The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Guten Tag, Deutchland!

Mostly, this blog ticks along with 400 to 500 page views per day, with 300-ish visitors looking at a page or two each.

This week, something happened:

Blog Stats - 2021-08-28
Blog Stats – 2021-08-28

Both of those spikes came from Germany:

Blog Countries - 2021-08-28
Blog Countries – 2021-08-28

Traffic spikes generally come from a single post getting fifteen minutes of Reddit fame, with a zillion visitors hitting a specific page.

In this case, a German “visitor” read nearly all of my 4461 posts on two days: 822 + 3561 = 4383. I’m reasonably sure no human finds my writing that interesting, so it’s likely a scraper capturing my text for the purposes of spinning it into a blog-like site with “unique content” for the purposes of SEO.

Perhaps the first traffic spike was a targeting run?

I’ll never know the rest of the story, but if you happen to stumble across a blog with an uncanny resemblance to this one, written by something with a wide vocabulary and no techie knowledge, let me know.

Comments

3 responses to “Guten Tag, Deutchland!”

  1. Bill Avatar
    Bill

    “stumble across a blog … written by something with a wide vocabulary and no techie knowledge, let me know.”

    Sorry, but that sounds like most social media blogs to me, or almost any tech-related comments from politicians.

    1. Ed Avatar

      Good point.

      All I know is, the blog will seem vaguely familiar …

  2. Vedran Avatar
    Vedran

    Maybe someone just wanted a backup of your collected works :)
    I’ve done that with a site or two over the years