Wow, it's the site's 55 millionth hit. 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:
223.11.179.11 - - [13/Nov/2026:15:14:51 +0000] "GET /new/atom.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Tingjian/1.0 (+public RSS reader)"
Let's see, it's an RSS feed reader (i.e., blog reader) checking to see if I've updated my blog. Looking at other blog hits on my site that day, looks like this feed reader checked three times for updates. Wow, that's pretty reasonable. The IP address looks like it's in China, which might explain why it's an RSS reader I haven't heard of named "Tingjian."
Seems like in recent years a lot of my N-millionth-hit blog posts have been kvetching about the state of the modern web. Every two-bit hacker on the planet checking to see if any website has a /wp/blog-admin.php page that they can break into using some recently-discovered bug. (nope) Sloppily-written web crawlers from AI search companies checking every 10 seconds to see if I updated my 2015 Austin travelog for some reason? (nope) Here is a bit of the old web shining through: a well-behaved feed reader looking for updates a few times a day. So, so beautiful 🥹
Because I'm in a good mood, I'll post this picture of the sunrise from my walk to the grocery store this morning.
