Numbers odd
I figured I'd throw stats on this site like the old days, but stats like they used to be: information about how the server was reacting to user demand, not information about users.
I really don't want to know anything about you, the reader, unless you tell me yourself, preferably over email. It's privilege enough to have you show up. Nor do I want to even think about GDPR or other punishments Europe has meted out to the web platform for its overreach. No cookies.
Not that I'm particularly virtuous. We use analytics, and retargeting, and all manner of normal marketing awkwardness at the office. But this is home.
The chat suggested goaccess. I installed it and it works fine. But the numbers don't make sense. There is simply no way that 82,522 unique visitors came last week. This is not false modesty. It simply make no sense. So it must be bots, or RSS feeds, or bots reading RSS feeds.
I don't have a grand conclusion. I'm just noting the change, and that I'll figure it out some day. In the meantime memories of optimizations past come unbidden to mind. I will need to gzip everything; I will need my content types set correction; I will need to cache with proper ETAGs. So many hours lost to Apache's regexp syntax, and it's not like I can explain the pain to anyone except a vanishing few grayheaded souls like myself. Nor was it particularly meaningful work. I'm just noting that my soul was forged in Apache config files, setting up virtual hosts, and seeking to do redirects as the new CMS came online, and that these experiences did mean something to me, logged into some server somewhere.
Anyway. The stats make no sense. Everything is off by two orders of magnitude at least. Although I doubt it's making anything up. It's just a different web than I understand and it will take me a while to understand it again. With the exception that I can say, “Please optimize this site,” and a friendly robot will trundle through the config and do as asked. So that that experience of broken configs, so foundational to my very being, will never be shared again. It's for the best, I just wish progress didn't seem so intent on making everything I sought to comprehend into an irrelevance.