Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
This site had 30,444 visits in December 2022 from 21,386 unique visitors.
The list below is of document pages that were each viewed at least 100 times in the month. Ranks in parentheses are from November 2022. 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.
Most prominently new for the month is the thousands of hits on the RSS Feed XML in the site’s root directory. It was there for testing what I might do for my readers who ask for some sort of notification of new content. Had I paid more attention to the numerous nuisance 404 errors from who knows whose requests for files that are meaningful to them but which I have no intention of providing, then I’d have known that at least some feed readers look automatically for an rss.xml at a site’s root. Now that it’s being hit, I commit to keeping it.
I can’t help be curious about sudden interest in support by WIN32K.SYS for the execution of 16-bit Windows programs. Pages about two structures that are very particular to this surely obscure functionality make the arbitrary cut-off of 100 visits (one convincingly at 201, the other at 109). So does another WIN32K creation (at 180) and two pages (at 267 and 192) about CSRSRV functions which are not unrelated. What is going on in the world that such a fossil as 16-bit execution gets any attention!
Similarly curious for their sudden appearances in the list (at 126, 124 and 108) are pages that I wrote nearly 20 years ago (in 2006) about three compiler-generated functions for iteratively calling constructors and destructors. What is going on that brings such things to attention!
Less mystifying is the showing from my relatively recent dabble in retro-computing. Pages that resulted from this have been in and out of the list for the last few months. This month is odd for the few that instead date from 1997 as bug fixes and updates of source code that was written for DOS Internals (ISBN 0-201-60835-9). What I single out, however, is last year’s page on the BIOS Parameter Block—not because it somehow got 102 readers this month but because it ought not to be at the live website! It is not anywhere near to being finished and I may yet remove it.
Especially gratifying to me, just for the practicality of how I fund all the work that goes into this website, is the increased interest in my several pages about consultation services. The main page on consultation always makes the cut-off, but for the first time ever all its children did this month too (at 145, 121, 106 and 104). But please don’t just read about bringing me your problems to solve commercially: please actually do consult me!