From 5pm to midnight, I was getting my usual 5 or so hits per hour. (The ‘spikes’ between 9 and 10pm were from me viewing my own site to check some CSS tweaks.) After the post went live and daylight came to Europe, site hits perked up into the upper 20s per hour, and when the story was picked up by the various US-based online publications, jumped into the 200s per hour.

Then, somewhere shortly after 1pm Pacific time, John Gruber of Daring Fireball linked to my post, and everything jumped into the 700s. That’s actually not nearly as high as the hits I got from DF for my post in August 2006, but I switched to Mint only recently and don’t have those numbers anymore, so I can’t show them to you. I should probably install a caching plugin so John can’t knock my hosting site over…

(Of course, RSS-only readers who are having problems won’t see this post… Catch-22.)

Much better now. Much blogging to resume…

I’m only following a few people at the moment (Adam, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, John Gruber of Daring Fireball, and Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica, and some MacBU folks among others), and it’s actually been pretty interesting. As Twitter intends by asking the question “What are you doing?”, the stream of pings is more or less random snippets of folks’ lives that they want to share, and thus not terribly heavy on Mac development or Mac news. However, I’ve seen entries fly by ranging from Daniel discovering that MarsEdit’s icon has been copied by a Linux distribution, to Adam fighting spam for the TidBITS domain, and a whole lot else in between.

I’ve tried to post little bits throughout the day myself, since Thursday or so. Tonya Engst is right, it is a whole lot easier to blurt out the ‘topic’ of a blog piece than it is to write up the whole thing. It might be of some minor interest to a few folks if I wrote up a blog piece about the byteswapping bug I spent most of Friday tracking down, but I was absolutely exhausted yesterday evening (my son woke me up at 6am, I had an eye doctor appointment at 9:15am which included getting my eyes dilated, so that I couldn’t read a computer screen for hours, I had 2 different triage meetings to attend, and a one-on-one meeting with my manager’s manager that day, plus fixing bugs) and had no energy to blog. Instead, I put up a few ‘headlines’ on Twitter throughout the day. Admittedly, my following on Twitter is very small so practically nobody saw them, but I felt like I was actually doing something public again for once.

So anyway. Yep, I gotta blog more. Folks have asked about Xcode over on Mac Mojo and now that we’re reaching the end of a major product development cycle on the new tools it’s time for an update. I’ll work on that, but in the meantime if you’re curious about some of the day-to-day stuff going on inside the MacBU, come follow me!

In that same time period, I’ve received 9043 (!) spam comments, or just over 39 per day. The number is actually a little higher because I’m only counting the comments caught by Akismet — every so often it misses a few and I have to manually delete them.

That’s a spam level of 94.9%! Funny enough, Akismet’s own world-wide statistics show spam at around the 94% level, so I guess I look like a nice average target to the comment spammers. Oh for the days before Canter and Siegel!

It’s all back up now, with no lost content. Any mail sent to me in the last day or so will be trickling in today and I’ll try to get to it tonight.

Hopefully I won’t get too much spam.

That is not what I intended, however.  See, there’s a song called “Love Stinks” (from an album of the same name) that was performed by the J. Geils Band in 1979 or 1980 that was very popular on the radio when I was growing up.  The chorus of the song is roughly this:

(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah
(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah
(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah
(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah

where each of the “yeah yeah” bits is an affirmation of the sentiment that “love stinks.”

That’s the spirit in which I used the lyric as a title for my post — bugs do stink, and there is much agreement about that. If you look at my post titles, you’ll see that many of them are silly puns or simple plays on words. As I was writing my last post, “Love Stinks” was playing on the radio and I thought it might be a silly little pun to use.

So, if my post title sounded like a brush-off or a put-down, I’m sorry. I definately didn’t intend it to be one.

I’ve rerouted the RSS feed through FeedBurner — that will give me plenty of data.  Please let me know if you have any problems reading via syndication.

I’m considering changing the RSS feed to excerpts, so that I can see who hits the site with a browser to read the full post. Will that annoy people? Let me know if you like or don’t like the idea.