Whaaaaa????

Normally, this blog gets, oh, around 30 page views a day, according to my Blogger stats. Lately, that has increased to between 45-60 a day, as I have been writing more. (Of course, at least 50% – some days many more – of those hits are people Googling the words “children ardent for some desperate glory.” Many more are people Googling some variation on the words “little-known heroes.”) When I wrote the Steve Jobs, “Silence = Death,” and “Class Warfare” posts, I had several days where my page count approached 100.

Today my hit count exceeds 450.

I am astute enough to realize that it is unlikely that anything I have written would have resulted in this surge in activity. Not to mention that the three URLs which have accounted for the most traffic all redirect to the same nondescript content-empty site.

I think my blog URL is being used either to spoof something else, or as a way to generate false hits for someone's web ads. Both of these bother me no end. The first because I don't know what it would be used for, and if someone is going to all the trouble to hijack the blog, it must be something unsavory. The second because there is a reason I keep my content ad-free, and if anyone is going to be making money off what I write, it darn well better be me.

I an not net savvy enough to diagnose what is going on here. I am afraid it is something that will get the blog frozen.* If it continues past today, I am going to contact Blogger to see what they say.

In the meantime, I am taking steps to keep disaster at bay. I am backing up all my content on a mirror site that I have on Wordpress. I have been thinking of moving over there for some time, and once I have the site looking the way I want it, I may well do so. (Of course, this site has been redesigned six or seven times in its history, so maybe I will simply call it a work-in-progress, and open it up. As it is, I still am teaching myself the basics of the Wordpress system, and remembering the small amount of HTML I need to tweak the design.) I am also setting up an RSS feed for the other site so that I can port it over to LiveJournal, since I know readers who view it through the LJ RSS feed.

So keep tuned. I'll let you know what happens.


*If it turns out that it is something that gets all my Google accounts frozen, I am royally screwed. I have four Gmail accounts: the one associated with this blog, the one in which I get important institutional news (emails to my doctors, the school, etc.) and various useful spam (e.g., Groupon and Amazon), a “professional” account (i.e., one with my actual name in the address) which I use for job-hunting and work-related correspondence, and a mostly dormant one associated with my jewelry and design work. (I have a non-Gmail account for corresponding with friends and family.) I also have quite a number of Google docs, mainly because it has proven to be a useful format for receiving and editing things from other people. I don't use Google+ or Chrome, on the grounds that, with the above mentioned Gmail and docs and my search history, this multi-national already has far too much of my information already. (Paranoid I may be, but I do not put my trust in large companies. I am far too small a fish to ever come to anyone's notice, but just the idea of people having access to that much information about me makes me a bit uncomfortable.) I stick to Facebook, and am careful about what information I release to my friends. (Although there, given FB's history of a total lack of respect for people's privacy, I may be putting too much out there as well.) Thank God for Livejournal.