Happy Holidays everyone! It’s Christmas time now and we’ll be taking a short break here on Pingdom’s blog. We’ll be back next Monday.

Until then, here are some of our best posts from 2009 that you may have missed.

Computer tech geekery

• Retro delight: Gallery of early computers (1940s – 1960s)
• A look at the fastest supercomputer in the world
• Ten of the coolest and most powerful supercomputers of all time
• A look inside the fastest supercomputer in Europe
• Before Google became Google: The original setup at Stanford University

Social media geekery

• Study: Males vs. females in social networks
• In-depth study of Twitter: How much we tweet, and when
• A year-by-year tour of how Twitter has been taking over the world
• Why Facebook doesn’t have to worry about Twitter quite yet
• Dawn of the Twitter Effect

Open source geekery

• The triumph of Linux as a supercomputer OS
• The 8 most successful open source products ever

Web and Internet geekery

• The sad truth about today’s Internet population
• Perl far from dead, more popular than you think
• The launch years of today’s most popular websites
• The early buzz about some of today’s most popular websites
• Why CDNs are great for the Internet, and it’s not for the reason you think
• The origin of 9 popular Web buzzwords
• A crisis in the making: Only 4% of the Internet supports IPv6
• Web growth peaked in 2007 but might be back with a vengeance in 2009
• The blog platforms of choice among the top 100 blogs

Uptime and performance geekery

• Sweden’s Internet broken by DNS mistake
• URL shortener speed and reliability shootout
• Why 100% uptime often ISN’T 100% uptime
• Online launch troubles and how to avoid them
• Social network downtime in 2008
• 6 gotchas about web hosting quality and reliability
• 40% still use old Google Analytics script

Misc tech geekery

• The holy tech flame wars
• Computer messaging before the Web – A visual timeline (1960-1990)
• Computer messaging history, part 2 – A visual timeline (1990-2009)
• Leaked emails with both embarrassing and painful consequences
• 10 historical software bugs with extreme consequences
• Wacky copy protection methods from the good old days
• Tech heroes of the past: Where are they now?
• The inner threat, 6 real-world cases of sysadmins gone wild
• Close-ups that reveal the beauty of silicon chips and circuits
• A gallery of electrical cabling gone wild
• 7 tech comics that will put a big smile on your face
• 12 unexpected parallels between Apple and Nintendo
• Version 1.0 of today’s most popular applications, a visual tour

Pure geekery

• Marriage proposals in true geek style
• 25 amazing people celebrated by Google

These were just some of our posts from 2009. As of this writing, there are more than 650 articles in our archives since we started this blog, so there’s plenty more where that came from.

Once again, we hope you’ll have a great holiday these coming days (if you have that in your part of the world), and we’ll see you back next Monday. Thanks for reading!

In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

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The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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