It’s scary out there in Internet Land. I have just checked the logs on one of my servers and in the last 24 hours the server received 827 failed login attempts via SSH. The attacker ran through a list of random usernames sorted alphabetically and the password they attempted to log in with for each username was “password”. Very imaginative.

Some people do it a few times a week. Others do it several times a day. Some don’t do it at all. I am, of course, talking about updating your blog.

I recently read a report analysing the use of websites for councillors in local government. One of the claims in the report, although no quantitative data was provided, was that the more frequently a councillor updated their site, the more traffic it got. I have been thinking recently about how you increase the readership of something like a blog and, more importantly, how do you keep readers coming back for more?

Here’s my guide to getting a little more action on your blog:

1. It helps if what you write about is interesting. It doesn’t matter how often you update your site, if people don’t find what you write about interesting, they ain’t going to come back. Period.
2. Accuracy is important too. If you don’t background check your information, assuming you have that kind of blog, you can be sure someone out there in Internet Land will pick you up on it. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” You have been warned.
3. It helps if you maintain some sort of regular schedule for publishing your material so that when people do revisit your site they have something new to read. If the blog or website looks as though it hasn’t been updated for a while people won’t bother coming back. There is a fine balance here though. I used to read Scripting News every day but now I don’t because Dave Winer appears to do nothing else all day but update his blog. Too much information for me in one go, although at least I know that when I do visit his site there is something new to read.

Having said all of this if what you write about doesn’t interest other people and you don’t update your blog every other day does this mean you shouldn’t maintain a blog? Hell no! I maintain this blog because I enjoy writing. A few more readers would nice, but hey, it’s not the end of the world. If it doesn’t interest you there are plenty of other blogs for you to go look at. You can get out now.

Yet Another Stupid Ass Web Site (YASAWS)

I have to remember this one. Could come in handy one day.

I have been playing around with gVisit. It allows you to see where your visitors are coming from. Here is the current result:

So mostly North America and Europe. All 6 of them! It’s a fun tool and is free if you have limited traffic.

I used the Grab utility (Apps > Utilities) on Mac OS X to get a screenshot of the map. It’s a really cool tool. As well as taking a shot of the whole screen you can also select which part of the screen you want to capture. Unfortunately it saved the image as a TIFF file so I had to use PhotoShop Elements to convert it to a JPEG. There doesn’t seem to be an option that allows you to specify what format you want the screenshot to be saved as.

I’ve just finished listening to George Carlin’s Napalm and Silly Putty again. It’s very funny. He certainly doesn’t hold back about some of the things he talks about. It was the first audio book that I ever bought. It was also the last audio book that I ever bought. Nothing to do with the book. I just haven’t bought an audio book since.

Here are a couple of quotes:

“The reason I talk to myself is that I’m the only one whose answers I accept.”

“I had an interesting morning. I got into an argument with my Rice Krispies. I distinctly heard, “Snap, crackle and fuck you”. I don’t know which one of them said it, I was reaching for the artificial sweetener at the time and not looking directly into the bowl, but I heard it.”

Is there a coffee shortage I don’t know about? Whenever I go to Starbucks I usually order a tall latte. During the last 3 occassions, and at different locations too, I ordered a latte and ended up with half a cup of foam. I eventually found the coffee hiding at the bottom of the cup. Normally when I order a coffee I expect to get a whole cup of the stuff, not just half. I distinctly remember not ordering a tall “dry” latte so why all the foam?

In the future when I go to Starbucks I will order an espresso macchiato. Now when I get my coffee and find that there isn’t much coffee in my cup, I am not going to be disappointed as I am not expecting to find a lot coffee there; there isn’t supposed to be a lot of coffee in a macchiato. However, give me a latte with half a cup of foam and I am going to get angry. After all, I want to drink my latte, not use it for shaving.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how in the future it would be possible to access the Internet at home by means other than having to use a telephone line. Looks like the future has already arrived.

The Register: “PCCW takes wireless broadband to London”

Now you can create podcasts with QuickTime Pro 7.

I saw the movie Sideways over the weekend. It’s a fantastic film. It’s really funny but doesn’t try to be, unlike most other Hollywood comedies that try really hard but fail; the kind where you can see the jokes coming from a mile away. If you get the chance to see it, you should do so. The other reason I liked it is that I saw a bit of myself in one of the main characters. I won’t say which one 🙂

The best £4.99 I ever spent. It even has a list of the chords for all the songs so you can play along while you listen. Now where did I put my guitar …