jumped over to Google+ and other platforms. Having a lot of technical issues, including downtimes, contributed a lot to this. I am now the most prolific poster in Identi.ca, but how important is this platform anyway?

Now, some might say that Twitter et al. are the next MySpace. I would concur. And moreover, the likes of Facebook and Google+ are queued to follow. Facebook staff — not just outside investors — are reportedly dumping their stock this month. They would know. Yes, they see what’s going on inside Facebook.

My hope is that the next generation of social network will be self-hosted and communally-federated. The Diaspora project gives me hope that we already have the necessary code and some deployed platforms (pods) with reasonably good adoption.

Digg Stabs All Users in the Back, Deletes All Their Content, EVERYTHING!

THE site known as “Digg” did something worse than negligence; it’s destruction. The Digg which Kevin Rose had created sold us all out when it sold core assets for half a million dollars, apparently just meaning domain name (and no code that will actually be reused). FSDaily became bigger than Digg overnight. The site was sold to some NYC-based company, which as its first step decided to throw to the garbage can many people’s volunteer work (like over 10,000 submissions from me, over 13,000 comments from me, etc.). So perhaps hundreds of millions of pages are just gone, incinerated. This is a deja vu for me; Netscape/Propeller ended up just throwing away all the content because it doesn’t seem to make a profit for AOL.

The attitude here shows total disregard for the time and effort people have put into various Web site, never mind preservation of valuable public record.

For the disgusting decision made by the new owners of Digg.com, I honestly hope they quickly go out of business; no, not that they would go bankrupt and end up in the streets, just whatever can bring the old site back. What they do is unethical (they require Facebook for login, which in itself is comical) and they show zero respect for those who helped created Digg.com, at great cost to themselves and for no profit.

Looking Back at 5.5 Years of Techrights and 15,000 Posts

BACK in 2004 I set up this Web log where I posted every day, and almost without a single exception (usually I posted around 3 posts per day). It was only in 2006 that I started to focus on more specific issues and developed an expertise in particular subjects. Techrights was a lot more focused than this personal blog, which has not produced about 2,000 posts.

Last Thursday I crossed the 15,000-article milestone over at Techrights. It still serves a lot of requests owing (for the most part) to the huge archives. Now, just to clarify, there is also a lot of traffic in some other sites such as this one, but when I stopped writing on a regular basis here in schestowitz.com the traffic dropped from about 20,000 hits per day (gradual decline). I wrote 15,000 articles/posts in Techrights, which now serves about a quarter of a million hits per day (since 2010), giving me little reason to post in this personal blog any longer. At Techrights, over the course of 5+ years, I have been posting at the pace of almost 8 posts a day for 5 years (but at the highest points a lot more than the average, with a peak of 31 posts in one day).

Techrights has reached a sort of plateau now — a point where it stays about the same when it comes to traffic, despite expansion in content. The visitors count stopped growing some time around 2009 when I was entering Twitter and was on Twit TV, a TV show I was invited to be in for 1.5 hours or so, speaking for the site. These days I am busier with my jobs and my fiancée, but I still find a lot of time to dent, tweet, blog, and occasionally record shows (although not as much as of late because my co-host and I are exceedingly busy). Thanks to all those who are supporting my work and spreading the key points (even contributing time, HT to “wallclimber” among others). I will carry on doing this for a long time to come. Activism, to me, always comes first (well, family comes first, but it’s a close second).

2009

2012

My Most Common Blogging Platform: Palm OS

Palm Tungsten

A LOT of people may not know this, but most of my blogging I actually do from a proprietary operating system, Palm OS. I find little reason to write from home, so taking the text out with jpilot and my Palm Tungsten is what inspires me to write long posts such as this one. Much of Techrights is also being composed in Palm OS.

Why Palm Tungsten?

Well, it’s simple really. In one word: keyboard. As devices get smaller and smaller they often neglect to accommodate for productivity, so they resort to gimmicks like touch (which Palm had over a decade ago) and not a good, affordable foldable keyboard.

Is someone else blogging from a PDA?

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