Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
This site had 18,518 visits in February 2017, from 13,684 unique visitors. The list below is of pages that were each viewed at least 100 times in February 2017.
Quite why four hundred visitors have wanted a list of utility functions that are exported from SHDOCVW from the days when it was the core of Internet Explorer, I don’t know and can’t imagine. I myself have likely not looked at that page since 2010, when I last updated it and the ones it links to. How do a hundred people come to look at a throw-away page from nearly ten years ago about something as obscure as the <script> tag in Internet Explorer? Rather too many of the pages that are most viewed are throw-aways or are just catalogues. That I prepare the latter is because they are vital background to research, especially when collated over versions to track the history. Preparing them is certainly not a waste of time—and, apparently, using them isn’t either. I wish I had the resources to get more of them up to date. But in no way do such pages count as research. It’s depressing that these are the pages that get the most attention.
I am, however, very pleased to see that this month’s list includes two pages that are wholly new from the last year’s resumption of research and writing. The demonstration of how even an unprivileged program may profile its own execution is not quite finished but does seem like nice work of its sort—and is unusually practical for me. It astonishes me that this ancient functionality in Windows is not better understood and more widely used. The other new page is part of my on-going documentation of the kernel’s functions for working with so-called system information.
The faded titles are just index pages which I presume are viewed only or mainly on the way to others, especially while moving from one Table of Contents (TOC) to another. One of those index pages is just the skimpiest of placeholders, pending my writing an introduction, which I likely never will get round to. The TOCs are omitted entirely. The rank in brackets is from the previous month.