Wow, it's the site's 44 millionth hit. 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 "a million hits" isn't as impressive as it sounds. But hits are easy to measure so that's what I measure. We can take a look at the log:
85.208.96.199 - - [22/Sep/2024:03:51:25 +0000] "GET /departures/SFO/hawk_hill/27_lobby.html HTTP/1.1" 200 849 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot/7~bl; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)"
Semrush is a service for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) people. If you have a website, you can pay SEO people to suggest tweaks to your site so that it will show up higher in Google searches. (Some of these SEO people are legit; many are scammy. But that's a tangent for another day.) When you're trying to figure out the best way to tweak a site, it helps to have lots of data about it and other sites: text on the pages, what they link to, and more. Semrush has a bot to gather that data so that not every SEO nerd has to figure out such a bot on their own.
That bot was confirming that a page showing a picture of a photo I took back in 2009 hasn't changed since. It's not such an interesting thing to do; a good task to delegate to a bot.
Oh now I'm getting distracted by the photo.
I guess back in 2009, I was carrying a camera separate from my phone. Ancient times, I guess.
People are more interesting than bots. Glancing at "nearby" log lines, I guess that humans at around that time were playing Bewordled, my word-nerd idea of a "match 3" game. Anyhow, welcome to the bots, welcome to the humans. Have a nice time.
