It’s time to shut up shop for the year on this blog. I’m aiming over the next two weeks or so to do very little that involves computers, and so even if Tim Cook releases a video called “my favourite farts”, or an idiot analyst downgrades Apple to “set fire to” because it “didn’t release the iPhone 6 before Christmas”, I don’t care. I’ll be too full of mince pies.

So: until 2012, have a good one. Thanks to everyone who’s read and linked to this blog during the past year, and to all of you who take the time to offer interesting and savvy comments.

(Man, it’s like my rant-o-meter’s broken or something…)

Things have been quiet on the blog this week, due to overwork, but things will also continue being quiet for a bit, because I got hacked for the second time today. Last time round, I welded a ton of security to this side (one aspect of which at least informed me that a bunch of files had been changed). I’ve no idea how the shitheads got in this time, but I do know it’ll take me time I don’t have to clean up. So it’s probably going to be a while before this blog’s up and running again.

In the meantime, here is some light music, backed with the sounds of fuckwit ‘hackers’ being repeatedly punched in the fucking face. (Seriously, guys, take out your ire on a website of some importance, not a tiny little tech blog.)

No, I’m not dead in a ditch, nor have I succumbed to the joys of Windows and Android, thereby skulking away from this blog in an embarrassed fashion. Instead, I for the first time in years went somewhere with naff-all Wi-Fi (south-eastern Spain, where you get odd looks in phone shops for asking if someone will sell you a SIM card without a phone already wrapped around it), and spent a happy couple of weeks oblivious to news, technology and Tim Langdell continuing to be a total dick. (More on Langdell later.)

Still, I also got a number of messages from people who I’ve never met but who were nonetheless concerned for my well-being, asking through the silence if I was OK. So, occasionally, the internet is indeed full of lovely. Also, clearly, I am a noisy bugger (to the point that two weeks away makes people think I’m being held hostage by giant rabid weasels (or perhaps something less exciting) or come across so stressed sometimes that perhaps people thought my head had exploded due to my disbelief at someone doing something so unbelievably stupid that it all got a BIT TOO MUCH.

Anyway, Revert to Saved is open for business/bile again, but may have a mildly cheery edge for a short period of time, right up until the first of the many deadlines lurking menacingly in the distance whizz past my ears while making DAGGADAGGADAGGADAGGA noises. The bastards.

As you might have noticed, this blog’s gone into one of its quieter patches, mostly because I’m currently drowning in iOS games for my Tap! magazine duties. The good is that I get to play and write about cracking* iOS games. The bad is that I don’t really have time to do anything else for a few days. However, this also gives me a nice excuse to mention the spiffy new website for the publication, www.tapmag.co.uk, which will carry reviews, posts from editor Christopher Phin (and maybe some of us other contributors if he gives us the magic key), and handy links so you can subscribe.

Anyway, back to Dungeon Raid and Liqua Pop.

* As in “Cracking cheese, Gromit!”, not dodgy app piracy.

Because I was curious to see whether anyone was actually reading my rants on this website, I installed an exciting statistics doohickey two weekends ago, and it’s amusing to note that even on a blog such as this one, the usual suspects kick the face off of all other articles (in terms of traffic, rather than literal face-kickage).

I’m happy to report that even on days where I don’t write anything, Revert to Saved still has traffic, and that the stats aren’t swaying me in the slightest regarding any new content I’m going to write. They do, however, show how tempting it must be for a publisher to follow the AOL way and just churn out shit to appeal to search engines.

For example, I spent a few hours a couple of days ago writing a long, considered review of GarageBand for iPad. Even online on a typical tech blog, it’s the sort of thing I’d expect to have gotten around £150 for. By contrast, I also that day fired off a bitchy little rant about an Adobe video that pretty much went WAH WAH WAH APPLE COCOA WAH CS5 JOBS HATES US WAH WAH WAH. The Adobe piece got ten times as many visits as the GarageBand review.

Similarly, keywords in titles make a big difference. A two-year old article Steve Jobs is going to die! still gets lots of hits, no doubt fuelled by people eager to know that the CEO is about to pass. (How disappointed they must be to find an article essentially telling everyone to leave him be, that Apple will be fine without his daily involvement, and ending with “Get well soon, Steve”.) This knowledge won’t change anything on the site either, because I admit to ensuring titles are likely to be picked up by search engines and roving eyes, but then that’s been something I’ve done since first writing for magazines a decade ago. You write interesting titles for articles, or the subs rewrite them for you and get all grumpy at the extra work.

The only exception to not making changes due to statistics has come from the interview with Rob Janoff, which is still bringing in a lot of traffic—if only I’d had stats running the day that went live!—which has made me wonder whether I should reprint some other interviews I’ve done over the past year or two. I’m not sure any would have quite the same impact as the Apple logo designer, but the interest seems to be there. Some of these are uncut interviews with people like Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov, which could be presented in a similar fashion to the Mike ‘Hellboy’ Mignola interview I posted a few years ago. Any feedback on this would be appreciated.