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.
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.
ReplyDeleteLove,
Janie
Let's try to keep 'em UNSUCCESSFUL, ey? ;)
DeleteYou bet.
DeleteMy blog has been blocking a lot of spam lately. I wonder if my map would look similar if I checked it. Hmm...
ReplyDeleteEasy to check and also kind of interesting, though most of us don't quite know what this means.
DeleteHow 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.
ReplyDeleteI'd say REJOICE in everything that works for you.
DeleteFor 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.