Updates, updates, updates. Welcome back to another daily update. I'll start by saying my spirits rose as I saw the first (potentially) organic comment on this blog! Thank you kind stranger, you're a gentleman and a scholar. Fraser, I know you commented, and I love you but you were sold on my madness even before I started this blog, and you seem to support me in all my crazy endevours. So yea, you should get a shout out too but more importantly this other dude "Online Slot" (not sure I like you advertising a casino and you could be a bot, but I'll take this as a win and I'll take it as an action item to remove the URL option when submitting comments and maybe add a bot filter). Thanks for commenting both of you! And now back to your regular scheduled blog post..
In light of the first comment I received, I decided to revisit my blog posts. By my count today's post is number 16, and I think I can look back and say I'm happy with what I've written thus far. It's a bit more AI centric, compared to my initial vision of searching for decentralized identity that is available to all. But I felt there was some pushback with the initial messaging I had here. People were not ready to just accept me blindly. And yea, that's smart of them. But as I type and make my consistent messaging known, hopefully you will see what I see. You won't need to trust me, or anyone else if you don't want to. You'll trust in your own agency to bring you to where you need to be. Maybe today it's reading this blog, maybe tomorrow it's writing your own.
The internet has many rules, and ideas layered on. And one such rule is the 1% rule, which actually fits quite well with this post. This is quoted from Wiki: "Variants include the 1–9–90 rule, which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content". TWhbP, as reported by Google Analytics, has seen 95 unique visitors. But Google lives in my site as a JavaScript file. It just loads seamlessly in your browser and gives me an idea of what you're doing here. So I guess my anecdotal evidence lines up with the 1% rule, so that's cool. All webmasters have this ability, it just depends on whether they are using it to drive up ad revenue or sell more widgets. I just use it to nerd out on, see the maps and things. It's relaxing to know that all this effort I'm putting out is getting some traction. It's not fast, it's not steady, it's growth though. Google doesn't see all users though, browser software like Brave Browser, or browser addons like Privacy Badger, Ghostery, ublock Origin are things that can be layered on your browser to make you invisible to some marketers. For Android, Chrome doesn't support extensions, but Firefox does. I advise all my friends to look at these plugins or addons as they provide a safer way to browse. This makes you invisible to JavaScript trackers that are the backbone of the free nets.
There are additional metrics I use as well. This site and all my sites I create sit behind Cloudflare which is one of the backbones of internet. They help to protect sites against DDOS attacks, they also strip out emails (so bots can't scrape them as easily). They cache responses, forward SMTP messages, they do everything. If you're hosting a website and not using Cloudflare (or a similar service, Cloudflare is just a household name around here) you're missing out on many security features that are free. I know I'm the product if I'm getting such a powerful service for free, and I've read stories of them holding businesses hostage forcing them into paid plans. If you've built your business around this infrastructure and it becomes too expensive to stay profitable then yea, your shits done. So just have a backup plan if you'd like to leverage Cloudflare's expertise.
This image is from the Cloudflare dashboard, where you can manage everything for your site you could imagine, and then some. I swear this isn't sponsored, like they can take your infrastructure down and hold you ransom so have a backup plan if you rely on your site for money and want to protect with a service like Cloudflare. An astute observer might have noticed the Google numbers (95) and the Cloudflare numbers (~2.3k) don't add up. Well that's because there are many bots trawling the nets. As stated in the linked article, they're looking for bugs, for footholds to escalate privilege to gain what does not belong to them.
Semi-related, a concerted effort against my own Wifi network has been going on for a better part of a week. The screenshot below from my router running AsusWrt Merlin and Skynet (firewall software, not the ominous bot network from the Terminator) shows from Nov 29, 2024 to Dec 3, 2024 there was over 3.8k probes from the Netherlands! I checked in now and it's back to it's normal 5 Eyes level shenanigans. But I digress. What was this anomoly? I had a smart TV turn on randomly just before I took that screenshot from my router, so maybe someone was in my house, hacking my TV and exfiltrating data? I have a separate SSID for my smart TVs that has no visibility into other devices on the network. Someone can get in, steal my partners Netflix creds and turn the TV on I guess. They cannot make lateral movement to another device under my network control unless I've misconfigured something.
I'm coming up on my 5 minute mark of this post and didn't really do what I wanted to do today. Tomorrow is another day however, maybe if I remember I'll be sure to post about it. I wanted to write about all the ideas I have for this site, for this voice, for this movement. I get overzealous in many of my pursuits, I find myself hyperfocused on tasks before me. I see many different paths to go and want to take them all at once. Somehow, I can set the madness beside me and even if makes my shoulders stiff for a bit, I can sit with my mind and know that I've had an idea, it's formed, it can form in any ones mind like myself. I'm not so different than others, maybe an idea like mine can form in their mind. If I think hard enough about this idea, I can find it in my mind again. If I can recall it, then I can share it and teach it.
It's just taking the steps to act on this action, and to be better than you were yesterday. To challenge your privilege, my privilege is great and I feel blessed everyday I can. It's why I want to be the 1% of internet users, I want to make content and have you consume it. I lost my voice at a young age, and think the voice I've cultivated in my head for so long to help me through my troubling times. This voice could be a beacon for a better tomorrow. It's littered with dusty, dirty, grimey things. They will be slowly dusted off and made available here. This is my blog and it's about me, but it's about so much more. You just need to be receptive to what you find here if it's going to add any value for your life. I'll leave you with a brief clip from an older American show, "Malcolm in the Middle", where the father, Hal, is experiencing what I'm experiencing trying to put all the pieces of this site together to ensure we can have a trustless system where we can share ideas.
PS. - here's some linkage to some topics I wanted to discuss today. I try to write one post a day, but maybe a bit of a reading list could be good to have people comment and make novel observations that others might not be familiar with. Let me know what you think. SEO is a thing us webmasters need to think about, and engagement is gold to SEO.