With popularity comes spam, now I can feel it

Well, thank to everyone that reads my blog – sincerely. When you start writing, you never figure that so many people could actually find what you think remotely interesting. And so, on that note, yes, it’s time for another stats update. This time, I can tell you that the numbers are through the roof, as far as I’m concerned, of course. In January, arseneault.ca has averaged 537 visits/day! That’s 200 more than in December.

My domain includes many sites/blogs, but the one that gets the lion’s share of the traffic (think 95%) is Life in Technical Sales. In January alone, I’ve served 55,000+ page views representing 1Gb of outgoing bandwidth – that’s incredible (and something I’m sure my hosting provider will start discussing with me)!

My top (known) referrers?

• IBM Blogcentral (internal IBM blogging community – thanks guys!)
• [Geeks are sexy]
• Hawk Wings
• virtualization.info
• Technorati
• edbrill.com

My concern lately has been to reduce the numbers of errors I get. Right now, I’m at about 5% of Error 400/401/402/404/500. I think that’s a bit too high. I know I’ve got more .htaccess magic to learn before I can get it down further though. Finally, to celebrate this joyful event, spammers have decided I was a worthy target after all.

A few minutes ago, I checked my Comments page to find 234 spams from the same attacker. Now, I know the spam comments are picked up by WordPress 2.0, but I wonder if I should start thinking of that Akismet plugin, and whether I can even install it, since I’m self-hosted. Next step for today: upgrade to 2.0.1 if it’s not too much trouble. I don’t have much time since I have to start designing a website for an acquaintance. Computing, it never stops.

Update: Update to 2.0.1 completed.