Blogging: One year has passed

Blogging: One year has passed

On the 31st December 2005 this blog as started with a post called My personal blog, after one year I've released a total of 86 posts (including this one) where 84 were made during the year of 2006.

I'm very happy with the results of this blog, I know I've had some months of low activity although I'm picking up speed again. It feels great to write about interesting IT stuff.
For the upcoming year you can only expect one thing from this blog, more and better content.

Now I'm gonna share with you all some blog curiosities.
Did you know that:

• Although I mainly post about IT the most commented post was about TV Series - TV Series: My recommendations - with 6 comments at the time.
• My most viewed post is XSS: Smashing hi5 for fun and profit with 1051 views at the time.
• 9 posts were dedicated to SnipSnap hacking or SnipSnap Macros release.
• 5 posts were dedicated to the hi5 xss subject.
• There were 2 downtimes of this blog, being one of them for more than 48hours, both due to DNS problems. You can read about those situations in Donwtime: DNS Problems and Donwtime: Zoneedit account lockdown.
• 5 Macros were developed for snipsnap.
• The months with higher level of activity were January and May, with 15 and 14 posts.
• Top referer is Netvibes, having around 500 visits coming from them in the latest months.
• Top search keyword is hi5.

Now I'll leave you the blog visits stats. You might find them interesting (or not).

Month	Unique Visitors	Visits	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
Jan	145	491	4252	12817	217.79 MB
Feb	137	293	2051	4321	144.67 MB
Mar	328	756	5976	10661	241.57 MB
Apr	626	1971	15132	24214	720.16 MB
May	776	2146	19231	30077	1.27 GB
Jun	269	493	2366	7254	44.47 MB
Jul	384	739	3843	12112	100.25 MB
Aug	378	616	9877	14488	256.74 MB
Sep	290	525	4652	9029	142.22 MB
Oct	2620	4606	16732	22679	368.71 MB
Nov	596	2175	7879	14026	188.91 MB
Dec	650	1843	9721	20143	259.09 MB
Total	7199	16654	101712	181821	3.90 GB

Now there are at least two values that might make you wonder:

• why in May there was a 1.27Gb?
• why in October I had 2620 visits?

The answers are pretty easy, back in March I had developed the RSS feed macro, and thought it would be a good idea to have the "Latest Posts" feature implemented with the RSS, instead of a different macro that actually accessed the snipsnap. The result of that was for each access, there would be another access to fetch the RSS feed, resulting in the huge increase of the site traffic.
To fix that problem I developed a real latest post macro, you can read more about it in YASM:Yet Another SnipSnap Macro.

The huge visitors traffic was due to spam bots, I've mentioned that on Spam Bots: another pain in the ass and that was the reason I disabled registration on my blog.
Maybe I have to start thinking in re-write the registration system and use one of those "please type what's in the image" system, it's not that hard and it's effective.

Well and that's all, let's get ready for another year!
Happy New Year for you all!