Archive of ‘blog maintenance’ category

In things that I did not expect to actually happen…

For the first time in… ever, I’ve actually had more people from outside the United States viewing this blog than I have the alternative. I’m not quite sure what to think of that. I’ve gotten a few more spam comments which I haven’t allowed to pass through, too. They seem to be originating from the new locations to this.

At any rate, this is Dave Shaw’s final dive. His diving buddy, Don Shirley, began talking at the end of it so that Dave’s final breaths were not heard. Don Shirley is the MVP here and the epitome of an amazing friend.

On Tuesdays, we continue to rip on Tumblr.

This is a screenshot of me and a friend ripping on Tumblr’s “site security”. They continue to refuse to acknowledge that there was a recent data breach, or data leak, even though passwords have now been brute-forced into plain text (they did not use SHA-1 cryptography to hash their passwords, let alone salt them… and I’m not going to get into the fact that passwords hashed with SHA-1 cryptography are now easier to brute-force, that site managers should look into using higher-leveled cryptography). But it is what it is, and I tried to alert them to the problem. It’s out of my hands now. It’s not my problem. I don’t have an account on their site, so none of my data is going to continue to be compromised, especially since I use burner e-mails for fandom accounts and do not replicate passwords. However, I can’t say the same for their other users. I can’t speak for them. But even the barest of statistical analyses would have to say that some of them would have to be using professional e-mails for these sorts of things, that they were replicating passwords, or even that they were using universal passwords (in 2022 of all years, which I am not even going to get into… heh).

I mean, I tried. I really did. I truly did. I didn’t even have to say anything, but I did. They chose to ignore it.

I told you that I had an internal tracker running.

My hosting also gives me the IPs of visitors on request, and my tracker also confirms VPN use if applicable.

I set it up a long time ago and this combination, when necessary, has not failed me once.

This is what happens when conservatives try to scare people online and it doesn’t go according to plan.

I finally put an exclusion for my IP into my tracker!

Before, my internal tracker would catch me at least once whenever I came to my own domain to log in to blog, that sort of thing. I was finally able to set an exclusion so it ignores my IP whenever I do that, which makes my stats more accurate. It took about a week and some change for my daily visits to my own blog to write in it to “flush out of the system”, but they eventually did, and now it doesn’t show my visits here at all.

You do realize that I run a tracker here, right?

The same people who complain that I view their Tweets when they misgender my friend and constantly call him by the wrong name are frequent fliers on this blog, sometimes going twenty-one pages back as they do so. You do realize that my internal tracker (Google Analytics, thank you very much) tells me all of this, right? In before some of you start claiming that it’s not legal or questioning the legality of it, it’s… literally Google Analytics. The only reason that it was ever even set up in the first place was because I wanted to know if Bub’s paternal grandmother and (one of?) her sisters were devoting hours to stalking me again because they have two extremely unique locations, and it would be impossible for them to say that “someone else from that area” viewed my blog in light of that. (This was actually something that was noticed by more than one state agency, too. The fact that this was happening. That they were doing this. I mean, it wasn’t “just me”.)

Sometimes expecting logic out of people is simply too much of an expectation, though. I’m just saying…

The mystery behind the elusive Google PageRank.

Almost a decade ago (which makes me feel old just typing it), Google PageRank was everything.

You wanted to have PageRank if you wanted to monetize your blog, let alone be taken seriously in search engine results. With a bit of work it wasn’t very hard at all to get something like a two straight out of the gate. But in recent years, it has seemed more difficult to actually get that coveted PageRank… and then, not too long ago when I ran a PageRank checker on my own blog and other blogs and sites that were known to have it, suddenly they were all gone. This has left many people scratching their heads trying to figure out what the best metric to measure website popularity (“importance”) was, or should be, especially since Google hasn’t really… said much on the whole matter. I mean, I run Google Analytics behind this blog, but it’s mainly to let me know if two very specific people (Bub’s paternal grandmother and his great-aunt) ever actually access this blog, that way I can go to all of the trouble of IP blocking them and do it as many times as becomes necessary until they get the point. Aside from that, I don’t really mind how many hits it gets…

Although it could have done with improvement, if PageRank is gone that’s sad (and the end of an era).

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