My Blog Traffic

One thing that nobody tells you when you start a blog is how much traffic you’ll get. Or rather, how much traffic you won’t get. Maybe it’s just me, but I kind of hoped that when I started a blog I’d be writing for a loyal and vibrant readership from day one. Of course, that was a stupid thing to think, and I didn’t seriously believe it, but I was still disappointed when I added Google Analytics after a few months and watched the tumble weeds go rolling past.

I’ll quickly add that I am writing for pleasure (and practice), not traffic, but there is no denying that it is very nice to see some kind of tangible result. The only tangible result you can really see with a blog is traffic. Increased traffic hopefully means improved writing style (or more relevant at least), and that makes you feel good.

Anyway, if you’re a tech person, and you’re thinking of starting some vague, general and rambling blog (like mine), here are my figures for you to compare/compete against. I’ll just add that I started blogging properly about 5 years ago, but I deleted that blog and started this one in 2010. My old blog had lots of very technical posts (with plenty of sample source code and useful commands), and I got a disproportionate amount of traffic to one or two specific posts (80% or so of traffic went to a post about resetting passwords in Oracle — it lives at another blog I reposted it to). Those posts still get great traffic, mainly from good Google ranking, but they aren’t a useful measure. I just happened to answer a question that lots of people ask, and aside from their immediate pain they had zero interest in my blog. Bounce rate was something like 98%.

This blog is different. I so far have one or two disproportionately high-traffic posts (like this summary of the best things about OS X, and the corresponding list of great features in Windows), but the rest are pretty evenly split. For the month of January 2012, I got 629 unique visitors, 1,169 page views and a bounce rate of 75%. Not great, but it’s roughly a three-fold improvement over a year ago when I had just over 200 unique visitors.

So there are my numbers. After two years I have 629 unique visitors a month for the last full month. I’ll re-post my updated figures whenever they jump significantly — it’ll hopefully be interesting to plot over time and see how things change at least (especially if I can keep up the renewed pace since my re-design). If you want to get in touch, either to commiserate or gloat, feel free :) I’m mostly on Twitter these days. I turned comments off due to spam :|

Defeating Key Loggers with Snake Oil

This comes via John Gruber, who quotes a New York Times story about the odd security precautions a guy called Kenneth G. Lieberthal takes when he visits China. He calls out the fact that clipboard loggers are just as easy to install as key loggers. Here’s the relevant bit from the NYT article:

[He] copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.”

This is a moronic policy designed purely to make Kenneth ‘feel’ more secure because, at the front of his mind, he is worried about key loggers. Gruber is right — a clip board logger is just as easy to implement as a key logger, but this over looks one important fact — a program to steal files from a USB stick is vastly easier to implement than either a key logger or a clip board logger, because it doesn’t need any special system privelege.

Don’t write your passwords down and don’t store them in a file. I presume there’s some missing detail here — maybe he’s using a programme that encrypts the file with the password, the article doesn’t say, but even if that’s so, he still needs to descrypt it some way or another, and that means the key logger would be just as effective.

If you want true security and it is important (and justified), use one time passwords.

Don’t call James Altucher a Douchebag

Over at Techcrunch, James Altucher writes about the economy not being quite as dire as the news reports all make out, all of the time:

So what does this all mean? Does this mean your life is going to be better because the economy is going to be better? Who knows. That’s up to you to choose. Does this mean the media will start apologizing for all the misinformation? No, of course not. They will just figure out the next thing that scares you.

His reasons for disliking the way news handles this stuff are similar to mine, but I just tend to ignore the news pretty much most of the time. I like to think that as a result, I’m probably more well-informed on current affairs than most people ;)

Posted February 11, 2012 in General

Do You Need To Know About Hashing and Encryption?

There has been a bit of a hullabaloo over the past few days that started because of an app called Path. It even hit the mainstream news. This app was sending address book data back to its servers where it got stored in clear text. Not the smartest move, and Path certainly weren’t the only ones guilty of this.

If you’re a developer working on a system that handles sensitive data — and any email address or personally identifiable information is sensitive — you must educate yourself about hashing, salts and general encryption techniques (and the various gotchas). You owe it to your users. You’ve got to understand when to use encryption, when to use hashes and how they work and how they can be compromised.

Matt Gemmell (who writes a bit about Mac development) has posted a pretty long post on the topic of hashes that could serve as a good introduction. I’ll admit I haven’t read it all the way through yet (currently I am very tired — my brain isn’t functioning properly so far as I can tell), but I scanned it and it looks like it should set the scene well.

Path also did this without the user’s consent. Needless to say, that is a pretty awful sin. If you are designing an app that accesses sensitive information on a device, you’ve got to ask permission. It’s only polite.

Next audio-book added to the queue…

I’m still listening to “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (I’m about 8 hours in I’d guess, and so far it’s pretty good). Anyway, I just came across a book called “Street Smarts: An All-Purpose Toolkit For Entrepreneurs”, and it looks pretty interesting, so I think I’ll listen to that next.

Here’s the iTunes link to the the audiobook. I’m posting it here mostly as a reminder to myself, but also because it genuinely does sound interesting.

I got the link from this short list of Books Entrepreneurs Recommend at WSJ. The book at #1, The E-Myth Revisited, is one of my favourite books of all time. I’ll write a post all of its own about that book soon.

Is retro design crippling innovation?

Clive Thompson, in a piece over at Wired argues against skeuomorphism (when designers make something look like something else, usually to make it feel more familiar — a computer calendar looking like a physical calendar, for example). His first example is solid:

When we get to the last week of this month, open your Google Calendar and choose the month view. You will see the previous three weeks are greyed out. Only the next few days will be “active”. If you want to see what you’ve got planned for more than the next couple of days, you’ll have to flip forward to next month.

I agree that constraints like that are exactly the kind of detail that good design should question and, if possible, find an improved way of doing things.

He goes on to argue against skeuomorphism is general, especially when it’s purely visual. This is a position that lots of professional designers (who I greatly respect) take:

On the new iCal for the Macintosh, things are odder yet: when you page forward, the sheet for the previous month rips off and floats away, an animation so artless you’d swear it was designed personally by Bill Gates.

iCal gets a lot of ridicule, and so does Find My Friends (which also gets a mention in this article). I see his point (and let’s be honest — he’s far more qualified to make these judgements than I am) but, you know what, I actually like those rich textures, I think they add a ‘human’ element to the feel of an app that I’d actually miss if it were the hard, efficient design he argues for. Don’t get me wrong, I love Flipboard, it’s an incredibly usable app and I don’t want it to change, but I also like iCal. I’d like to see improvements of the kind described in the first quote, but I don’t mind that it looks a bit like a personal organiser. In fact, it being so visually distinct actually helps my mind switch in an instant to being ready to thnk about dates and times, possibly because it is so distinctive.

In many ways (especially from the end-user-perspective) design is very subjective. Clearly skeuomorphism has a bad name, but I personally don’t mind it, as long as it doesn’t go too far.

Posted February 10, 2012 in Design

Bootstrap – a handy toolkit for your HTML apps

The bootstrap project from Twitter is a great collection of CSS and Javascript helpers that make a really good starting point for your HMTL based apps. Here’s a sample of what it gives you:

  • Nicely styled buttons with clear visual clues for default/delete etc
  • An easy-to-use grid system for trying different layouts
  • Simple fluid-layout modes for resizing down to phone-screen size
  • Styled form elements to quickly make your forms look good
  • Toolbars and menus based on nothing more than ul/li elements
  • It’s all controlled by adding and removing CSS classes

If you build web apps, check it out. It’s open source too, so you can tweak it, change it, do what you want with it.

New Look

I’ve given the blog a lick of paint. I hope you like it — or at least don’t hate it. I’ll freely admit that I’m not much of a natural when it comes to design, and this shabby effort represents two evenings worth of tinkering until I got a result that I am more happy than not with.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I borrowed some (OK, lots) of inspiration from the magnificent Daring Fireball, though it’s not a direct copy. It was actually while I was reading Shawn Blanc‘s blog that it hit me that I needed this kind of style for my own blog, so he deserves a mention too. Needless to say, those two sites look far better than mine, but if I keep tweaking maybe I’ll one day have something good.

Let me know what you think. You can email me or find me on twitter.

Posted February 9, 2012 in Blog