I thought I’d take a look tonight at who is reading my blog… or at least what kinds of systems are accessing it. According to the log files, access to my site has climbed steeply in recent months although I probably shouldn’t get too excited. The most popular pages are ones that don’t exist and the majority of my visitors appear to come from Vietnam. One doesn’t want to be ungrateful but that might suggest these are not all avid readers of my deathless prose but also a certain number of automated attempts to find weak spots in my site. Lesson: if you publish anything online, you have to make sure appropriate security is in place because there are bots out there dedicated to searching for vulnerabilities.

Apparently almost half of my visitors are coming in via Apple Macs but, given the observations about countries of origin, it is hard to extrapolate anything from that with confidence. My reflection is that, if I do want to get a handle on who my audience are, I’ll need to work through the log files with a bit more finesse than what the venerable AWStats provided by my ISP can offer. The headline of “the numbers are going up” has never been particularly meaningful and, with more automated systems floating around the web, is probably becoming exponentially less useful with each passing year.