Anna Nicole (4 Stars)

This evening I watched two biopics directed by Mary Harron. The first was about Anna Nicole Smith. While I can't claim to like her as a person, the film gives fascinating insight into her life.

Curiously, my 2021 post about the film has been getting a lot of hits over the last five weeks, pushing it up to the sixth place in my popular posts list.

This screenshot of my reader statistics should give you an impression of what's happening. There was never much interest in the post, not even in 2021 when I first wrote it. Then suddenly it was noticed on 16th May this year. Whatever had sparked the interest, it only lasted 12 days. It was quiet for two days, and now there have been a lot of hits for the last two days. I'm curious how it will continue. My readers are strange.

I check my statistics every day. I can tell the difference between genuine traffic and fake traffic. A few times a year a spider crawls through my blog, though I'm not sure why. Is it making copies of all my photos? Is it searching for email addresses to spam? I don't know. Usually the spider's activity lasts about two days. A typical spider reads every post once, so it boosts my overall reader count, but it doesn't manipulate my popular posts list. Not every read is registered, because the blogger software has spam protection that stops counting when the reads occur too fast.

This month is different. I have a spider from an address in Singapore that's been crawling my blog since 1st June, and it shows no sign of stopping. My genuine traffic is about 600 hits per day, but the spider has tripled that number. It doesn't really bother me. It's just amusing. It makes my blog look like it's doing better than it really is, but I don't lie, I'll admit it to anyone who asks.