Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
No pages at an obscure technical site are ever really hot, but many nowadays attract more than 100 views per month. There are nearing 2,000 pages at this site. Most are very detailed descriptions of functionality in Windows. Though they are the sort of thing that may be the key to some advanced programmer being able to complete his work, they are beyond arcane to everyone else. I am astonished that any of these pages get looked at even once a day.
This site had 17,715 visits in June 2010, from 13,279 unique visitors.
There follows a list of pages that were each viewed at least 100 times in June 2010. The faded titles are just index pages which I presume are viewed only or mainly on the way to others, especially while moving from one Table of Contents to another. Two of these index pages are just the skimpiest of placeholders, pending my writing an introduction. The rank in brackets is from the previous month.
Especially pleasing this month is that two of my favourite pages finally make the list. The Start Menu’s Start details what limited support is available for getting third-party programs onto the Start Menu for new users. It is a small piece of user-level output from quite a lot of programmer-level research into the Windows Shell, and makes the list after nearly a year. The other favourite page has taken even longer to make this list. It’s the entry page for my documentation of the otherwise undocumented IListView interface which provides significant new functionality for List-View controls in Windows Vista and higher. If you have ever wondered whether things really are left undocumented that are genuinely useful to programmers outside Microsoft, this would be among the largest and best examples. Yet its revelation lay here for two years, sketched by this theorist but undeveloped for real-world programming, before attracting even a hundred views in any one month. Has innovation at this level of Windows dried up or was it never flowing?