Larry Hosken: New: Tag: milestone

Milestone: 54 Million Hits

Wow, it's the site's 54 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:

3.235.215.92 - - [16/Aug/2026:10:14:14 +0000] "GET /new/2010/05/29/phae-decaying-you-remember-how-i-wrote-that-href/ HTTP/1.1" 200 4200 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36"

OK, looks like Amazon.com has a webcrawler that fetches web pages to feed to an AI so Amazon can understand reviews better. E.g. by fetching my old blog post about a dangerous-but-impressive play structure no longer in a children's playground, perhaps some huge×huge matrix of weights somewhere slightly increased a number associated with "concern for safety."

Robots continue to dominate the traffic. That's both because AI companies crawl pages; and because people don't tend to follow links from AIs to source documents. E.g. Google says that zero (0) people clicked Google results to visit my pages in the last month. Wow, I'd heard that Google was sending fewer people to websites since most folks were content with the AI summary. It sure seems true. Digging through yesterday's logs, I found some probably-human visitors. I noted where the first came from: kagi.com, a much less popular search page. Apparently some kagi.com users still click links and visit websites. OK, looking at one web-visitor is an anecdote, not statistics…but it's weird, man. Or perhaps it's the new normal.

Anyhow, if the web traffic here became 99.9% robots, I suppose I would keep blogging. Even if web traffic were 100% robots, this would still be a handy place to draft posts for my socials 🤣

Milestone: 50 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 50 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, ...

47 Million Hits, COVID fluctuations Wow, it's the site's 47 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 s...

Today, I reached level 100 in Pikmin Bloom, a walk-around-with-your-phone game. That's the highest level achievable. And Alexander humblebragged: "Oh woe is me, I just don't know what to do wit...

Milestone: 44 Million Hits 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 s...

Milestone: 42 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 42 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 s...

I have gone five million steps while playing the Pikmin Bloom phone game. Look on my walks, ye mighty, and despair! (Yeah, yeah, I know some other people have more steps than this. I bet there's...

Some weeks back, I set up a dashboard of San Francisco COVID-19 data. It showed data that was already available elsewhere, but zoomed in near the low end of the graph. I wanted a graph that I could g...

Milestone: 39 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 39 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 s...

1 Million Steps I'm still playing that Pikmin Bloom walking-around mobile phone game. I recently hit a milestone: I've walked a million steps while playing the game. ...

Nowadays, I appreciate outdoor hot dog stands. They're very well ventilated and I can buy food unlike that I'd cook for myself. When I ran the hotdog stand at the MIT Mystery Hunt, I made more hot d...

Today, I note a major milestone in my recovery from shelter-in-place. (To be clear: I don't think I caught/recovered from COVID. This is recovering from the measures I took to evade COVID.) The miles...

You may recall that some months back I started playing a walking-around game called Orna. I'm still playing it these days and hit a milestone this morning: My character is №100 in my region (Northern...

Wow, it's the site's 36 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 s...

I have walked 1000km while playing that Harry Potter Wizards Unite game. (That milestone doesn't capture the fun of the game, but it's something that folks can understand even if they don't know t...

Milestone: 35 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 35 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 s...

Milestone: 33 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 33 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 s...

One Year of Octothorpean The Octothorpean online puzzle-hunt launched a year ago today. How have things gone since then? Pretty well, I think. On the other hand, for the goals I had… They're not so easy to measure. S...

Milestone: 24 Million Hits 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 ...

Milestone: 21 Million Hits It's the site's 21 millionth hit! (As usual, this isn't as impressive a number as you might think at first: these "hits" include, e.g., one for each graphic on each page loaded, visits from search-en...