Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
This site had 21,706 visits in March 2021 from 15,217 unique visitors.
As explained in the general notes on What’s Hot? my presentation of statistics stopped in 2017, having got complicated when the site’s hosting service enabled HTTPS and separated the statistics according to whether pages were accessed with HTTPS or plain old HTTP. As a side-effect of revising the site’s scripts and style sheets in early 2021, I noticed that the hosting service now provides for automated redirection of HTTP to HTTPS such that all access shows in the HTTPS logs. Collection of a statistical summary is relatively easy again—and so here it is.
Especially gratifying is that very nearly at the top is a page from 1999 (and much lower down is one from so long ago that it was originally a Word document). Sometimes, readers tell me that some page I wrote in 2009 for 32-bit Windows Vista needs “correction” for 64-bit Windows (perhaps fair enough) or for all the changes in the many years since. Often, the topic still has so little written about it on the Internet that my old write-up is all the reader finds, and I can only disappoint them that I haven’t looked at the page in all that time and don’t plan to ever again, mostly for having spent the decade wondering why I ever did this work that seems to have done no good for anyone. Here, by contrast, is a much older page that I’m always happy to be reminded of.
Also gratifying is that my two laboured write-ups on driver signing are both comfortably above the arbitrary cut-off of 100 views per month. That both were slow to get there is in large part why one is still a bit rough and the other is still nowhere near to finished. Even in this state, both are chock-full of driver-signing details that I believe were individually new to the Internet at the time and certainly were new as a collection in one place. Yet for many months after I wrote them in 2018, quick peeks through the logs showed dismayingly few readers. Back then, asking Google about pages that name CustomKernelSigners turned up only very few matches. Curiously, asking now gets many more references, but more to a hacker’s repository on GitHub than to my write-up. The hack does cite me for very much older, different work and since it seems to have been developed with little sign of the detail in mine, I can’t say it wasn’t arrived at independently. Still, I really am doing this research and writing all wrong, aren’t I?
The list below is of document pages that were each viewed at least 100 times in the month. 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, as is the banner page, since none of these are meant to be seen independently of a document page.