Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
This site had 21,949 visits in March 2017, from 16,023 unique visitors. The list below is of pages that were each viewed at least 100 times in March 2017.
Last month brought a surprise from the distant past and this month brings two!
I remember that when I wrote in 2006 about Microsoft’s extension of C++ by way of allowing for attributes in square brackets I was excited to be breaking new ground and unhappy that I didn’t have the resources to see it through. Microsoft’s extensible (but, of course, undocumented) scheme of attribute providers even provides for an attribute provider provider. The latter’s attributes can then be used to describe attributes that are provided by other providers. Someone has evidently discovered my more or less mechanical extraction of the compiler’s own descriptions of the built-in attributes. Thus did a page that languished in obscurity for 10 years suddenly get nearly 300 visits in a few days.
Also getting noticeable attention for the first time in a decade is one of the site’s smallest pages. It’s just a quick note from 2007 to introduce my even earlier documentation of an undocumented SHLWAPI function that plainly and indisputably can have existed only as special support for Internet Explorer. That this Windows API function did not get documented by Microsoft for settlement of an anti-trust suit about using Windows to help Internet Explorer is a lasting testament to the utter incompetence, at best, of the court’s supervision. Of more interest to me these days, however, is that out of 226 visits to the introduction, not even 10 proceeded to the documentation, e.g., to find out what (little) the undocumented function actually did.
I can’t avoid mixed feelings about the appearance in this month’s list of more than a mere few pages that were entirely new from last year’s commitment to research and writing. It’s gratifying that they get attention, less so that it has taken so long—and they are anyway not the year’s best work.
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, which I likely never will get round to. The TOCs are omitted entirely. The rank in brackets is from the previous month.