still remember when this site was new more than 2 decades ago. In the summer of 2004 I think I was in London for a sort of “summer school” focused on computer vision. I’d log in to check AWStat after ‘classes’ (lectures rather) and be happy if this site got like 100 visitors in a day whilst I was away from home. To me, 100 people were already a good accomplishment and back then bots were easier to tell apart, hence estimating the number of daily visitors (real human visitors) was feasible.

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.

No “manners” anymore

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?

Look ma, no Facebook!

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.

oday I published 13 posts here, which probably is an all-time high for this blog or “Weblog” that began in 2004. That’s despite the fact we were out for Rianne’s birthday, so at least the day of this record will be a memorable one (the date).

Tomorrow we’ll be back to normal, except still on vacation. No journeys across Town.

Personal stuff isolated:

HE other month (June or July) I began writing many more posts in my personal blog and I didn’t expect it to ramp up this quickly – to the point where today this is the twelfth blog post despite us being outside the home much of the day. The aim was to improve Signal-to-Noise (s/n) ratio in other blogs and it seems to have worked. Fewer but more focused articles elsewhere.

I’ve meanwhile noticed an increase in Geminispace activity, so maybe it’s time to set up a capsule again at home, this time for another site in incubation.

adopted Gemini Protocol 6 years ago, a year after it was conceived. It has since then worked OK and several of our team nowadays manage capsules. The community has grown and people who read Geminispace have joined IRC (which is also nowadays managed by several of us; it is a neat little project of ours).

Last week Techrights served 305,682 Gemini requests – that’s more than the usual – and I began thinking about having a Gemini capsule for this blog as well. This is still something I’m seriously considering as a project.

At the end it’ll probably boil down to how often I update this blog. I could host the capsule from home on a Raspberry Pi 4.

oday I became aware of a site that goes a long way back and is run by a person I know and follow. It’s “a new age website I started in the late nineties that at one time had about 10,000 articles,” she told me. Along the side, in the sidebar, it says “Now on FOSS Force” (so the connection is not hard to see).

It’s good to see how she separated political writings or personal opinions from her coverage of FOSS.