Have Bag, Will Travel

I haven’t posted for a while, I apologise for that, I have been away for a long holiday in Australia and New Zealand and I will tell you about that later.

I have noticed previously  that  if I don’t post then interest in the blog quickly evaporates and the visitor stats starts to tumble down south  as was the case this time in the first three weeks but in the final week the wind direction changed and visitor stats started to climb, climb and climb again.  My visitor numbers have always been fairly steady so unless I had become an overnight internet sensation it simply wasn’t possible.

Turns out that I have been the victim (along with many others) of  a web crawler or a spider crawler. Others had told me about this but until now I had not been inconvenienced.

It is not a virus, maybe not even dangerous (I don’t really know) and this is how Google explains it…

“A web crawler, also known as a spider, is an automated program or bot predominantly used by search engines like Google and Bing to explore and catalog web content across the Internet. Its primary functions are to gather content of nearly every webpage and to facilitate retrieval of that content in search results.”

Interestingly my posts with the most fake visits now appear high up in Google search results.

The Internet and the World-Wide-Web used to be a genuinely nice place to spend some time but now it has become a sinister black hole,  Tim Berners-Lee must be spinning in his grave.

This is Tim Berners-Lee…

It seems that it is impossible to trust anything on here anymore.  Take Facebook for example.  The original concept was that it was a tool to keep in touch with family and friends and it worked well but now it is full of AI generated shit and fake news and any friend contact posts are almost impossible to find.  I suspect that other social media posts are much the same.

I often say that I am so glad that I was born when I was born and there was none of these fake influencers to corrupt my childhood which was about playing outdoors, hours of sport and BBC ‘Children’s Hour’ on TV.

There has always been deception of course as with the Cottingham Fairies…

And then ‘April Fool’s Day’ (I wrote about that one time back in 2012) but what we have now is way more sinister.

Anyway to get back to the point of my story because before this explosion in numbers I was riding along comfortably at about one hundred visits a day which seemed just about right but now thanks to the spider they are over ten thousand and increasing by the day and my statistics are now completely worthless and that means the demise of my annual end of year statistical round-up.

Interestingly, yesterday (Feb 20th) WP recorded 11,955 views but I also use another counter called ‘flag counter’ and that reported 121, which seems to me to be about right so I wonder why WP cannot filter this annoying intrusion out.  Are they bothered? Probably not.

I am beginning to question the whole point of even remaining on WP at all.

Looking Puzzled…

The quote “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” is attributed to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli by the American author Mark Twain.  It may or may not be true.

This is Benjamin Disraeli…