💬 Community Forums

so back in 2011 i had a blog. it was mostly reviews of gas station sandwiches and one really long post about a raccoon that lived under my porch for a summer. i named him Gerald. i stopped posting in 2013 when i got a job that actually made me eat lunch at a table like an adult

logged into the hosting account this week for the first time in years, only because they tried to charge my card. analytics says it gets about 40 visits a day. every day. somebody in Finland has looked at the Gerald post 300+ times this year

nobody comments, there's no new content, and half the images are broken because i hotlinked them from a site that doesnt exist anymore. the sidebar still has a widget counting down to a concert from 2012

part of me wants to update it as a bit, just one new post

ok but who is Gerald?? you cant just drop Gerald on us with zero context!! Finland is really into this lol fun fact, a

lol Gerald is a regular now, he's family. but Stargazer6 you can't cut off mid fun fact like that, i'm sitting here waiting for teh rest i

"datawrangler92, post: 2533, member: 3" wrote:

...he's family. but Stargazer6 you can't cut off mid fun fact like that, i'm...

gerald deserves a reserved seat at this point honestly. and yeah stargazer6 dont leave us hanging, i've been refreshing like an idiot and my coffee's gone cold

scruffy_pockets refreshing a forum thread till your coffee goes cold is peak 2011 blog energy. you might be one of the 40 tbh ever check if gerald is just you on your phone

"datawrangler92, post: 2533, member: 3" wrote:

lol Gerald is a regular now, he's family. but Stargazer6 you can't cut off mid fun fact like that, i'm sitting here waiting for teh rest i

omg sorry!! i got distracted by the kettle and then completely forgot where i was going with it ok so the rest of it is that Uranus spins on its side, tilted about 98 degrees, so each pole gets around 42 years of straight sunlight and then 42 years of total darkness!! ngl nobody's totally sure why but the main idea is something huge smacked into it ages ago... anyway tell Gerald i said hi lol

probably bots mostly, but i bet some of it is one old post ranking for something oddly specific. i had a 2010 post about replacing a watch crystal that kept getting traffic for years, all from one search term... also the thread was about blog visitors and somehow we're on uranus now. 42 years of darkness does sound a lot like my city council's permit office

tbh i'd bet half of those 40 a day are bots and the rest are three confused guys looking for whatever weird thing you mentioned once in 2011. my old livejournal still gets hits from people googling "can you microwave a crayon," because i did it once out of boredom and wrote 600 words about it. you can, by the way. dont and the permit office thing is real, i waited four months to get approval for a mailbox

four months for a mailbox is actually fast by our standards. my neighbor needed a variance for a fence that was six inches too tall and it took two council meetings and a public comment period, and three people showed up to talk about it. none of them lived on our street... also respect for actually microwaving the crayon. somebody had to do it for the rest of us

ok if the fence thing is turning into a city council thread im out lol. back to the blog. most of those 40 are probably bots if you can get the raw access logs, load them into sqlite and run `select user_agent, count(*) from hits group by user_agent order by 2 desc` and you'll see it fast. anything with "bot" or "crawler" in it isnt a person. whatever's left is your real fans. happy to help with the query if you get stuck [URL]https://sqlite.org/cli.html[/URL]

lol i dont know a thing about sqlite but that sounds like a lot of work for a Saturday... my grandson Tyler set up a little blog for me back in 2012 about the herons at our retention pond and he told me most of my "visitors" were robots, which honestly hurt my feelings a little!! lowkey but then a lady from Ohio emailed me once asking about the great blue heron nesting... so some of them are real people What was your blog about?? If it's a recipe or a how-to, it might just be folks finding you on Google... I watched a Dateline last week where they found the guy from his old internet posts so it's always good to know who's reading!! just my two cents!!

the heron lady is the dream honestly. i got exactly one real email off my old blog in like six years and it was a guy in Manitoba telling me i spelled "Manitoba" wrong. which i did. twice

if you want to actually find out who they are, check your referrers and search terms if the host still keeps them. mine turned out to be one post about a stop sign somebody had tastefully added "eating animals" under, with a photo people kept linking it on some vegan forum, and i'm pretty sure a high school teacher used it in a lesson about street art. still says its vandalism in the comments tho. its art and i'll die on that hill

probably bots mostly, honestly a good chunk of that 40 is crawlers and spam scripts hitting old comment forms. but if theres one post doing all the work its usually something weirdly specific that google decided is the authority on it... mine was a review of a $30 field watch from 2012 that still gets traffic because nobody else bothered writing about that model. people come in wanting to know if it keeps time and the answer is yes, better than their phone does when the battery dies

also check which pages theyre landing on. bet its one weird post doing all the work. mine was a 2013 writeup on lubing cherry mx browns with krytox 205g0 and it still pulls more traffic than everything else combined lol. people are still out here doing that mod, which is fair, it fixes the scratch

if you verify the domain in search console it'll show you the actual search terms people used to get there [URL]https://search.google.com/search-console[/URL]

sometimes the queries are funnier than the visitors

*GASP* datawrangler92 NO 😱 a 2013 krytox post carrying your WHOLE blog for over a decade?? the betrayal!! the drama!! every other post you wrote is just sitting there in the dark while the brown switch lube guide takes all the glory 💔

lol the krytox post is just doing its job at this point... every blog has one!! my old one was 90% telescope stuff and the only post anyone ever found was a rant about Grandaddy's Sophtware Slump being underrated, which probably says more about me

wait, has anyone actually checked the referrers yet?? i bet like half of those 40 are bots and scrapers that never got the memo that 2011 ended... i think the rest are people searching some super specific error message at 2am who end up on your page as the only result lol. i'd check myself but i forgot my own blogger password around 2014 and now i just wander my old posts like a ghost!!

blogger's built-in stats count a ton of bot traffic too, so 40 a day might really be like 6 humans. look at the referrers tab. if it's full of sketchy domains you've never heard of, that's referrer spam. ignore it, and definitely dont click them

@ghost blogger's tied to your google account so you're probably not locked out for good [URL]https://accounts.google.com/signin/recovery[/URL]