Stardate 20010802.1416 (Crew, this is the Captain): One of the interesting things about owning my own server is the ability to access a lot more detailed information about who is getting in, when, and from where. Cobalt has a nice web-based management system for looking at this kind of stuff, which permits me to see things like total traffic or per day or per hour, or the most common 200 requesters, but I rarely look at those. The one I look at a lot is the referrer list, and that can sometimes be strange. I am mainly watching it looking for places where someone else referenced me because I'm trying to keep a
list of such people (out of courtesy, if for no other reason). Of course, what I'm seeing here is every refer to my server, not just to the web log. So since my CDMA FAQ (about cell phones) also lives here, a lot of the traffic I see is because of that. But some of it is also an indication of people who don't know how to use search engines. I just spotted a refer from Yahoo that was looking for "beautiful+pictures+of+beautiful+women" and got linked to my essay
"Beautiful Women". Unfortunately, he (presumably a male) was searching for all those words, not for for a phrase, and indeed all those words
do appear in that essay. Alas, it has no pictures. (The guy looking for "beautiful+young+breasts" will have been equally disappointed.)
Of course, a "refer" doesn't necessarily mean a page with a link to me. What it sometimes means is the page that you (my loyal crew) were at just before coming here by clicking on your shortcut you have for me, and I must say that some of you have very strange reading habits. I still haven't been able to figure out just what "www.hungryhippo.com" is or why anyone would look there, given that it comes up as a nonexistent page for me. For a while I wondered if someone was just trying to play games with my mind. (Now I bet I get to see a lot of really weird ones. Spare me.)
I reset the statistics every few days, and I last reset them about a week ago. I registered with Google to be on their list of places to crawl, and I've noticed since then that several other crawlers have found me. I know that some people object to that, but I don't mind and I find a lot of hits from search engines now, including some I've never heard of: search.rediff.com, for example. In the last week, I've gotten nearly 140 refers from Google alone, which is fine by me. (I have no idea what they were searching for, though I could probably find out by getting into Linux and actually looking at Apache's log file. I suspect quite a few of them were looking for CDMA information, since my CDMA FAQ is top of the list of hits for the phrase "CDMA FAQ".) But I get a bit of a charge out of finding an all-new refer, and today I got a doozie: My entry on Yahoo has gone live and I've already gotten about 15 refers from there. Of course, once I'm no longer "new" and sink down to the end of the page I'll probably never see another one. Jeeze, that page is long. (Why, oh why, didn't I name this AAA Clueless instead of USS Clueless?) (discuss)
