Good Lord! It’s Possible That You Are Human, After All!
(This explanation is also written for the readers of my personal blogsite: www.heyboomers.com, )
This posting is written, predominately, about my duplicate appearance on the Bootsnall.com website blogs, where I copy all of the entries written on my www.heyboomers.com site. Bootsnall is a large, backpacking and hosteling site which I have belonged to for many years because it caters to around-the-world travelers. At first, of course, all of my material was written on the road, from whatever country I might have been in at the moment. That fit right in with the young crowd who does that sort of thing and hangs out at the Aussie site: Bootsnall.
I strayed from the backpacking theme when I wrote about publishing my first book, “Hey Boomers, Dust Off Your Backpacks, as I have done since I returned from my four month’s trek throughout South America, in April, 2009. Lately, I have been writing about metaphysical subjects as I work them into my current book under production. Anyway, I’ve been writing regularly on both sites for about a year-and-a-half, and believe that I’ve built up quite a reading audience. Well, frankly, I can’t tell how many of you come only to the heyboomers site, because my site designer has not made the behind-the-scenes capability available to me.
But, la te da! I can get into it on the Bootsnall site, and I have become fascinated with counting hits for every blog. Bootsnall is a very big site, with a world-wide membership, filled with links, and whatever else puts it ahead on the search engines; so I naturally suppose that my readership would be larger there, than on my own, personal site at www.heyboomers.com. Wish I could compare. I will ask again for that feature from my designer.
How long has our species been fascinated with gadgets? Well, how long have gadgets been around? I’m famously out of the loop, but when I found out about this statistical analysis, available to register the waves that my words could set off, I began to watch closely. One set of colored bars shows how many hits I have had each month since the beginning, almost eighteen months ago. Another set shows how many hits I get each day, and even breaks that down between unique IPs and others. My assumption is that a unique IP is a computer that has a business reason for checking the site, such as employees of Bootsnall, as well as myself. They don’t exactly qualify as fans, who simply want to see what I have to say each time.
Other bar graphs report cumulative totals for various days of the week, and hours of the day, and lots of other information that I don’t know how to interpret. I’m like this newbie, running around an engineering office, trying to draw conclusions. One thing that I noticed was that my bars were all begining to go Green, ever since September. That means that my hits were totaling somewhere between 1500 – 1600 per month, consistently. When I checked the graph showing the running total for the current month, I began to see that some days registered a decent, but unexciting, 30-40 hits. However, out of the blue, several days a month, the figure would shoot right up to 150-hits, or more, whether I had written a new blog, or not. This pattern went on for three months.
As you will conclude, I am not very sophisticated and am obviously not aware of the fact that some popular sites, out there in the vast web world, garner a million hits a month…or a day. No. I am very pleased when 1500 hits occur within thirty days. It still means something. In fact, it really means more because I can imagine you as individuals and not masses. And, whew! Not machines.
During those green months, I wasn’t posting daily. Not all the time, anyway. Usually, once or twice a week except when I got on a roll and had a series to write about. Bootsnall has a central page, which announces the titles of all new blog postings, and maybe my “fans” also had RSS feeds to let them know when I had posted a new entry; but the weird thing was, that The Club (my 150 hit days) didn’t always come in conjunction with any new posting. What was going on here?
Well, I had learned about junk advertising comments from my heyboomers site, because every few days, I have to clean off the spam sent by the leech-machines that get hold of one of your posts and pretend to make a comment, hoping that you will accept it and let it show on your site. Maybe that gives internal control to their leech-machines, or maybe they foolishly hope that one of my readers will become fascinated with their ability to supply cheap Viagra. Whatever! I just spam them away.
But, because of these two independent pieces of information about how blog sites work, backstage; I made the brilliant assumption that my 1500 plus, monthly Bootsnall hits must be mainly coming from these mindless machines which were simply visiting my site in order to infect it. They wouldn’t care, or know if I had put up a current posting because they latch onto old ones and just keep coming in on those. I know this from cleaning off my own site. I have even erased a very good former piece of writing because it had so many spammers attached. Apparently, deleting doesn’t help. They still show up on my site, though the post is long-erased. Nasty little buggers, these.
Naturally, I didn’t bear the responsibility to clean the spam off of the Bootsnall site, and that’s probably what those unique IPs were doing. But, it made sense that anyone who had kept writing for so long, would naturally attract barnacles.
Shoot! There goes my slim impression that I was making a dent in the world.
So, I decided on a test. I would stop posting on Bootsnall for a few weeks and see if the hits kept coming at the same, unrelenting rate. If they did, it would prove that I was being attacked by leech-machines; and not intelligent life, bent upon finding out what brilliance was about to be unveiled this time. I wrote a small explanation that I was conducting “marketing research” and had not fallen off the planet. This note went up on November 24th and is still wishing them a Happy Thanksgiving. I had planned to stay gone a month and to start up again with a Merry Christmas.
But, I might have enough of an indication already that the hits are human, after all. !!!
My daily rate has fallen to anywhere between 3 and 16 hits; but, every now and then, I will have a 33, a 47, or a 51-hit day, when there’s really nothing new to read. So far, I’ve had a grand total of 250 hits in the first two weeks of December, whereas, before I’d be at around 800-900, by now, and wondering if I could, yet again, bust into the green range and keep my record going.
There have been no big, 150-hit days though, like used to happen, when I imagined The Club swinging through with all their impersonal machines firing off spam, on some huge cyber schedule. So, therefore, it’s beginning to look as if there are no machines!
If you are human though, why are you all behaving like a school of fish? Why do you all hit at once, especially if I haven’t posted anything close to that day when you all show up? Ahhh me, I believe that I have just identified one of the latest Mysteries of Life!
Note to Self: Linda! Get a life!
Tags: , 1, a brand new Mystery of Life, spam, Tag Index
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