Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

Writing a web page in HTML should feel like a relatively deterministic process, in that each time you add a tag or a CSS rule, you can predict how that will effect the rendered output. Not all web pages are written in a “bottom up” way, though, and web developers can find themselves taking over maintenance of someone else’s pages, or modifying an existing template or CMS’s pages. In these situations, it can be difficult to know what change to make to the source to produce a given output, and similarly how the output will look after a given change to the source. (Speaking of bugs, I just clicked a link on one of my 58 open tabs in Iceweasel and my browser[s] crashed. Fortunately WordPress’s auto-save feature meant that I didn’t lose any work.) The issue is even more complicated when a certain HTML document has the correct appearance when rendered by one browser, but not when rendered by another. At this point, in theory, one’s understanding of HTML has to be at least as good as the union of the understanding of the individual programmers of each browser. That’s probably an over-estimate, but these situations do require more than just reading the specs.

I have previously been curious about the precise effect my blog has on the wider Web. I knew that a few people had found it without my prompting because of the comments left on it, and at least one person had been helped by it. An early attempt at satisfying my curiosity involved grepping the Apache access logs for references to pages of my blog, and trying to get a sense of how many people had accessed it, and from where. This was early on, and I believe my very rough estimate was that about 30 people a month (not including myself and bots) visited the site. The other approximate measures I have are that:

1. my blog is preserved on the Internet Archive (reinforcing, although not proving, the view I held right at the beginning that any information I put out on here will be accessible forever),
2. it is the top result for “drab as” on Google (at least currently, and at least on my computer), and,
3. as previously mentioned, it is in the top 1 000 000 blogs at Technorati (even after their recent changes to the ranking system).

Still, my curiosity was not completely sated, and I think justly so, as, when people ask me how popular my blog is (which is one of the first things they ask), I have no real cogent statistic to give them. That is why I was glad to find out that my hosting provider (who I must say again is probably the best hosting provider in the world, and a really decent guy) was doing an upgrade to his server which included installation of a statistics package.