witter is not a site that I like. Honestly, I don’t! In fact, I think it is getting worse over time. In 2016 it shadowbanned me a lot of times and I receive plenty of abuse there. I now identify as living in the North Pole to avoid messages like “you’re English, so…” (method of shooting the messenger). I only very reluctantly joined Twitter after I had begun participating in identi.ca for the purpose of posting Free software news. Prior to that I preferred just blogging, relying on people who subscribe to RSS feeds to find my writings. At the time there was also Digg.com, which I’m proud to say I was ranked 17^th on (they had millions of users at the time). Having taken a quick look at my Twitter account last night, I noticed that a milestone is approached and will have been reached by weeks’s end. I am nowhere near the most prolific users (like 38 million tweets for this Japanese account; see the out-of-date chart below), but quantity was never my goal and besides, as many people know, I primarily post in Diaspora these days, with posts being exported from there to Twitter. I vastly favour these Freedom/Free software-centric communities (like identi.ca at the time and nowadays GNU Social, Diaspora etc.) and I humbly think that all this social control media phenomenon is a waste of human productivity and a threat to real, in-depth, fact-checked journalism. But no single person can tell the world how to use the Internet and how to communicate; if social control media is what’s “normal” and “necessary” now (adapting to the so-called ‘market’), then so be it.

DON’T profess to know exactly what attracts people to this personal site, but the site is very broad, with over 100,000 Web pages that I have produced over the years. Although I hardly update this Web site anymore, it continues to serve many hits and uses up almost 40 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. It is still a lot less than what Tux Machines and Techrights are serving, especially via Varnish. In the next post I will provide a site performance (bandwidth) tip for Drupal. When sites get very large this becomes imperative for keeping costs down.

OMETIMES I get asked how much traffic my Web sites are getting. The only honest answer I can offer is that I don’t know. It depends a lot on how it’s measured, what measures it (if anything), when it is measured (peaks taken into account), and how spiders or spam traffic get culled out. Bot traffic is increasingly made more sophisticated, so it is hard to classify one thing as a bot viewer and another as a human viewer. In any event, by far the biggest site that I run is Techrights. It has almost 20,000 pages that I wrote over the past 6.5 years. Schestowitz.com, this one particular site, predates Techrights and has more pages in it than Techrights, but some of the content is not of high quality, e.g. my USENET posts. Then there is the site of my relative Harvey, who lives in Florida. I set up that site for him and have helped him maintain it since 2004. Recently, my friend Mark and I set up Medivasc.com, which also attracts a vast amount of traffic. Those are just 4 of my sites; there are about a dozen in total (an almost complete list of domains is here, but it is not complete). Techrights is believed to be dealing with millions of hits per week, based on Varnish logs. It is hard, however, to dissect those logs because they’re all routed through a cache proxy and therefore have the same IP address for almost all traffic. My second most-accessed site is Schestowitz.com and this month (so far) it is looking as follows:

Tobkes.othellomaster.com (subsite alone)

Medivasc.com looks like this

ge 31, 89 KG, after a one-hour workout session, all natural (no supplements). This video was taken just a couple of hours ago despite the fact I had done a heavy workout beforehand. In the future I will do more repetitions, not just 4-5. In my early 20s I could do better, but on the shoulder press I struggled a little at maximum weight.

VER THE past 2 months I have practised very hard to improve the strength of my upper back in preparation for the competition which I have just won (and received the award for today). I was attempting to break the British record, but I did not succeed. I was two tenths of a second behind it. Nonetheless, my time was good enough to win the contest, which I added to the sports page.

My mother and I this month

inally, for the first time ever, I have gotten a site whose front page is PageRank 7. That would be Techrights. I didn’t see it coming and this is part of a group effort, so it’s a victory for many of us who worked on it for years. I cannot think of another Linux-oriented site which has PageRank 7 or higher. It’s an important milestone for sure, even if it’s mostly symbolic.

Today was generally a great day and I met an old friend who is now a boxer. Did some programming, ran successful experiments, and some of the changes are compiled without an issue, removing the zlib dependency from Cyrus. Now is the time to have these tested and the plan is to use the existing interfaces with some test data and detect mis-correspondence in CRC polynomials. Tomorrow, heavy blogging will resume and maybe a trip to London will wait until Monday.