Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
The end of a year is for many an occasion not just to anticipate the new year but to review the old. This year, 2016, is notable for this website because research and writing resumed for it after a five-year break. The year started with some more or less mechanical updating that could be done tolerably well at nights and on weekends. Then it changed gear for a deliberate programme of full-time exploration to find Windows material that’s genuinely new to the world, including even to Microsoft.
Has that been a success? Not if we reckon just by the numbers, no. This site had 18,002 visits in December 2016, from 12,347 unique visitors. That’s a tailing off from the 17,763 unique visitors in one month exactly four years earlier, when I last collected these statistics for presentation, but that’s just to be expected. Indeed, considering that the site had no new material for years, I regard these totals as having held up pretty well.
But the site does have new material now, and not just a smattering of it but several hundred new pages. These, it turns out, have hardly got looked at by anyone. Of course, I’m well used to finding that a topic I write about doesn’t get anyone else’s attention for months and even years—and am also too used to wondering how someone’s later work on the topic, e.g., for a conference presentation, doesn’t cite mine. Still, it is conspicuous that in the list below of pages that were each viewed at least 100 times in December 2016, only two were created this year and they just update material that was first written in 2010 (also to no immediate attention). I’m glad enough that 380 people looked at my page on Consultation and that almost as many seem at least to have contemplated sending Feedback. I’m utterly astonished at 705 visits to one of the site’s oldest pages (about a buffer overflow bug from 1999). Yet not one page that’s truly new makes the cut. Did I waste the year?
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 (TOC) to another. One of those index pages is just the skimpiest of placeholders, pending my writing an introduction. The TOCs are omitted entirely. The rank in brackets is from exactly four years ago.