These Views Are Not My Own

It's been a while since we've gotten to talk about you, my hypothetical reader. Besides our very first post, I don't think I've made too many comments about you actually being me in the future or doubting your existence. However, when I was writing my last weekly review, I noticed something very strange. It would seem you haven't been entirely upfront with me.

Unbeknownst to you, Blogger has some nice features for tracking the traffic and other stats for a blog. Seems like it's meant for the people who take this whole blogging business seriously and try to make money off it. In my paranoia, I check the Stats somewhat regularly. What I found recently shocked and disturbed me. I'm not the only one viewing my blog. Let's take a peek at the Audience page:

It's been an interesting week

I have no idea if it breaks the Terms of Service to show this, but you wouldn't believe me if I didn't. For the sake of argument, I will claim the US page views on Mac with Chrome (spoiler alert, that's my setup). Four page views seems about right, as I typically view my blog to double check my posts and any changes I make to the formatting of the site. That leaves 13 Mac views that are not from me, along with the 28 Windows, 3 Linux, and 1 Unix views. Coincidentally, this adds up to 45, the very same number of non-US views. Actually, that's probably not coincidental at all.

Now let's talk about the elephant in the room. Forty freaking four views from Israel in a week. And from an assortment of browsers and operating systems. Strange, but in all likelihood those are probably bots. Regardless of whether or not they are bots, the question is why are they viewing my blog? And more importantly, how are they finding it?

The fact this blog gets even the slightest bit of traffic beyond my own views is baffling to me. To the best of my knowledge, I've disabled any settings that would allow the blog to show up on search engines. The only site that has a link to the blog is my portfolio site, and I'm fairly sure I haven't even given out the URL to that site since changing the domain. The only place anyone would be able to find the address of my portfolio is off the repository for the site on Github. Though, I don't have much of a network, so it's unlikely that anyone stumbled onto that page either. Nosey friends are always a possibility, but I would have expected at least one text mocking me for having a blog by now. Furthermore, according to the Stats, my site has been the source of only around 15 views, which most likely are all from me. So no answers there.

Okay, so we don't know where these views are coming from, but at least we can have some idea of how many there are. It's easy enough to shrug off the random spike from Israel as bots crawling through the web looking for personal information or whatever else they may want. What concerns me more is the one incursion from Belgium. That one view is a bit more believable; someone stumbles onto the blog, says "wtf is this," and leaves. The thing is, there are more unaccounted for views. For that, though, we need to dig a bit deeper. Time to put on our detective hats and look at the views for all time.

Don't worry about that starting date

Here are the most recent stats as of writing this post. As with before, I will claim all US Mac views on Chrome, plus all the iPhone views on Safari. Might be a bit excessive, but there's no doubt that the vast majority of the blog views are mine. These days I do my proofreading in the editor, but I originally proofread the published post, made edits, then refreshed. That definitely led to some bloat in the view count. Anyways, 456 Mac views, less the 13 we know are not mine, plus the 27 iPhone views accounts for 470 of the 472 US views. That leaves us with at least two errant US views with the most conservative estimate. Based on the Stats, one of those views occurred within the last 24 hours!

I know you're there

So what does this all mean? Not a lot really. The blog is devoid of personal information for bots to collect, devoid of meaningful content for actual readers, and if nosey friends are poking around, they evidently haven't found anything to hold against me. And I get to have fun writing stupid conspiracy theory posts about the views I do get. Seems like a win-win-win-whammy for me.