Because it isn’t a weekend, you see.
First in the news is that Virpus, who provides the VPS that runs this website, has a crazy sale on their VPSes until the end of the year. $10 monthly for an eight-core Xeon VPS with two gigabytes of dedicated RAM is simply absurd, and if you need one I’ve had nothing but good experiences with Virpus’ support. I received no money for this
Second in the news is a glimpse at my traffic statistics. It suffices to say that I am pretty much the opposite of famous or even Internet famous, but I’ll give the embarrassingly low numbers out anyway1. According to Google Analytics, five visitors is a good day, and two or three is average. On a whim, I downloaded web log analyzer Webalizer and ran it against the logs off of my server. That told a story of five hundred hits a day, which was obviously bunk. After filtering bots by name, writing a fancy-pants script using my computer science knowledge to filter dozens of thousands of log entries with IP addresses occurring in a list of 250,000 known spammer addresses, and filtering out my own hits, I have Webalizer showing something like 20 visits a day. I suspect the number is somewhere in between 2 and 20 (Webalizer still sees a chunk of traffic from China, while Google Analytics doesn’t count people with Javascript disabled, and neither counts RSS reads), but I don’t really have any way of narrowing it down further than that. Nor do I care to; ‘between 2 and 20’ sounds a lot better than ‘5’. Now that I’m writing regularly again, I feel comfortable asking you, dear reader, to throw me a bone and link to me (that is, tell your friends).
I have a week or two of vacation around Christmas, so I’m going to finally sit down with We Sail Off To War and give it the red pen treatment, and once I’ve done that to my satisfaction, I can get it ready for e-book publication and on sale. Look for that in mid-January, and maybe for further prodding about driving people here.
1. Does my feigned shame make you uncomfortable? Excellent! Then give your friends the link.
