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 Hi everyone, Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful December celebrating whatever you celebrate, and hanging out with whomever you hang out with. Yep, I did, thanks for asking.
I'm very busy with eyesFinder of course, the little visual search startup I started a year ago, but I'm slowly getting caught up on blogging. In addition to posting about all the cool stuff that's been happening - wow, more every day - there's all my opinions to share! Wow, more every day :)
The start of each year happens to mark my blogiversary, too. I started blogging on January 1, 2003, so I am now entering my thirteenth year of blogging! During that time I've made nearly 3,000 posts, incorporating over 9,000 images. I get about 5,000 visitors each day, mostly directed here from search engines, and serve about an equal number of RSS feeds. I'm always astonished by the amount of hotlinking that takes place*, and by the vast diversity of inbound links. Random message boards, Facebook posts, and Tweets form the bulk of the referrers.
* hotlinking refers to linking to images instead of the posts which contain them, a generally a frowned-upon practice, and I while I have hotlinking protection in place it doesn't seem to keep people from trying to do it anyway.
My most popular post remains The Tyranny of Email, which was posted a mere three months after I started blogging. It was linked by Dave Winer and subsequently slashdotted, and that early momentum has apparently kept it going. (That, and the fact that email remains tyrannous!) My second most popular post is IQ and Populations, and the third is The Law of Significance. All in the first half of my blogging career...
You guys might know, this blog began as a way for me to write a book called Unnatural Selection, about this idea:
Once upon a time the fittest, smartest people were the ones having kids. Their kids were fit and smart, and each generation was smarter than the last. But that stopped happening a long time ago, and these days, less fit, less intelligent people are the ones having kids. So their kids are not as fit and not as smart, and each generation is less and less intelligent. This is Unnatural Selection.
I never did write this book, although I think about it all the time. Maybe someday...
 Over the years a few things have changed, but not much; my blog looks and feels pretty similar to the way it did back in 2003. I'm marking this blogiversary with a biggish change, at least under the covers; I've switched hosts! For the last fourteen years this blog has been running on an old Pentium 2 stashed in a closet, running RedHat Linux 7.3 ("Valhalla"). It's a rock solid platform and has served me well. Back then, it was rather unusual for people to run their own servers, and in the meantime it became quite common and then again rather unusual, as virtual hosting services have taken over. So as of today I am hosted at Amazon. Should be faster and more stable, and open the door to some new stuff.
Thanks to all of you for reading; this is an ego-powered blog, and if it wasn't for all you guys I wouldn't do it. Cheers and best wishes for a great 2015!
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