About this blog's statistics recently...

Although this blog is tied to Google Plus, a lot of the recent traffic here has been tied to my activities on Facebook, by the looks of it.  I'll explain, of course.  Blog statistics have a default setting of viewing traffic on a week-by-week basis.  The following screenshot is after the Day's traffic was selected, so it's traffic in the past 24 hours.

Over the past few days, there has been an increased activity on Facebook by IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting) which invited me to Like a number of its pages, and for the most part I obliged. In the past few days, hits on my blog posts about Iran and Persia went up quite a bit, while my hits from China, mostly directly via Google Plus, declined.  I guess my minders consider me to be under control, ha.  For now, anyway.

Prior to that, my association with Inca Trail on Facebook seems to have been driving all the traffic to my Peru posts, and when I posted about the Latin y Persia event in OKC, you guessed it--the hits basically doubled, but they also put me under the Chinese radar for the time being. Seeing Brazil lit up a bit is interesting; I've used Portuguese on only one spot on this blog, but in an update of considerable vintage. Interesting. UPDATE: I just reviewed all the new Adds on Google Plus and apparently an Add I overlooked is a Brazilian. Hey, that works.  Hello, Brasil! :)  Well, I Added back everybody who Added me tonight, so this should be good.

What this blog's statistics will not show: it doesn't identify individuals--the only traffic sources ever shown are hits relayed by stat-counting websites and search engines.  It will identify operating systems and countries of origin, but not individuals.  The best I can do is notice patterns like the ones described above.  Due to the nature of countries that do not permit unscreened access by their citizens to the Internet, I fully understand the necessity of the use of proxy servers and IP masking.  As a former admin of forum boards, and because of interaction with whom I refer to as "my pet Russian" (hi, gri! ^_^), I was usually laxer than other admins regarding the wanton banishment of IPs, specifically or in sets, and would not use Project Honeypot boardware.

Basically, even if I could see your IP, I wouldn't trust it as being the genuine article even if I did a lookup on it.  But I can't see your IP, rest assured of that.  The traffic to this blog does indeed go through SEO entities first, and they're not talking to me. 

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After I posted the above, I looked at the stats again, same setting, and it looks like this:

4 hits on this post already.  That most likely would be Google Plus people online now, cuz that's how fast that worked.  Oh--and I already selected the "do not track myself" option, so I know it's not me.

Also--I'm content to know that even with the number of my Islamic readers has increased, no further challenges to my posting about Islamic law have been proffered.  It stands with presumed approval.

And speaking of other questionable people I Like on Facebook, there's the inimitable Arnie Coro of Radio Havana. He's a freakin' junkyard genius who IS Radio Havana. I don't care how your politics run regarding Cuba, or what you think of Cuban jamming ops, or the finger he usually pokes into the eye of the HFCC, but Arnie is a one-of-a-kind technological treasure.  Luvz ya, Arnie!  (noteworthy material 6 minutes in...)