I set up my website http://www.drinky.org.uk/ a long time ago. I started in Microsoft Frontpage Express (this was before I knew what Linux was). As everyone that ever used it will know, Frontpage Express was utter crap, but I didn’t know any better. Today the same basic design exists as I’ve never had the time to rewrite the whole thing, though I’ve been meaning to move it over to some kind of CMS for some time. I basically use it as a dumping ground and as portal for when people ask me stuff. It’s a terrible, disorganised, ugly mess.

Because it’s so poorly put together I’ve never really pimped it and having been living under illusion that nobody ever really reads it for around 4 years. Until today.

I have this workshop to do for a uni module. It basically involves checking the Apache server logs on the uni webserver and grepping the output for your own site. Until about a week ago, my entire website was hosted on the uni server with DNS forwarding to point at the relevent place. So I expected some kind of logs. What I didn’t expect was todays logs to scroll off the terminal for a few minutes. On a busy site maybe, but not for my pathetic effort. How wrong I have been.

It seems that the Big Snake (not suitable if you are squeamish) is popular with the employees of Samsung in Korea and quite a few other people. Why I don’t know. I’d forgotten all about it. It’s a verbatim copy and paste of an email I received about 2 or 3 years back, complete with annoying caps-lock on text. All I can assume is that someone must have come across it and emailed a link to a few friends who then forwarded it on and on and on, it must be doing the rounds in Korea at the moment. Bizarre. But aside from that, my site has been getting a regular hammering from all over the world. I’m really surprised. I didn’t think anyone read my site at all.

So, having moved my hosting over to the account kindly provided by Sparkes, I decided to check the logs for my new hosting and my blog subdomain. Wow. Obviously not as prolific as the old one, it’s only been up for a few days, but still busy. And then I noticed something really cool.

Some of the biggest referrers are Planet Gnome, Planet Ubuntu and Planet Debian. Holy crap. People on some of the coolest blog syndicates are reading *my* blog. In the last 24 hours. Jeee-zus.

So off I went to Bloglines to have a look as I’m subscibed to all of those planets. Planet Gnome first as it was the biggest referrer. It seems that Jeff Waugh has linked to my Ubuntu Jingle post. That really freaked me out. Nobody really knows I’ve got a blog yet, apart from the LUG Radio guys. Jeff was interviewed at some ungodly hour of the morning by the LUG Radio team, the day after Australia day and still managed to be intelligent and entertaining.

So. Shit. I’ve been linked to by one of the coolest guys in the open source world. That really made my day 😀 Guess I have to finish my jingle now…