Sunday, November 5, 2017

Daylight Savings/Standard Time & Website Statistics

It happened again. The time was changed on us. Today, Sunday, we were shoved back onto Standard Time. This reminded me of a post from five years ago. Let me explain.


When you have a website, you can get statistics on how many page loads there were on any given day. You can even see the general geographic places these “clicks” are coming from. It’s a free service, and if you want to pay more, (I don’t) there are sophisticated versions of it.


On Blogger this is automatically part of the site and easy to see if you click on the word Stats on your blogger panel on the left. You can set it up never to count your own clicks to your blog (I did) and get a more accurate idea.


This blog’s posts usual click numbers are modest by any standard. They range in a low couple of hundreds, with occasional posts not even reaching three digits. Some of the hits are real readers (like you) and some are random search engines that look for keywords.

I’m delighted that anyone visits. Bless you.



But there was one outlier early on among my posts. It was this one, on Daylight Savings Time. It’s not a great post, nor very informative. But it had a few thousand hits, well above the usual for my site. Looking at the origins of the hits, Blogger’s Stats said that many were from Russia.

At the time, this did not mean much to me. I assumed Russian search engines were combing the Internet for certain key words. So what? Surely, they are not interested in Daylight Savings Time, and most definitely not in my kvetchy rant about it.


The whole subject of Russian hacking has taken a completely new meaning now. My time-disturbed brain is wondering... Hey, Russians, will it happen again? C’mon down and look. For your convenience, I’ll even use Google Translate: Летнее время*

*Daylight Savings time in Russian, I hope.


I doubt it, because these Internet-combing algorithms must have long concluded this blog is useless for their purposes. But if I knew for sure, I would tell you.


And yes, I’m in the throws of adjusting to the time change, Kvetch-kvetch.


7 comments:

Janie Junebug said...

Willy Dunne Wooters, who is a computer programmer and long-time blogger, told me that hits from Russia are spambot or unsuccessful attempts to take over blogs.

Love,
Janie

Mirka Breen said...

Let's try to keep 'em UNSUCCESSFUL, ey? ;)

Janie Junebug said...

You bet.

Kelly Hashway said...

My blog has been blocking a lot of spam lately. I wonder if my map would look similar if I checked it. Hmm...

Mirka Breen said...

Easy to check and also kind of interesting, though most of us don't quite know what this means.

Karen Jones Gowen said...

How funny! Especially to see if your use of Russian increases the hacker interest. I don't mind the fall back since it feels like a gift of time that lasts for weeks. At this moment, 9:07 am, it feels more like 10 am to me. But it's not! This happens for the first few weeks of the time change until my body clock readjusts.

Mirka Breen said...

I'd say REJOICE in everything that works for you.
For me, time changes are temporarily disorienting, and I find myself making mistakes I likely wouldn't otherwise. I'm just about to go through it again for a wee bit.This time, travelling.