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.

t has gotten gloomy again, so the hopes of going to the park are deflated again and this likely means lots of original articles, instead. Tomorrow we’ll exchange cards and celebrate with Jim Beam 14 years of happiness and teamwork. I said more about that in another site [1, 2], envisioning we’ll be too busy to write about the anniversary tomorrow.

Today I checked the progress in the blog in terms of visitorship, as it was not regularly updated in the past two decades because in 2006 I focused on non-personal sites.

It’s sad to see how much junk traffic comes from totally useless bots (not even search engines’ spiders). So much has changed, not just because of LLM slop. It seems like many people choose walled gardens such as social control media and many young people never heard of RSS feeds.

This predates the slop frenzy and it’ll make the population poorly informed, exposed to state-connected propaganda, and unfit to handle social life.

started this year on a high note and with good momentum. It seemed like I’d manage to publish 8,000 articles per year in Techrights. With Rianne very active as well, 12,000 in Tux Machines (this year alone) seemed attainable. It’s still going at that pace.

Somewhere along the way I realised that Techrights was probably published too much, so I decided to offload and post more personal topics in this blog.

As a result, Techrights focuses on what it does best and this old (22 years) blog of mine is more active again and it sometimes receives comments.

ross misuse of other people’s work (aka slop) did not kill blogging and choosing to blog here again (on a frequent basis) has paid off. Hence, I will continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

In recent years there were whole months without any blog posts at all.

Why?

I blogged elsewhere.

But for personal matters and non-tech topics I might as well make better use of this platform. It’s still being read despite many people no longer using RSS readers.

was very serious when I said we’d take it up another notch after our long vacation. Right now I watch back as there are about 20 new blog posts since midnight (it’s only 5AM here). The headsup was based on the devotion of time, or based on the general allocation of resources. We now put foot on the metal/pedal, or push the pedal to the metal throughout the day today, as we expect more tactical intimidation and bullying from hired guns who are extremely rude. Yesterday tuxmachines.org served 665,042 Web requests and techrights.org served 479,275 (not the same as visits).

The sites’ reach only grew since the lawfare began 3 years ago (it was always Americans, it’s still only Americans).

Fast-forward many years and now I speak to millions, not hundreds. With exposure comes envy, however, and envy leads to litigiousness.

I’d rather choose the latter (with the price of litigiousness) than remain an obscure Ph.D. student who attends lectures.

ots and scrapers are ruining the Internet, not just the Web. Today I read that Geminispace too is targeted by them (the LLM plagiarism engines). Earlier today they engaged in de facto DDoS against us, though it’s hard to know what those rogue bots are actually for and who runs them. Maybe their purpose is purely malicious.

Either way, Web traffic will become meaningless without some further context.

In today’s Web, like with E-mail, it is about merely surviving online (because of the many predators online).

Who will be left to clean up the mess?

allery has been installed in this site since 2012 or 2013. This past week it passed 8 million views for pertinent pages, now clocking at 8012k.

Gallery is hardly maintained anymore, so the gallery we have installed here will need format-shifting and exporting some day.