30 Months Old…
As of this Sunday, RR… will have been up and around for two and a half years, a quarter of my goal achieved to keep some form of journal for ten years. This just happens to be an on-line version that everyone with a browser has access to. A lot has transpired since its inception, and it’s kind of funny to look back and review some of the interesting information that no one else but me can see — it’s my blogging system, after all! Please note that some of this information pertains to the entire blogging system, not just RR…, and the dates and times are reported as GMT (Zulu, to you pilots!)
- The first entry was added waaaaaaaay back on March 26, 2002.
- The searching mechanism was first added and tested on April 9, 2003 at 2:48 a.m. (again, keep in mind GMT!)
- A few seconds less than six minutes later, the first outside (in other words, not me!) search was performed. Someone from the University of Massachusetts misqueried for ‘manifest parst’, and then corrected him/herself one second later and searched for the ever-popular ‘manifest parse’.
- Two more folks in Europe came looking for similar information about eight hours later.
- The first person other than me to log into the blogging system was Sean on April 10, 2003, after three failed login attempts. He added entry #580 which consisted of only three words (which if memory serves were “First to find!”) and saved it as draft. It was never published and eventually deleted.
- On April 14, 2003, the now-famous search for “nude jew” was performed. I wish I knew what they were expecting to find, apart from the obvious!
- The most popular searches in 2003 related to the manifest parse error article and to She-who-shall-not-be-named. Of note, a particular AOL user still searches for the name of She-who-shall-not-be-named every two weeks or so, first searching the blog entries and then the comments. Same modus operandi every visit. Guess who that is. The most recent of these search patterns was this past September 9th.
- Other strange searches in 2003: ‘old nude men’, ‘april death list in sydney’, ’self castration’, and ‘homemade tattoo instructions’. Keep in mind that the searches I mention are not how people found my website, but what they searched for once they arrived!
- In late December 2003, in an effort to reduce the large numbers of spam comments (people pretending to make comments but simply advertising their own websites), I installed MT-BlackList which automatically rejects comments submitted with links to a few thousand websites.
- Robert Moore submitted the first comment to be rejected by the new system on January 4, 2004 with an attempted link to enenkio.org. Eleven more attempts by Mr. Moore were denied 25 days later. To date, the automatic rejection count of Mr. Moore’s spam is at 20.
- On January 7, 2004, an automatic ping to a public publishing server that records when new blog entries are created was rejected with the automated explanation that “we can only accept one ping every half-hour. It’s cool that you’re updating so often, however, if I may be so bold as to offer some advice — take a break, you’ll enjoy it!” I wonder how many other bloggers have perused their activity logs enough to find that hidden message! It’s not otherwise visible to the outside world.
- It was in July 2004 that the MT-BlackList filter started kicking in frequently, thanks to idiots attempting to post advertisements for such varied topics as ‘pënìš enlargement’, ‘levitra’, and ‘phendimetrazine’. To date, 95 comments have been automatically rejected, saving me the effort of removing them manually. Boy, I wish I’d had that installed a year ago when SA frequented the website — not so much because the deranged comments would have been filtered (because they probably wouldn’t have been), but the removal process is just a few clicks to either remove one comment or 200 comments.
- The most interesting searches of 2004 so far (remember, on my website, not in getting here!) have been for ‘kim’s ramblings’, ‘big bøøbš’, and ‘psycho playboy’. The most common searches of 2004 are for ‘itsyourdomain’ and (once again!) for She-who-shall-not-be-named — but that’s because she’s the one doing the searching. Fine with me at long as it doesn’t go further than that.
- So far, there have been 1,411 searches, 80 invalid login attempts (64 of them from Kim on one particular day when a glitch prevented her from logging in), 23 ping errors, 38 password recovery attempts (35 from Sean), 1,614 blog entries (1,070 georocks, 404 ramblings, 60 family postings, 29 keystrokes, 23 soapboxes, 20 corners, 2 tests, 6 that must have been deleted from various blogs), 2,235 comments (most by SWSNBN), and 8 authors (6 contributing).
- A quick Google search finds other similar websites: Richard’s Misc. Ramblings, Richard’s Random Ramblings, Ramblings from Richard’s Ranch, The Ramblings of Richard, Richard’s Intermittent Ramblings, Richard’s Rasslin’ Ramblings, and Richard’s Random Rants. At least mine shows up three times in the top ten list!
OK, I’m done. Back to the real world…
Running NT 4, something tries to run qttask.exe just as my computer is booting Windows? I got into this mess trying to look at the Mac Brown Interview on the Texas Football Website, and I can’t get it off my computer. Uninstall doesn’t work, because the program never installed properly. And it is not in my Startup list. I can’t find it in any of the registries either. What is the “something” that is trying to run qttask.exe, and how do I get rid of it? Thanks for the help!
Belated Rambling-versary to you… Thanks for bringing up the MT-Blacklist plug-in in your retrospective. I had recently been inundated by comment-spam, and now it’s all gone… Thanks!