HIS year I began blogging a lot more in here – in a blog which I started 22 years ago. The site was not “dead” at any point, it always attracted some traffic.

When it comes to statistics, one lingering issue is that there are many subdomains and AWstats already measures HTTP separately from HTTPS.

This is HTTPS for schestowitz.com alone:

HTTP for schestowitz.com alone:

Combining the two, so far this month it’s about 350,000 visitors. Many are bots. AWStats isn’t good at detecting these.

But of course a respect quotient/metric matters more than traffic, as being a troll or showing nudes gets one traffic, and the hourly rates of escorts is high too (seems like some sites are de facto “online” escort sites).

My goal is not traffic but positive impact.

oday the rain is fairly heavy (at times). It’s good for cleaning outdoors and for the garden (plants), but it also means that going out is reasonably unattractive, undesirable, unpleasant.

So today I’ve decided to stay at home and focus on writing details articles. There’s no lack of topics to cover, only a lack of time.

It seems like some of my recent articles “triggered” a reaction. That reaction was counterproductive as it gave away some finer details, which help our legal strategy.

Social control media compels people to act impulsively and post short, dumb, self-harming things.

he second month of 2022 is – or was – when I finally quit all social control media. I had already stopped engaging or interacting much in it (2 years earlier), but I still posted to it and checked every reply.

No more.

As an associate has put it to me: “There’s probably a public health aspect to social control media when considered at scale. The stress and hate has to be extracting a physical cost on the overall health of the population. There are too many otherwise smart people who participate in it and are thus exploited yet seem to think that they alone in the whole world are immune to it. It’s sad to witness as people succumb to it, even from an online distance.”

Looking back, my time without social control media is the same as the full-scale Ukraine invasion.

I don’t want to have anything to do with weaponised ‘platforms’.

oday we did a lot of housework and then caught up with news. On Tuesday next week we celebrate another personal anniversary and maybe we’ll have another chance to travel around Greater Manchester before it gets too cold.

Football is back in 9 days, but it’ll be in Anfield with heckling local fans who accuse ManCity of cheating.

The more rosy news, for us at least, comes in November. Techrights turns 20.

oday I had a long conversation with a friend about sites we catch cheating and plagiarising with slop. I pointed out many of them cease to release new material, with some going offline.

That serves to affirm my expectation and observation that sites which become slopfarms commit suicide.

When the bubble pops, which is inevitable and already “in progress”, all those sites will vanish faster.

still remember how, about a month before Tux Machines turned 15, we invited Susan (from the US) to join us. She politely declined only because of the distance but tactfully expressed gratitude.

Today I saw Susan’s name mentioned [1, 2], so despite her retiring from writing she is still remembered, appreciated, and loved.

HE news about GNU/Linux generally gets better over time. If one looks deep enough, there’s already more of it than before. More and more people use the platform, and some bloggers adapt and react accordingly.

Heck, many bloggers are themselves moving to GNU/Linux.

I reckon that by next year GNU/Linux will be seen as a non-niche.

think that it was 2001 or maybe September/October 2002 in Manchester Computing when I began making pages that later became schestowitz.com (prior to that the address was different, I used a Web address under another domain). When I began writing in boycottnovell.com (which is shown as correlated above), in 2006 onwards, I wrote a lot less in schestowitz.com. Almost no new material/pages got added.

It feels good to “be back” in schestowitz.com, the ‘domestic’ or original ‘turf’ online.

Will schestowitz.com ever turn 40? I reckon so. It’s needed for E-mail (not only my own).

arlier this year I decided to offload more personal and/or non-technical topics to this blog. 3,300 posts since 2004 may sound like a lot, but this year alone it was almost 1,000 of them.

The effort to offload topics was successful in the sense that expectations were met. It seems like the right way forward.

‘ve only just realised that days ago marked 3 years since we moved everything to Simply in the UK. This webhost was recommended to us by Catalyst2, whose services I had happily used since 2003 or 2004.

One lesson I’ve learned is, if your team is mostly based in Europe, then it makes sense for hosting to be in Europe (or EU in this case).

Think local.