Milestone: 32 Million Hits

Wow, it's the site's 32 millionth hit.(Well, sort of… remember a few months back I whined about how my then-web-hosting provider had messed up some things? I lost a few weeks' worth of logs then.) 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:

45.33.89.177 - - [07/Jul/2017:08:26:47 +0000] "GET /new/atom.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_2; Feeder.co) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.120 Safari/537.36"

IP address suggests this is coming from a server farm. The "Feeder.co" in the user agent got me to look at feeder.co, an app for reading "feeds", such as my blog's feed. Looking elsewhere in my logs, I think this is a bot that checks on my feed hourly for new material. Wow, can you imagine if I tried to blog hourly? Feeder.co is a feed reader app, which lets you choose several sites and shows you updates from those sites, like, for example, blog posts on this here blog. Feed readers are great. I use mine heavily. If you're not reading this in a feed reader, I'm kind of surprised that you're keeping up with me and with the things that interest you more than me and you're doing it all by hand somehow‽ Don't work so hard.