Milestone: 28 Million Hits

Wow, it's the site's 28 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: every time 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:

46.185.178.98 - - [06/Aug/2015:12:55:28 -0400] "GET /departures/TX/0/dallas_zoo_elephant_fountains.jpg HTTP/1.1" 206 276031 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) GSA/6.0.51363 Mobile/12F70 Safari/600.1.4"

It kinda looks as if someone, having visited my page with the photo of the elephant fountain at the Dallas Zoo, is getting the photo shown thereupon. Oddly, this photo doesn't have the page as a "referer" [sic], nor do I see a request for the page back in the logs.

The response code is 206; there are a few of these requests in a row. That means that this phone didn't ask for the whole photo at once. Instead, it asked for parts of the data.

The IP address is associated with the Jordan Telecom Group, as in the nation of Jordan. Maybe the bandwidth situation to Jordan isn't so great? Maybe their phone network has to do a lot of caching (which might explain why there wasn't a log of a page load) and has to fetch a not-that-big photo one piece at a time? Maybe.

Another possible reason there's no log of loading the page associated with that photo: Maybe this is someone using Google Image Search and going directly to the image that way—though it's still strange that Google didn't show up as the "referer"; which makes me still lean towards the theory of a Jordan phone co proxy, but not one that's cached my page. Google's webmaster tools hasn't caught up to yesterday yet, but "Google image search" is a nice theory.