This week I have just focused on getting into the blogging habit, writing about my studying and AWS experiences, then publishing the stories via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

I am enjoying the writing aspect, being disciplined to put out at least one story a day, and to write in a conversational tone, rather than that of a lecture or tutorial. I am also trying to explain technical jargon to make it accessible to all, not just the tech savvy. I hope that when I look back upon these writings in a month, I can show that I have improved without being ashamed to re-read what my scrambled brain cells threw up onto the digital page.

I am a little self conscious about flinging my links out into social media for a couple of reasons:

• A story goes viral, and brings down my architected-for-cost wordpress site
• Somebody decides I need to be brought down a peg or two, and attacks my site
• Someone takes issue with my stories and flames me on social media
• No one reads my stories at all

I think the last is the hardest to bear. However, I am glad to say that is not the case. I'm not going to get nominated for blog of the year, but I did some quick log parsing and came up with some numbers. Here is the basic parser, one per story:

sudo less ./3mn.net.access_log | grep -i ebs-volumes | grep -v myHomeIP | grep -v mySchoolIP | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq | wc -l

This reads the website access log, looks for a particular story, removes my home IP and my school network IP to discount my views, prints the viewer's IP address, sorts them into numeric order, drops all duplicate entries, and then gives me a count of entries. In short, this gives me a count of unique viewers for that particular story. I made a few of these, one for each story I want to track, then wrote a wrapper script to echo the numbers to my terminal when I logged in. Here is part of the wrapper:

echo -e "EBS Vols article: \t `/home/ec2-user/checkEBS.sh`";

The wrapper gives me these results after a week: