{"id":535,"date":"2008-04-10T21:33:31","date_gmt":"2008-04-10T11:33:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=535"},"modified":"2008-04-11T07:49:28","modified_gmt":"2008-04-10T21:49:28","slug":"happy-third-anniversary-oddthinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2008\/04\/10\/happy-third-anniversary-oddthinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Third Anniversary, OddThinking!"},"content":{"rendered":"

April 10 is OddThinking’s third Anniversary. Tradition holds that I do an annual<\/a> recap<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I have to admit, this anniversary caught me unawares. I only noticed when I was reminded at midnight last night so this year’s recap is a bit less in depth.<\/p>\n

In the 12 months, there have been a total of 94 posts (down 15%), 482 comments (down 27%) and 93,000 spam messages (up 330%).<\/p>\n

Highlights by Month<\/h3>\n

April<\/h4>\n

I changed to a new web host<\/a>.<\/p>\n

May<\/h4>\n

Only one post<\/a> in the entire month; I was distracted by my father’s serious illness.<\/p>\n

June<\/h4>\n

The death of my father<\/a> led to a series of sentimentality-free stories about him<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My first web-comic<\/a> was published. It was also my last (to date).<\/p>\n

July<\/h4>\n

My web server was hit by a self-inflicted Denial of Service attack<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My brain was hit by a self-inflicted Denial of Service attack<\/a>.<\/p>\n

August<\/h4>\n

I described a plan to paint the moon red<\/a>.<\/p>\n

September<\/h4>\n

First review of a live performance<\/a><\/p>\n

October<\/h4>\n

This month contrasted a bunch<\/a> of<\/a> pranks<\/a> combined with a serious look at one aspect of the Climate Change Debate<\/a>. That Climate Change post got me a steady stream of new traffic and introduced a new audience to OddThinking.<\/p>\n

November<\/h4>\n

I finally tackled the Podcast\/Winegum Shuffle Optimisation problem<\/a>, only to be 0wned<\/a> by Aristotle and Jonathon’s much faster (and equally sub-optimal) solution.<\/p>\n

I belately introduced Julian Links<\/a>.<\/p>\n

December<\/h4>\n

EmailShroud 2.2 was released<\/a> and I solved Virus 2<\/a> in a disappointing boring way.<\/p>\n

I asked a innocuous and trivial question about beverage containers<\/a> and was surprised by the level of interest.<\/p>\n

January<\/h4>\n

A puzzle-solving month, introducing Alphametics<\/a>, and Slitherlinks<\/a>, and discussing the generic architecture<\/a> that can solve them.<\/p>\n

Another WordPress plugin, Compact Monthly Archive Widget<\/a>, was released.<\/p>\n

February<\/h4>\n

One of my favourite pranks<\/a>, carried out on other pranksters.<\/p>\n

March<\/h4>\n

Quiet month, including the acknowledgement of two pre-eminent<\/a> geeks<\/a> who had passed away.<\/p>\n

April<\/h4>\n

Started a surge approach to re-starting the blogging after 7 weeks of less than a post a week. <\/p>\n

Reader Statistics<\/h3>\n

Most Read Pages<\/h5>\n
    \n
  1. Samsung PC Studio 3 vs Microsoft Outlook<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. A Hat Trick of Trick Questions<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. A Kakuro Solver<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. A New Owner’s Review of the Samsung D600 Mobile Phone<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. EmailShroud<\/a><\/li>\n
  6. What do I think of the SVG standard?<\/a><\/li>\n
  7. Seeing the Man-in-the-moon<\/a><\/li>\n
  8. Solving the Four Fours Problem<\/a>*<\/li>\n
  9. In what direction does the sun set?<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    * = Published this year.<\/p>\n

    Posts with the most comments<\/h5>\n
      \n
    1. Wine-gum\/Podcast Selection Algorithm Solution<\/a><\/li>\n
    2. Why are different drinks packaged differently?<\/a><\/li>\n
    3. Why you shouldn’t use Facebook and why you shouldn…<\/a><\/li>\n
    4. The Sum of… One Million Frickin’ Laser Beams<\/a><\/li>\n
    5. iTunes and I<\/a><\/li>\n
    6. Message-Passing in my Puzzle-Solving Architecture<\/a><\/li>\n
    7. Maths Insurance<\/a><\/li>\n
    8. Solving the Four Fours Puzzle<\/a><\/li>\n
    9. Male Modle<\/a><\/li>\n
    10. Sat Nav Lust<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      Most Prolific Commenters<\/h5>\n
        \n
      1. Me!<\/li>\n
      2. Aristotle Pagaltzis from Plasmasturm<\/a><\/li>\n
      3. Alastair from Girtby.net<\/a><\/li>\n
      4. John Y.<\/li>\n
      5. Chris from Brainsnorkel<\/a><\/li>\n
      6. Sunny Kalsi from The USS Quad Damage<\/a><\/li>\n
      7. Richard<\/li>\n
      8. Bork Blatt<\/li>\n
      9. Jonathon Duerig<\/li>\n
      10. Tie: Andrew and James<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        I am, of course, extremely grateful to each of you.<\/p>\n

        Bot Statistics<\/h3>\n

        Searchiest Search Engines<\/h4>\n

        (i.e. whose bots crawl the most)<\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Yahoo<\/li>\n
        2. MSNBot<\/li>\n
        3. GoogleBot<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          Google continues to refer about 80% of the search visitors.<\/p>\n

          Search Results<\/h3>\n

          A fair number of visitors come to OddThinking straight from a search engine. A record is kept of what they were looking for when they got here.<\/p>\n

          The most popular search terms change each month… slightly…<\/p>\n

          Most Popular Search Terms, by Month<\/h4>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
          Month<\/th>\nTop Search Term<\/th>\nRunner-Up Search Term<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
          May 07<\/td>\ntrick questions<\/td>\nsamsung pc studio<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
          Jun 07<\/td>\ntrick questions<\/td>\nsamsung pc studio<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
          Jul 07<\/td>\ntrick questions<\/td>\nkakuro solver<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
          Aug 07<\/td>\ntrick questions<\/td>\nkakuro solver<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
          Sep 07<\/td>\ntrick questions<\/td>\nkakuro solver<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
          Oct 07<\/td>\ntrick questions<\/td>\nkakuro solver<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
          Nov 07<\/td>\ntrick questions<\/td>\nkakuro solver<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
          Dec 07<\/td>\ntrick questions<\/td>\nsamsung pc studio<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
          Jan 08<\/td>\ntrick questions<\/td>\nsamsung pc studio<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
          Feb 08<\/td>\nkakuro solver<\/td>\nsamsung pc studio<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
          Mar 08<\/td>\nsvg photoshop<\/td>\nkakuro solver<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
          Apr 08<\/td>\nsamsung pc studio review<\/td>\nstupid trick questions<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

           <\/p>\n

          Posting\/Commenting Frequency<\/h3>\n

          My favourite big ugly graph:<\/p>\n

          \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

          The tops of the vertical bars show how many posts I made per day. They should be measured against the scale on the left.<\/p>\n

          Rather a mediocre number of posts, with June and March being the worst two months on record.<\/p>\n

          The green and blue boxes show how the posts are split between the posts that never received a response and those that did receive comments.<\/p>\n

          One metric I am trying to minimise is the percentage of green. I can’t see an obvious improvement, and I haven’t check the figures closely (yet?)<\/p>\n

          The light blue line (using the scale on the right-hand axis) shows how many comments I receive per day. Unsurprisingly, it is strongly correlated to the number of posts I made. <\/p>\n

          Comments are down considerably, with an odd jump in December\/January.<\/p>\n

          The dotted yellow line has no scale shown. It compares how many page hits I have had each month, since I started measuring at the end of September 05. The collection technique used changes (BAS_Stats to Google Analytics) in October 2006. <\/p>\n

          The correlation between posts and page hits disappears for a few months from May to November. I can’t explain that.<\/p>\n

          Profits<\/h3>\n

          Q: Ignoring future inflation, how long before Google Adsense will pay enough money to buy my own weight in chocolate bars?<\/p>\n

          A: There’s been no relief in the strong Australian dollar in the past year. A new baseline Mars Bar source has seen a once-off 28% increase in price. Similarly, a change of bathroom scales, and an increase in sedentarism has seen a small but significant gain in mass.<\/p>\n

          It looked like a bleak year for the chocolate project.<\/p>\n

          Astonishingly, given less than a 50% increase in content this year, the Adsense revenue has grown disproportionately higher. Another solid leap towards its goal!<\/p>\n

          The new ETA for the chocolate binge is 2047, an improvement of 9 years. That’s actually within my life expectancy, so now I have something to look forward to!<\/p>\n

          Summing Up<\/h3>\n

          This year had a few of quiet stretches; not total blog black-out but certainly blog brown-outs here and there. That’s reflected in both the reduced number of posts, and the even bigger reduction in comments.<\/p>\n

          My current expectations are that the next 12 months will see a return to more consistent posting and a continuing evolution in the “OddThinkingian” style (as John Y. might put it).<\/p>\n

          Originally, I expected the blog would probably last about three months. Three years is a good milestone!<\/p>\n

          Thanks, as always, to all of my regular readers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

          I summarise the third year of operations of OddThinking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[271,84],"class_list":["post-535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-oddthinking","tag-anniversary","tag-oddthinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}