I'm not sure I have ever looked at Google's webmaster tools in depth before — not testing against my personal sites anyway. It appears that Google has just replaced yet another tool for me: it's easier to look at Google's trawl errors than to run my own link checker.

Unusual top referers to my site at the moment include:

• Wikipedia (entry for zsync)
• Gnome Bugzilla (I guess I must have got that one right then)
• The Doom wiki
• Searching for Doom IV on search.warez.com
• Google search for '9 levels of hell' (one of my Doom level reviews has this title)
• Google for 'Alien Vendetta'

I'm now the editor for the Transmission Protocols category on the Open Directory.

I happened across this classic advertisement from 1984 for the Apple Mac. Now I understand why there are Mac zealots. And there is no denying that Apple knew how to do marketting.

I had some content hosted on my ISPs webspace, and when it came to move it off, I hit a slight problem: I do not like breaking links, but as Demon run thttpd, with no configuration access for us users, there was no way to redirect a whole directory tree. So I have written a script to create an entire tree of HTML pages with meta-refresh tags redirecting to a new site. Not an elegant solution, but it gets the job done.

I have just finished moving everything over to a new VPS provider. It is much more civilised to be on Debian and away from Red Hat. Apart from it being Red Hat, Westhost's VPS was never quite to my taste — it was designed for people to add software via their interface, and not very convenient for doing things yourself. I did get a prompt response the only time I needed their tech support, though.

The DNS flipped over at about midnight last night; performance so far seems good:

I have upgraded my site feed to serve Atom 1.0 — and of course completely broke newsdot. Nice.

Where do I cash in?

Hmm, a meme that isn't completely bogus - it reckons news.netcraft.com is worth half a million.

Definitely an OBN for this article on news.bbc about eBay. Total lack of any criticism, or as far as I could see any journalism, by the writer; no investigation at all of the claim that "EBay has very close links with regional police forces that help to shut down phishing and fraud gangs." I liked this quote though:

"Even Western Union say don't pay by Western Union," said Mr Griffiths.

This is one of the funnier mails I have seen at work. Getting to a 100 day uptime isn't easy — so many possible causes of failure to look out for :-). It's the third item here.

Apparently I am now being syndicated on alkali.org by the old #doomroom crew. So I immediately flooded their front page with my Debian rant :-).

Anyway, I cleaned up the feed a bit now, so it should be a bit less cruel to news readers. I hope.

Hey, I got quoted on ZDNet:

Colin Phipps, a developer at Netcraft, said that usage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been dropping off since Red Hat changed its licensing model. ... "We saw a boost in Debian around the time that Red Hat made a change in its licensing model," said Phipps. "Fedora was a really new name so a lot of new sites that were setting up chose to go with Debian or SuSE instead. Fedora has now overcome this obstacle."

They even managed not to mangle what I said too badly — unlike some of my encounters with the press in the past.

After switching my home machine to FreeBSD 5.3, I have found that pyblosxom just does not like FreeBSD. Or the version of pythons is broken, or something else that causes the process to leak memory like crazy. It did the same thing on my hosting account. So I have switched to blosxom, which after a little work does the same job. There might be a few rough corners for a few days, but mostly everything should be about the same as before.

Have I discovered a new way of attracting search engines? I posted a graph of user agents on this site two days ago, commenting on how busy google and msnbot were. Two days later, two new engines enter the lists, and are already gaining ground.

Search engines watching for mention of rivals and jumping in to compete? Well, okay, I have to admit I am paranoid. The search engines do make a big percentage of the hits, and an even bigger percentage of the transferred data: I guess only a computer can put up with reading all the way through my dull prose :-).

I also corrected the graph this time for various things which were incorrectly classed under Mozilla on the previous graph. I'm still surprised by how far ahead Firefox is (although a good chunk of them are myself, checking the site).

(Ego trip ahead — skip if you want!) A passtime of mine, in very idle moments (actually, mostly idle moments at work…) is to see what percentage of hits on google for my name actually correspond to me (as opposed to someone with the same name).

I used to have an excellent record here: when I was at university, and filing Debian bug reports every week, not to mention PrBoom releases, nearly every reference would be to me. It dropped to a low of around 50% two years ago. In particular, there's some Dr Colin Phipps who works for an oil company, who gets mentioned in a lot of press releases who is my main competitor — he holds the top spot on google for now. But I am back up to 83% at the moment (looking at the first 3 pages (30 links) on Google, which is fairly good I think. But then my surname is hardly common; anyone with the surname Smith has my sympathy.

Sadly, all of this is based on memory, so from now on I am going to keep a record of the percentage of references to me in the first 30 hits, and track it.