Like most website owners, I check the website logs every now and again. It always makes for interesting reading, whether it turns up a new incoming link, or some interesting search string that has led some unwitting surfer to these pages.
Unfortunately, although I can go back to the original log files if I need to see something specific, many of the statistics presented to me on my webalizer summary for the month of February so far are fairly useless. Take the referral stats, for example (information about sites linking to this one): apart from Google, the top 30 referrers are all showing as variants on the address for the same online poker site, no doubt the result of comment spam robots spoofing the referrer data during a recent spate of failed attempts to flood the blog comments with spam. (Happily, none of these comments ever actually made it onto the site, and the “temporary” hack fix I put in back in August last year seems to be doing just fine–being able to solve the problem of comment spam in a non-standard way is one benefit of having your own blogging system I guess).
But even so, I can still find some interesting information in there. Slap bang in the middle of the list of domains accessing the site is this entry:
“Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ISU”
That’s strange, I thought, on first seeing this: I don’t ever recall noticing that before. A quick Google reveals that the ISU is Saudi Arabia’s government filtering organisation, which trawls teh interwebs looking for information to block from its citizens.
Now I wonder what I might have mentioned around these parts recently that might have attracted their attention. It couldn’t be the addition of Craig Unger’s excellent House of Bush, House of Saud to my reading list, could it?