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Allowing foreigners in

Head Rambles Posted on by

Back in the Good Old Days when people started putting up their websites, there were two essential items.

One was for any site owner to call himself [or herself?] a Webmaster. This title was to somehow imbue a sense of power and awe in the readership. No website was complete without an address somewhere – webmaster@whatever. That practice seems to have vanished into the mists of time and I haven’t heard the term in many years.

The other essential ingredient on any self respecting site was to have a little page counter, bragging how many people had visited the site. Naturally a lot of kids set up their site and initialised their new counter to show around 100,000 visits before the site was even launched. It’s a hell of a long time since I have seen one of them.

I must confess that in the early days [and even the not so early days] I used to keep a keen eye on statistics and visitors, Google Analytics was my friend. I watched the numbers climb over the years, but then got bored with it. What did it matter? I was scribbling mainly to amuse myself so it didn’t matter that much if my readership went up or down [provided it didn’t drop below zero?]

A while ago I all but scrapped Google Analytics and installed my own system on a server to monitor “my” sites [Matomo, if anyone is interested]. It’s a lot more accurate and isn’t cluttered with a lot of Google’s nonsense. One of the statistics which does interest me is where my visitors come from. Usually the figures don’t vary much. The UK accounts for around half my visitors followed by the States, Canada, Ireland and Australia in that order. For some reason the Irish never had much time for me, accounting for around 10% of visits.

Lately there has been a change. A couple of weeks ago I noticed a spike in traffic in the early morning hours. China had discovered me! I don’t know [or particularly care] what caused this spike but it became a fairly regular feature.

Then another mob joined up from India. Now the UK still remains at the top but China and India vie for second place.

Today’s visitors –

Weird?

 

Comments

Allowing foreigners in — 15 Comments

    • Where did you get the idea I was disdainful of their little invention? I have nothing for or against it.

      Now if you want to hear real disdain then let’s talk about those fucking vaccines!

      • Reading the comment again, I can see where it’s not terribly clear. It’s not actually the invention itself but the resulting hysteria. I can assure you that we are in complete agreement as to the vaccines.

        I don’t believe any government (or government representative) has ever let a dire emergency go to waste.

    • Welcome Cornishstu! Hah! An interesting one and slightly less pompous. People are actually missing a trick here? Webguru? Webnija? Websuprimo?

  3. Bots, spammers. When I used to do web analytic for a living (of sorts) most of the log traffic was robots and spammers, even the results from Google Analytics were infested with spam.

    • My first thought too. There are some indications for and against that theory. For it is the fact that all visits are flagged as Ios and all seem to be Class A IP addresses. Against is that they average two and a half minutes per visit and a lot come via web referral [mostly Baidu]. I suppose they could be spammers all right as spam just gets deleted before I even get to hear about it. From my Dashboard – “Stop Spammers has prevented 66487 spammers from registering or leaving comments.”

      The Indian ones do have the hallmark of bots, all right.

    • Welcome Peter! No. Definitely not Cambodia as that doesn’t feature at all on the list. Are you sure that’s where you are? It’s an easy mistake to make?

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