The Geek’s Blog

The site is growing at a furious pace… now we're over 1.3 million pageviews in the last 30 days.

We also hit the 30k subscriber mark yesterday as well, so it's just milestones all over the place.

None of these numbers include the blogs, but we've been seeing some great articles from all the bloggers as well.

In the last 30 days…

We've been having incredible growth lately…  but you can see from the graph it's been holding steady with normal weekday fluctuations that you'd expect. Much better than the last graph.

I'm hoping the next phase of the site is going to really make it boom.

A computer that dispenses Mountain Dew… what more could I want?

Found on this list of computer case mods…

Somebody at work sent me this… it's a shirt with an animated plastic gadget on the front that detects the current wireless signal level and lights up based on how good the signal is where you are.

My boss (at my regular job) had a good suggestion…. just take the decal off and put it on the wall. You could even attach it to the back of your laptop screen if you wanted to.

Wi-Fi Detector Shirt from ThinkGeek

The first thing I did when moving to a dedicated virtual earlier this year was install a php opcode cache so the site would run at maximum speed all the time.

After consulting with most of my friends I ended up settling on XCache (although I don't exactly remember why), and I've had really good luck with it for months. Haven't had a single issue…

Because of the intense load the massive increase in readers has caused, and especially after introducing the forums, I decided to start looking for more options to speed up the server… so I turned to eAccelerator, which is not just an opcode cache but also an optimizer as well.

Everything seemed to be running well, and it even required a bit less memory than XCache, until I noticed that the WordPress MU site was down for more than 18 hours.

tail /var/log/http/error_log

[Tue Sep 25 22:36:08 2007] [notice] child pid 1615 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Sep 25 22:36:08 2007] [notice] child pid 7493 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Sep 25 22:36:08 2007] [notice] child pid 7494 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

Crap!

So I've switched back to trusty XCache, and the problems stopped entirely. I'm not sure why the combination of Wordpress MU, eAccelerator and PHP 5.2.4 caused this issue for me, but maybe it's happened to you as well. If so, let me know.

In the last 30 days, that is…

It's really started to fluxuate up and down… the weekdays tend to average around 40k pageviews/day, and the weekends are just pulling in 30k or so per day.

Seems like Tuesday is always the biggest day of the week, although I'm not sure why.

For whatever reason this seems to be a popular geek theme… every September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day.

So here's "Talk Like a Pirate" Geek:

If you are curious, the Wikipedia link has all the details.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Talk_Like_a_Pirate_Day

Words are really unnecessary…

We've been hovering very near the 1 million pageviews per 30 days mark for a while now, but finally made it as of last night!

I'm incredibly thrilled, not just because of all the traffic, but because it's been my goal to hit this mark before our 1 year anniversary in October.

Time to figure up some new goals…  the site has been growing at a nice clip, roughly 10-15% growth per month, which would mean 2.5 million / month a year from now at the conservative 10% rate. It'll be interesting to see if we can hit that sooner.

If you are interested in keeping up with our site stats, you can check out our Quantcast profile… the traffic numbers should be fairly reliable, although the demographics just seem totally off. It only seems to update once a week or so.

I've never been a big fan of social networking (in fact I'm quite sure that MySpace is the spawn of the devil) but I've decided to give in to the dark side a little bit and signed up for a few sites.

So, here's the social stuff I've signed up for at the moment…

Twitter

http://twitter.com/howtogeek

Facebook

I'm geek@howtogeek.com on Facebook

StumbleUpon

http://howtogeek.stumbleupon.com/

This isn't exactly social, but if you want to keep tabs on How-To Geek's traffic numbers:

http://www.quantcast.com/howtogeek.com

I can't promise to keep anything updated… but if you are a user of one of those services you are welcome to add me.