REFERRER SPAM og Helt Sjuk

HELT SJUK

This past month has been abysmal in some respects. I caught some sort of head-cold/flu and it just didn't want to go away. Then it became a form of 'walking pneumonia', for which I had to take antibiotics. Now it's just relegated itself to the category of 'bronchitis'.

It feels like a month has been stripped away from my life. I can function OK for some things, like work (which has picked back up lately). But other things, like working out with weights, riding my bike, etc. etc. -- not so good.

DXing has been mediocre, and when you're coughing your guts up the last thing you feel like doing is tuning across crowded Medium Wave frequencies looking for 'rare' signals.

I have tuned the Shortwave bands, though, and found it a bit relaxing whenever there were stations from the other side of the world. But overall, the month of March was a blowout.

The above is a screenshot of my Google BlogSpot stats page. As you can see, there are numerous hits that are quite regular, about 30 of them every other hour or so. All from the same computer, and all from the US. Someone apparently really wants people to click on their links -- which I haven't done.

REFERRER SPAM

I've titled this post "REFERRER SPAM" because my blog receives quite a bit of it. At first, I wasn't sure what it was. All of a sudden every other post was receiving 30-40 hits or more a day, all from the U.S., and all from a Macintosh computer with a Chrome browser.

After a bit of Google searching I found out that these mysterious, multiple US hits were mostly from a form of spam called "referrer spam" -- it's a technique by which spammers slam your blog with hits, hoping that you'll click on their web links to see who's "viewing" your blog.

Of course, the joke is that no one was actually viewing your blog, it was a bot that slammed your blog with hits as a weird form of clickbait.

I still get a good numbers of readers from overseas, although I have no idea anymore which articles they are reading.... But I'm glad they're still reading the posts. And I'm sure a few of the hits from the US are actual readers, and I'm glad for them also. But the massive blast of hits from this spammer makes looking at my reader stats a challenge at best, and no fun at the worst.

I noticed that the blog posts which I "shared" via Google Plus are the ones that get the referrer spam hits. My most recent post, about the Sony Sports Boombox, so far hasn't received a ton of spam hits.

That is probably because I didn't "share" that post via Google Plus.

In the future I may avoid "sharing" my posts because of it. I'm still uncertain whether to continue "sharing" or not. I really don't know if there's that much of a benefit.

This particular post I shall "share" via Google Plus, so I'm sure by the end of the week it will have received about 500 hits or something -- maybe 20 of them actual readers.

Either way, life is picking up, slowly. Still coughing, still hacking, but less and less each day.

Here's hoping that those of you readers -- especially the ones in the Northern Hemisphere where it is still colder weather -- don't catch the type of virus I got, from wherever I got it. :-)

Peace.
CC 4-1-2017