A few days ago, I shared some tribulations related to looking at the most popular requests to my websites, starting with all requests to Eat This Podcast in 2022.

Of the top 50 resources requested, only 14 were actual episodes or articles. The rest were technical, behind the scenes things, like various flavours of feed and some of the (locked) doors that give access to the engine. I know why people keep rattling those doorknobs, but I wish they wouldn’t.

I had hoped to see whether any meaning could be gleaned from them, but that will have to wait, because at the start I was staring at a mystery.

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In a spirit of exploration, and because he mentioned it again in a recent 20-year roundup I decided to see what I could do with Tim Bray’s Topfew. Not the actual Topfew, because that’s beyond me, but the original incantation:

awk '{print $1}' access_log | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -12

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One of the first things the professor told us to do when I began to formally learn a bit of Python was to install Anaconda, which I dutifully did. Looking back, all we ever used there was Spyder. Only later did I discover the joys of Jupyter, but the joy was short-lived. Once I got the point of using virtual environments, I discovered that my entire setup was just too big a tangle for me to understand. So I uninstalled Anaconda, not for the first time. And after a couple of missteps, Jupyter seemeed to work just fine without it. Then I upgraded my os to Ventura, and many, many things stopped working, including Jupyter.

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RSS is not dead, never has been, but in recognition of renewed interest, I decided to have a go at cleaning up my feeds. Not getting rid of them, because there is absolutely no cost to keeping a feed hanging around just in case it miraculously springs back to life. But tidying up.

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Jubilation! I now have a Python program that accepts a date in the form YYY-MM-DD, gets all the Overland data for that day from Compass, and builds a static map of my wanderings for that day. And it works. Here is today, so far.

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