Stats and Garden Critters

At the risk of turning my blog into the "flower of the day," here's a picture of one of our dahlias. This dahlia, unlike most of the others, has had a very successful year with lots of flowers -- even though, as you can see on the leaves, it's covered with powdery mildew. Next year I'm going to have to stay on top of that problem better. It's been a real plague in this dry summer.

We continued to get rain yesterday, which was good, except that our school building developed some dramatic leaks including one that closed a stairwell. There's been some construction on the roof over the summer and I expect that created the problem, which fortunately didn't allow any water into the library.

I had another crazy busy day, which didn't permit me to either read blogs or respond (entirely) to comments. I did see Mr. Pudding's recent post about his blog stats, which prompted me to look at mine last night. I haven't checked them in ages and I found, like him and some other bloggers, that my page views have gone up dramatically in recent days. Seven of my ten most viewed posts in the last six months were written within the past ten days, with some of them gaining more than a thousand views, which seems statistically suspect. (Of course, I was writing about ABBA, so there is that.)

The "top referring URLs" were even more of a mystery. Google and other bloggers I expected, but I also got tons of views supposedly from the web sites of Stanford, Northwestern University, NASA and PepsiCo. Now, I know Pepsi and NASA are not linking to my blog, so I imagine this reflects some kind of bot activity -- maybe referral spam. (From Google: "Referral spam involves bots and automated tools, not real people, sending fake 'referrers' to your blog's stats page.") I don't quite understand the purpose -- it could be AI crawlers, or something else, but it doesn't hurt the blog and I'm not that concerned.

Here's my geographic breakdown of viewers within the last seven days. They love me in Brazil and Vietnam -- I have visited and written about both of those places, which could be why, but it could also just be bots. (Vietnam is one of my primary traffic sources, according to all-time stats.) My fellow countrymen and women here in the UK are giving me a comparatively cool reception.

I don't think any of this means anything useful, except that I get a lot of bot traffic like any blogger. But it's interesting.

Finally, this morning I downloaded the videos from our garden cam. Here's the latest garden activity, condensed into less than four minutes:

You'll see at least two (maybe three) different cats, a couple of really good glimpses of our lanky fox, and various birds. At the beginning of the video you'll see the cat and the starlings checking out some food in a plastic container -- that was a piece of Dave's leftover sushi that I left out for the fox. The cat and the starlings got there first!