All Along the Watchtower

I admit that I’m a little compulsive about checking traffic on my site. It’s not a very significant number, but it helps me feel a little wanted, and sometimes I can figure out if old friends or recent acquaintances are checking up on this blog, via the IP address and other info that SiteMeter shows me. Usually, I can see if the user was referred to my site by an external link, or a search engine. Lately, a lot of people have gotten here by searching for images of Giada De Laurentiis. Some stay a while. It’s a funny world.

This morning, something strange happened. I noticed a significant bump in traffic: about 30 people or so had checked in before 8 in the morning. I decided to look into the details, and discovered that nearly all of them were from the far east, and they were all going directly to a single post of mine, Moon over Malaysia.

Longtime readers who remember too much for their own good may recall this post. It was about how the Malaysian Biotechnology Corp. wanted me to stop by for an interview during the BIO conference in Chicago last April. When I looked up the country’s official policies toward Israel (“it doesn’t exist”), I declined the invite, writing a polite note to the PR rep in New York who was trying to arrange the meeting. I never heard back from them. It’s all in the post.

This morning, and late last night, and all throughout today, I kept receiving hits to that exact post. What was particularly interesting (or scary) was that not a single one of those hits included a “referring URL.” That is, there wasn’t a link on another site that led all these people to my site.

As far as I know, this means that they either all got the link via e-mail (but not a web-based e-mail like Gmail or Yahoo!, which would have left a referring URL), or there’s some site out there that linked to my post and is, um, secret enough not to leave a trace on SiteMeter. And it has users in the following locations:

Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

Tanjong Tokong, Malaysia

Bilit, Malaysia

Kampong Sinempuan, Malaysia

Kampong Abu Bakar, Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Kampong Tepi Sungai, Malaysia

Sungai Besi, Malaysia

Val D’Or, Malaysia

Alexandria, Egypt

Dakar, Singapore

Coatbridge, UK

Hull, UK

Sheffield, UK

Cardiff, Wales

Berlin, Germany

Perth, Australia

Melbourne, Australia

Toyama, Japan

Sterling Heights, Michigan

Garden City, NY (the user was on a computer at Adelphi University, alma mater of Baba Booey)

Some of these people stayed for only a second, while others hung on for a while or moved around on this blog. No one left a comment.

It was a little troubling, I admit. Fortunately, when I got home tonight, I received some reassurance.

It seems that, while the Malaysians were creeping around my site, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were busy driving through my neighborhood. They left a flyer in my door proclaiming “The End of False Religion Is Near!” So, y’know, I got that going for me. . .