Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
This site had 32,764 visits in November 2021 from 24,374 unique visitors. That’s 1,092 visits per day. Collectively, they downloaded 129,948 pages.
The significant jump in visits (and visitors) all comes from a few days of intense interest in a page I wrote more than 20 years ago! I remember well my excitement from the time. It was the first I knew of buffer overflows as anything other than defective coding that even bad programmers soon learn to avoid. It’s not the first buffer overflow that was ever exploited for mischief, nor the first whose exploitation was written up, but few write-ups then were anything like as detailed. I’m a little disappointed that not even 1% of the new readers proceeded to the several pages of details, but of course the introduction has everything that matters after so long—except perhaps that It doesn’t tell of what should be the industry-wide embarrassment that lying publicists from both Microsoft and America Online (AOL) went on to successful careers.
A few hundred readers of a different but similarly old page, recently reworked to introduce new writing on the old subject, actually did explore the new writing. I really must collect my thoughts and finish these pages!
Also in need of finishing is a page that makes its first appearance in these lists. I have struggled with this one for a long, long time, most recently abandoning a substantial reworking in mid-2020, before accommodating myself in April 2021 to the realisation that nothing like it exists on the Internet and never will unless I publish my rough work. As welcome as it is that the page makes the cut after six months or so, there’s sadness too since its topic surely ought not to be so neglected by the industry.
The list below is of document pages that were each viewed at least 100 times in the month. Ranks in parentheses are from October 2021. 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.