Blog anniversary: 1 year!

That’s right, it’s been a year of weekly posts.

First of all I must thank your support. Over this year I kept receiving positive feedback from you, my loyal readers. I really enjoy writing these posts but it’s even better to know that you find them useful or amusing. It’s being an enriching experience because everyday I’m learning a bit more about social media and writing for the web. It’s hard work but it pays off.

Why the name?

• I like technology, therefore “Geek”;
• I like reptiles & I’m cold-blooded, therefore “Gecko”;
• Thus, “The Geeky Gecko”.

Statistics. Statistics everywhere!

Since this is a technological personal blog I tried to balance the subject of my posts to please both kinds of audiences. After 51 weekly posts I think I managed to achieve that balance.

The average reader of my blog:

• is Portuguese, or American, or Brazilian
• visits the blog on Mondays
• reads the post at 11am, or 9am, or 22pm
• and takes 1 minute and 16 seconds to read it

Until last month I used the default commenting system provided by WordPress, without any human-validation software like reCAPTCHA. Over the course of the year, the number of spam comments increased exponentially as you can see from the graph below. In the first months I had an average of 100 spam comments but then it skyrocketed! I was having thousands of spam comments per week! You know, stuff about Oprah, pills, and crazy deals. Thankfully I had Akismet installed since day one (it’s really a must-have), which deleted all that spam for me.

In December, after several readers asking for a better commenting system, I migrated to Disqus and now I have 0 spam. Alongside all the other nice features Disqus provides, it sure keeps the spam at bay!

You gotta love the hatters

Speaking about spam, there’s something worse — hate speech. At least spam is writen by cold bots. Trolling on the other hand is writen by actual human beings. Poor souls. Quoting a clever article of Coding Horror about communities:

“Free speech” doesn’t mean we are obliged to listen to you being a jerk. This is our house, and our rules. You can go try a different house. Fortunately there’s a whole Internet of other communities out there. Jeff Atwood

tl;dr

Thanks. Carry on.