My Hacker News 15 minutes of fame: the numbers

So on Feb 25th my Do Not Donate-page was featured on Hacker News and that obviously brought some extra page-views.

Here are some more numbers for that memorable day;

  • Most popular pages:
    1. Do not donate: 10 013
    2. Homepage/ archives: 1 108
    3. about:futtta: 235
  • Referrers:
    1. Hacker News 7 978
    2. Facebook 112
    3. Search Engines 84
  • Outgoing links:
    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanders 959
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality-adjusted_HDI#List 809
    3. https://profiles.wordpress.org/futtta 596
    4. https://www.kiva.org 87

And my server? Even at the busiest time (around 10-11 AM UTC+1) it quietly hummed along with a 0.11 system load 🙂

Crunching 2015’s numbers

So this was 2015 in numbers:

  1. blog;
  2. OptimizingMattersAvatarMy WordPress plugins:
    • wp-youtube-lyte: pushed out 3 minor and 1 major release, getting 40264 downloads pushing the total to 250545 and having +10000 active installs
    • wp-donottrack: no releases for this one (except for some small readme.txt changes),
      downloaded 2355 times bringing the total to 14364 and +2000 active installs.
    • autoptimize: 2 minor and 1 major release, downloaded 265299 times this year, bringing the total to 506930 and +100000 active installs

That was 2015. For 2016 my main goal is to work on Optimizing Matters.
 

Bye 2014, it was nice knowing ya!

this used to be an animated gif, click to see itWith 2014 finally behind us, we can start dwelling on that past as of yesterday. These are some of my 2014 facts & figures:
About my blog:

My WordPress plugins:

  • Autoptimize
    • 2 major and 7 minor releases
    • 141324 downloads, bringing the total to 241650
    • answered lots of questions and feedback on the support-forum, allowing me to improve both the code and the FAQ.
    • 2015 will bring Autoptimize 2.0 (fixing the occasional WSOD & the cache-size problem) and Autoptimize Power-Ups (extensions for professional & power-users)
  • WP YouTube Lyte:
    • 2 major and 2 minor releases
    • 36507 downloads, now totalling 210285
    • 2015 will see continued improvements and WP YouTube Lyte Power-Ups (you guessed it, extensions for professional & power-users)
  • WP DoNotTrack:
    • 2 minor releases
    • 4312 downloads, now 12009 total
    • 2015 really should see a 1.0 release, which will finally include CSP-enforced protection.

Bye 2014, it was nice knowing ya, but I’m off enjoying 2015 now!

Looking in the mirror: 2012 numbers, 2013 goals

man in the mirrorAs I did a year ago for 2011, here I am looking in the mirror at my 2012 numbers and 2013 goals:

  1. This blog:
    • 130 blogposts (78 “real” posts and 52 aggregated lifestream-events)
    • 109285 pageviews, the most popular individual article being 5 tips to tackle the problem with iframes (8622 views). Off all new 2012 blogposts, Fix Samsung ICS Exchange connection errors was read most with 5727 views.
    • 294 comments (including trackbacks and my own replies)
    • Main goal for 2013: carry on, I guess? Maybe some more personal posts in Dutch. I’ve always loved to write in my native language, but it can be pretty time-consuming as I tend to rewrite a text multiple times before I’m OK with wording and flow (which I’m not as sensitive to in my non-native English).
  2. WP YouTube Lyte, my WordPress plugin to do “lazy load YouTube embedding”, is doing really well:
    • 9 minor and 2 major releases including the big 1.0.0 milestone
    • 66286 downloads (passing the 100.000 downloads mark in July)
    • Main goal for 2013 and long overdue; responsiveness but also even better performance (less reliance on JavaScript to do heavy lifting, using less http-requests).
    • Moreover, I was honored to see Yoast’s Video SEO plugin has support for WP YouTube Lyte and equally proud to be able to decline a commercial proposal to have my plugin add a link next to each and every LYTE player.
  3. WP DoNotTrack 2012 proved a fruitful year for my 3rd party tracking filtering plugin:

2012 was also the year that I got to know Drupal & Acquia a lot better, the year my lovely daughter learned how to read, the year I grew scared of Europe’s economical & Belgium’s political future, the year I saw Radiohead live and the year I finally learned how to fly.

Quick hack: making Journalist slightly more responsive

I’ve been using the Journalist WordPress theme ever since I migrated to my self-hosted wordpress.org instance, away from wordpress.com back in 2007. The Journalist is a pretty basic theme, 2 columns and fixed width. The last version on wordpress.org dates from mid 2008, but the developer did work on support for threaded comments and sent me a beta-version (1.9.1) in January 2009 which I currently use. A couple of months later, after having been stalked by yours truly for info on further development, Lucian replied he was busy with other projects and that he could not do too much “free” work any more (which is completely understandable). Ever since, I’ve been making small changes left and right, fixing minor bugs and making small improvements.
But the problem with fixed width themes such as Journalist; they’re not responsive. Although responsive design is great and all, I didn’t really bother with it until I needed some responsiveness to be able to test upcoming changes to my own WordPress plugin. And that’s why I added the following in /wp-content/themes/journalist/style.css:

@media only screen and (max-width: 880px), only screen and (max-device-width: 880px) {
  #container, #content { width: 98%; }
  #sidebar { display: none; }
  #bubble { background: none; height: 32px; margin-top: -24px; position: static; }
  #bubble p { background: none; color: #000000; font-size: 14px; }
}

This is just a quick hack, making the main content div variable in width, hiding the sidebar and moving the tagline from the bubble on the right to the left, underneath the site title for all screens with a width of 880px or less.
Feel free to use and to provide improvements in the comments or via the contact-form! And Lucian, if you happen to read this: any chance anyone could resume work on the Journalist?

CDN to the Max

It was time to put my money where my mouth is, or at least to give the use of a CDN a try. Based on previous tests MaxCDN seemed like a decent, dirt-cheap solution, so that’s what the js, css & images for this blog are served from now.
Setting this up was very easy:

  1. log into MaxCDN and set up a pull zone on static-cdn.blog.futtta.be with origin blog.futtta.be
  2. create static-cdn.blog.futtta.be in the web interface of my DNS-provider (as a CNAME to the domain-name provided)
  3. configure WP Super Cache to use static-cdn.blog.futtta.be instead of the non-cdn static.blog.futtta.be)

The speed difference can be huge, especially when routing to my origin VPS-server in Germany isn’t great. I’m sure my 2 overseas users and Google will approve!
Bandwidth-wise, with 10MB/day, I seem to be far from the 1TB/year I’m allowed, so if you’d like me to setup a (temporary) pull zone for your blog so you can check out if this would work for you then just drop me a line.

Some 2011 numbers and 2012 goals

  1. This blog:
  • WP YouTube Lyte, my WordPress plugin to do “lazy load YouTube embedding”, really took off:
    • 8 minor and 3 major releases (from 0.6.5 to 0.9.4), introducing support for features such as audio-only YouTube, embedding playlists, changing player size on the fly and translations in 6 languages (thanks to those six great contributors).
    • 48260 downloads
    • Main goal for 2012: stabilize and reach the magic 1.0.0 (which will probably include an optimized initialization-mechanism)
  • My WP DoNotTrack plugin is somewhat … younger:
    • 2 releases
    • 336 downloads
    • Goals for 2012:
      • stop more types of tracking (a.o. by including black- or whitelist filtering of the HTML using the output buffer)
      • improve filtering
      • integrate (and possibly automate) tracking-detection using the webpagetest.org API
      • promote the idea of “DoNotTrack” in general and for WordPress and WP plugins & themes in particular (the plugin is just a means, not an end in itself)

    But enough with all the navel-gazing, thanks for b(e)aring with me & have a great 2012 guys & girls!

    Hug a Blogger Day!

    Gelezen bij Jan Seurinck; Flattr organiseert de “Pay a Blogger Day”. Maar ik moet geen geld voor m’n blog, niet via zo’n micropayments-knop en niet door middel van advertenties. M’n blog (en m’n WordPress plugins), dat is mijn 5 minutes of fame. Of dan toch de long tail versie; een heel klein beetje fame, verspreid over een schijnbaar eindeloos uitgerekte 5 minuten.
    Geef uw geld dus gerust aan een goed doel, of ga er eens lekker mee eten, uw aandacht volstaat ruimschoots om de boel hier draaiende te houden. Maar ge moogt altijd “hallo” zeggen in de comments, bloggers hebben dat zo graag dat ze er speciaal een blogpost voor schrijven!

    WP Privacy: Quantcast sneaks back in

    After almost a year of peace and quiet, Quantcast tracking code has returned to this blog. As reported by Brian Yang, the stupid hack that stopped the code from being included doesn’t work any more. Automattic recently switched to the new Quantcast-code, which instead of using the old-fashioned document.write now gets inserted asynchronously by a DOM-method (insertBefore). I’m looking at ways to stop this from happening or at least limit it one way or the other, but for the time being there’s no fix. Bear with me and do speak up (in the comments below of via the contact form) if you think you can help!

    More power to the reader with RSS and mail-subscriptions

    As I’m a self-confessed believer in the power of RSS and as this blog is both about web technology (written in English) and more personal stuff (in Dutch), I’ve decided to offer separate RSS-feeds for these two categories. Moreover I’ve also enabled mail-subscriptions in Feedburner., so if you want you can receive my ramblings by mail.
    That means that from now on you have these subscription-links to choose from:

    I’ve thought about publishing to a Facebook-page and Twitter as well, but that just seems so … over the top, no?