Archives are Back, and Other Metacrap

After a configuration screwup, the archives are back and functional.

Also thought I’d share a little more insight into the indirect Slashdot effect. The echo resulted in:

• Visits from 52 countries (with the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, India and the Netherlands leading the way)
• Visits from 36 states (with California, Texas, Washington, New York and Virginia leading the way)
• Visitors from Microsoft edges out visitors from Oracle, 6-5
• The most popular follow-on article for visitors: The Tuesday Night Football post
• The most popular subsequent search target: my Soul of a New Machine review
• 100-odd comments on the Slashdot story, 36 comments on Richardson’s site, and 2 comments on my own
• Referrals from Richardson’s site outpacing Slashdot referrers just under 4:1
• My first commenter (none other than Susan Lammers herself) posting about her new site which resurrects the original interviews from Programmers at Work.

One other interesting side-effect turned out to be that I hosed a few of my site’s rankings in Google by posting the story; Firebones was not a heavily-used term in the Google index, but because the word appeared in the Slashdot story, lots of scraping and syndication sites that copy slashdot stories have mirrored the story and the keyword all over the place. This resulted in a lot of my previously higher-placed links dropping down. (This was a fairly short-lived effect, and matters little–most people searching for Firebones are looking for something other than this site.)