Milestone: 25 Million Hits

Wow, it's the site's 25 millionth it. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: everytime a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human views a page that contains a dozen graphics, those graphics cause another dozen hits. So it's not as impressive as it sounds. But it's easy to measure so that's what I measure. We can take a look at the log:

208.43.251.180 - - [17/Apr/2014:02:17:44 -0400] "GET /comment/20061104_rbragg.html HTTP/1.1" 200 2085 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0; chromeframe/19.0.1084.52)"

If you look at that log in isolation, you might guess it was a human reading an old comment about the site from Rich Bragg. But if you look at other hits coming from that same internet address, you'll see this thing is visiting page after page, once every few seconds. So…probably not a human; probably a robot.

(If you look closely, you'll notice that log's about a week old. Yes, this milestone hit came in a week ago and I wasn't paying attention. I'm just that amazing.)

That list of team names is still the site's most popular page, as it has been for over a year. A lot of people reach the page by searching India's version of Google. In my imagination, this means that many team-building activities in Indian companies feature teams named after USA puzzlehunting teams. I don't know if that's a realistic dream, but it's a lovely one so let's hang onto it for a while.