8 years mark. Blog is slowly turning into books reviews page. Already posted 9 reviews since new year and at least a few more coming. Meanwhile the most popular posts here are some random tech posts that bots for some reason like to crawl, i guess (like tweaking Japanese language support in Windows). I know the stats are not quite real as many visits are seconds long and probably by bots, but still kind of fun to see what gets more hits.
Category: General
Blog annual stats (v2022)
2022 was another less active year. With especially long hiatus from posting between March and August. Haven’t read anything at that time or watched any special movies or series to write about and i guess spring and summer was not that hot on tech news for me. But there were a few popular articles about IE deprecation and latest Windows 11 update, which i reposted on LinkedIn and they got a bit more of a traffic. A few older articles got lots of attention this year for some reason. In September there was an issue with SSL plugin i use and for a few days only home page was accessible, until i finally noticed and fixed it. Shouldn’t affect overall stats that much, though.
- Posted 14 entries (-12):
- Technology – 6 (-9), this is probably what my average will be from now on;
- Reviews – 5 (-1), similar to last year;
- Books – 4 (+2), the only category with positive difference and i almost completed another book, but didn’t want to rush it to complete by the new year. My reading numbers are kind of steady now.
- General – 2 (-);
- Movies – 1 (-2), have only posted my thoughts on different movies based on “I am Legend” book . Last year even skipped Kinopavasaris movie fest which i was going to for so many years. Maybe i will get back into it next year.
- Board Games – 1 (-1), the only thing i posted was my stats post for 2021 and i skipped doing it this time, so this category might go to zero. Have cooled on board games in general.
- Artwork – 1 (-1);
- Top 10 – 1 (-);
- TV series – 0 (-).
- I have approved one comment this year, which might still be spam, but it seemed real enough. Someone thanking on a very old board game review (+1).
7 years
Blog is 7 years old today. Not much new. Not very active for the last few months. But in total since the last milestone did 10 tech, 3 books and 1 movie post. So, not less than last year at least. Nothing on board games still. Kind of cooled off on them and not even going to board game meet ups at work anymore. So, it probably will be tech and books posts for a while.
Blog annual stats (v2021)
This year has a lot less posts as i have stopped doing M365 news in January. I still post in Technology category occasionally and some new articles get some views, but not that many. Also sometimes i repost in LinkedIn and i get some traffic from there. I have decided to post about interesting M365 news directly on LinkedIn. Got tired of collecting all the news and summarizing them. Again a few posts about board games, books. Will use Matomo for page views stats this year again. Because numbers differ from Google Analytics (Matomo has a bit higher count) and it will be better to compare with numbers from the same system.
- Posted 26 entries (-50):
- Technology – 15 (-36), stopped doing M365 news, also decided not to post Firefox release notes, so next year will have even less posts;
- Reviews – 6 (-12), less books read, less movies or TV series watched;
- Movies – 3 (-5), only 3 movies watched during Kinopavasaris, no completed TV series to write about, but i have watched lots of old movies, starting with all James Bond films;
- Books – 2 (-6), bad year for reading, only managed to finish two first books in Dune series;
- Board Games – 2 (-2), only 1 review in LT for Carcassonne and yearly stats, not playing that much either;
- General – 2 (-);
- Artwork – 2 (-);
- Top 10 – 1 (-);
- TV series – 0 (-1).
- No comments this year (-2).
6 years
The blog is 6 years old today. A short overview of changes (full summary as usual on January 1st). This year i have stopped doing Microsoft 365 news posts. Same as with board games news it became too tedious to keep up with the avalanche of news and to do short summaries of all of them in Lithuanian. So, after doing this for 2 years i’ve decided to stop. Now i only occasionally post something on LinkedIn with a link to a news article and my short summary or opinion. This feels more comfortable. I try to pick only something that stands out or is interesting to me or readers. As i don’t post it here, i get less traffic to my blog. But i am still getting enough views of old articles (some are still puzzling). Also stopped doing Firefox release posts as i got disappointed with Firefox in general and stopped posting in a local community that i used to post about Firefox news. Have only done 9 technology articles, 2 books, 3 movies and 1 board game review so far. I might finish one more book before the end of this year or do another review of an old board game in collaboration with D6.lt. But this year will be scarce on content. And i kind of start to feel an urge to start doing some series again 🙂
Blog annual stats (v2020)
Last year i have mentioned that i have started using Matomo. But it was in the middle of 2019, so i couldn’t use it for annual stats. Now that i have used Matomo for a complete year and also given the fact that i’ve screwed up in February by uninstalling old Google Analytics add-in in WordPress without realizing it is actually connecting my page to GA (i have lost 20 days of stats because of it), i decided to use Matomo numbers instead of GA for page views this time. I have compared them and they of course are very similar. Matomo numbers are a bit higher. Not sure if it counts differently or because of that 20 days gap in GA. But i like higher numbers better 😀 Will see, maybe next year i will go back to GA numbers or maybe i will get rid of Google Analytics completely. Although it is nice to have two options, if one suddenly stops working. The 2020 stats:
- Posted 76 entries (-36):
- Technology – 51 (-37), there were no Insider build posts at all this year, now i am only posting about final releases of next Windows 10 versions; about the same amount of Microsoft 365 news and a few other articles here and there (Android, Spark);
- Reviews – 18 (new), this is a new category which combines my reviews for books, movies, TV series, so the number is high;
- Books – 8 (+1), just finished last book a day ago to make this number higher 😀 ;
- Board Games – 4 (-3);
- Movies – 8 (+5), last year i have explored the option of watching Kinopavasaris movies digitally at home, so i have watched more movies this way and i kind of liked it;
- General – 2 (-1);
- Artwork – 2 (+1);
- Top 10 – 1 (-);
- TV series – 1 (+1).
- Removed Next Game category (it is now Board Games and Reviews combined) and a few other old categories that didn’t have any posts for years.
- Have received even two comments this year (+2) and actually replied to one of them. And also received an email regarding one of the articles. Btw, started using Antispam Bee because older plugin became a bloated money grab. This one is very good dealing with spam comments and is free.
Five Years Anniversary
A little bit of history. 5 years ago i was at home for a few months, recovering after a few surgeries. As i was bored i decided to finally put my domain wroot.lt to use (i had it since 2007 and only used for my personal email till then). It was surprisingly easy to use my hoster’s system to install WordPress and start tinkering with design and settings. The overall look hasn’t changed that much since then. Still the same gray and black theme based on Sparkling from Colorlib. As time went i have added a few plugins, removed some, enabled SSL, etc. At first i thought i would mostly post about board games as there is not so much coverage in Lithuania and i was posting some news in Lithuanian for a while. Of course, there was almost nobody reading that and it got too tedious to gather and translate the news. So i have stopped and only posted a few reviews of games or movies sometimes. A few years ago i have started using Office 365 a lot and following the news. And then i decided to start sharing them, again, in Lithuanian, as there are not so many sources here posting about this. And for now this is the main focus of this blog. I also started reposting these news to LinkedIn to drive more attention. Occasionally i will post about some other technology stuff, recently started posting reviews of books i am reading. It is not like this is still fresh and exciting to do that, but i’m persistent and i still kind of like it, like seeing stats and what gets more visits. And i just don’t want to stop and let this blog go into oblivion. Maybe at some point i will come up with something interesting and catchy. Probably not 🙂
Blog annual stats (v2019)
This year i have started using Matomo to track visits and have noticed same IP addresses going often every few hours to the same pages. So, stats are a bit skewed by such bots, but in a grand scheme probably are not affected that much. Also, Matomo masks true IP and shows last part as 0.0, so i can’t tell if these are truly the same IPs and of course it is not possible to block them without knowing a real IP. The 2019 stats:
- Posted 110 entries (+38):
- Technology – 88 (+32), although there were less Windows Insider posts, but i’ve explored various other topics like cloud services, Android, statistics, also started posting Microsoft 365 news a few times per month;
- Books – 7 (+7), big increase, hope to keep reading as much and posting about it;
- Board Games – 7 (+1);
- Next Game – 6 (+2), reviewed 1 game more than last year;
- Movies – 3 (-4), watched less movies during Kinopavasaris festival and in general, also not always posting about it, in total probably watched 5 movies this year;
- General – 3 (+1);
- Top 10 – 1 (-);
- Artwork – 1 (+1).
- Sadly, no comments received this year.
Blog is 4 years old :)
Another year has passed. Still going strong with my blog. 2015 looks so far away 🙂
14 years with IgniteRealtime.org community [EN]
I’ve been reminded recently about how long i have spent with IgniteRealtime.org community (a place for XMPP based projects and people using or developing it). So i have checked my forums profile and today is exactly the day i have joined 14 years ago (2005.01.24). This is a few months later than i started at my first job. And my first major task there was indeed to setup an internal communications solution (“like Skype, but for internal usage”). That’s how i’ve found JiveSoftware and then Jive Messenger (later renamed to Wildfire and now Openfire). Then Jive switched to other products and created IgniteRealtime to donate their older projects to the community. I have heard about Jabber (currently XMPP) before and i think have tried it a bit a few years before while studying at university. When i had my first internet line installed at home my ISP also had an internal chat system for its customers based on Jabber. So picking this technology was an easy choice for me. It also was flexible, as you could use any XMPP client and you could choose one better suiting your company’s needs. And it was free 🙂 At first i had a lot of questions, but after a few years i was mostly helping others to fix problems, configure things. It has become a natural daily routine to check forums and reply to a few posts, to pop in into real time chat with developers and users. In 2015 i’ve decided to step in and took over then abandoned Spark project (XMPP client). Although i’m not a developer, so it was mostly managing patches, filing bugs, doing releases and writing a few lines of code here and there. Spark is currently in a limbo with a few major issues blocking its next release and absence of experienced coders contributing to it also hurts, but it still moves forward slowly. Just fixed a few issues the other day. Although we have switched to Skype for Business at work i haven’t quit this community and still looking forward to participate and collaborate for many years onwards 🙂 Read More