Open the page in firebugs net tab.

Frequent post's to logger.base79.com who (once I figured out how to navigate their site) appear to be some shady rights management company.

The post request also contains the following

{"uuidSession":"xxxx","uuidPermanent":"xxx","ip":"83.xxx.xxx.234","partner":"dailymash","timeStamp":"Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:17:20 GMT","youtube":{"title":"Favourite One Liner","video_id":"toEqW3wGQSs","volume":0,"duration":141,"currentTime":5,"currentPercent":4}}

Delightful.

People are using rage views to drive traffic to their ad infested pages? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked!

Don't know if that's deliberate but I love the idea of a "rage view"; describes my browsing to a tee if I can't have my AdBlock.

I hope he is being ironic. After all, it says THIS page is why the internet sucks. Otherwise, the sense of entitlement is ridiculous. He has a free, hosted blog because it is ad-supported. He must be taking the mickey

He's not taking the mickey - he's actually defending himself saying WP are hosting the ads, not him etc... There are free blog services with more tactful ad strategy I'm sure. I just find this amusing. Let me just plug the best ad block software - your brain. Unfocus your mind and zone out the ads and they are simply not there any more (or use adblock - does the job for you).

His whole page is only 256kb total. That's nothing (and very normal) compared to many sites that are 1mb of code and various style sheets over riding each other.

Does anyone even use those buttons?

I manage a few decently sized blogs for authors and bloggers. From all the checking I've done for these buttons, only Email To A Friend, Facebook, Twitter, and G+ are worth doing.

The others might get 1-10 clicks vs the aforementioned few getting thousands of clicks (or hundreds for G+).

I've gone to just putting Facebook/Twitter/G+/Email, as minimally as possible.

Depends on the crowd. I wrote a blog post called Hackers and Engineers (the target audience is obviously the same people who read Hackers and Painters) [0]. From what I can see, lots of entries, lots of clicks on the links of the blog post, none on the share/tweet/facebook/g+ buttons.

By contrast, I see people clicking on the tweet/share/facebook button for the blog entry where I compared memes to speaking in metaphor ala Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra [1]. They don't click on the links (except to the book Wisdom Sits in Places)

Different crowds of people react differently to those share buttons, I guess. The HN crowd doesn't really click that much.

[0]http://blog.chewxy.com/2013/04/11/hackers-and-engineers/

[1]http://blog.chewxy.com/2013/02/22/darmok-and-jalad-at-tanagr...

no one i know uses these buttons. haven't clicked one in my life.

Yes people use them. They can drive a decent amount of traffic too if they have some alluring and easily digestible content such as the common "list of top 10 bla bla" articles. It is also suspected that Google weighs shared links highly for ranking so just a few shares can give a substantial boost to a page's seo value. Though no one knows for sure how it works.

I'd say, yes. Whenever I have a somewhat read post on my blog, many of the tweets have the template content excerpt

I use "tweet this" button but that's it

What buttons?

(adblock)

Using Ghostery here... my initial perception of a site is always based partially on how many entries are blocked on load. I've seen pages with 20+ calls to outside sharing services; at that point, a little extra cynicism kicks in.

Agreed. The number of things Ghostery blocks seems inversely proportional to the utility value of the site!

WordPress.com has a lot of really bad themes. With my own blog (hosted on the same network), I gave up looking and went with a simple responsive theme with decent typography.