Bonfire of the Vanities

OK, it's been about a month since I installed Site Meter on this blog. As of this minute, we've had 174 views. That includes 20 or so of my visits. Site Meter allows you to block posts from 2 IP addresses of the form XXX.XXX.XXX.***, where *** can be any number. It took me a few days to learn how to do this, and then we had the time of mourning. When that ended, Comcast logged me onto another location with a completely different IP address, so I had to block that.

Not counting me, then, it's about 5 hits per day. Since I only know of two people that check this blog on a regular basis, that leaves three random ones.

So, where are the random hits coming from? Site Meter has a "by referrer" link, so I can find out ...

Surprisingly, to me, most of the hits to this blog are coming from Working With Fedora Core 3, a summary of the Linux part of this blog. I remember putting the "Working With Fedora Core" (WWFC) pages onto some directory, but for the life of me I can't find it anywhere.

Anyway, given this information I decided to start another Site Meter for my pages on Comcast, including the Fedora Core stuff. I started it last night, about 6pm EST. So far there are 22 hits, which means over 1 per hour, and yes, I'm blocking this IP.

So where are the hits coming from? Mostly from Google searches. Interestingly, Google can't find any pages that link to WWFC anywhere, but people keep coming.

What does this mean? It means that people are desperate for information about Linux. The link to WWFC is often on the second page of the search, meaning that the searcher didn't find the information in the first 10 or so links on Google. I've had this experience myself, though no so much as when I was starting out. Mostly I can find what I need to know on one of those Linux links on the right-hand side of the blog. If not, I know who to ask.

But it's obvious that Linux needs a more readily available help system than this blog. If anyone's got suggestions, leave them as comments here. I'll put the best links on the bar at the right.