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By no means an orchid fanatic, it does please me when they rebloom, and only then will I show them here

I dont really need to know who is visiting my websites, although it is an undeniable pleasure to see number go up. I certainly don't want to feed the beast with any information about my visitors, which is why I long ago gave up on GAnal and adopted Bise. It all worked swimmingly with a mix of automation and manual drudgery for about six years. Then, when I started to move my hosting from Dreamhost to Hetzner, it basically went belly up.

The main reason is that the logfiles are stored in different places and Hetzner does not let me use rsync to bring them down to my machine. After some tinkering I found ways to overcome those obstacles, but the picture that emerged was extremely confusing and inspired no confidence in the numbers.

Bise distinguishes Uniques from Regulars, which is roughly equivalent to distinguishing all traffic from people who come once a week or more. I like that, for obvious reasons. So I was very struck when both jumped manyfold shortly after moving to Hetzner. But then they started wobbling all over the shop, dropping from above 25,000 to below 2000 in a week and then yoyoing.

Graph of visitor numbers against time showing extreme oscillation more recently

I have absolutely no idea why this should be. Nor, as I said, do I need to know. But it is intriguing, and I do want to know whether the fortnightly pattern will persist, so I will probably continue the drudgery for a while longer, as it is a relaxing part of my Sunday routine.

Or should I be using some other privacy-focussed log analyser that isn't overly detail obsessed?

Filed under | Geeky |

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