Photos of February

Last month the stats for my m-w.com domain (links to specific resources are on the right) showed an unexpected jump that lasted about a week, with page views nearly doubling during that time. At the end of the month I downloaded the domain's log file, plugged it into my log analysis database, and started looking for a reason for the jump. I didn't need to look at the entire week in question. The first day of the jump showed that a search spider was collecting pages for something, so I assumed that the other big days were similar.

While I was in the log, I also looked at a few other things. One useful analysis concerns 'page not found' errors, as in Most 'HTTP 404' Are External Errors. Based on my log analyses, I could write a tutorial on the techniques that hackers use to explore a site's vulnerabilities.

One thing I've always wanted to do -- but never found the time -- is to analyze the popularity of the various images stored on the site. This blog, for example, has all of its images stored in a single directory, '/CFAA/', making it easy to count and compare the number of times that different images are accessed.

The most popular image in the month of February was used in Titled Players and Their Continents, not too surprising given that it was one of the first posts of that month. Since nine of the top ten images were also posted in February, I eliminated those from consideration along with a few images from end-January. That left the following images as the most popular, meaning that the corresponding blog post was also relatively popular.

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Magnus Looks Like That Guy?

My server log doesn't tell me why this post is so popular. The referring page is nearly always some national variation of www.google.com, like google.bg or google.co.uk, with no additional info.

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Chess in Africa - FIDE Members

The popularity of this image was no surprise to me. The post often appears on the list of most popular posts for a given week, with people searching for a map of Africa.

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'A Holy Grail to Cookie Jar Collectors'

This post/image and most of the following are from my ongoing eBay series. I'm approaching the fifth anniversary of this series (?!) and plan to write a post about it in the next week or so.

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Engine Block Chess

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Lord of the Rings, Trilogy Edition

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King Kong vs. Godzilla

This is from another post that frequently appears in the list of top posts for a week. There appear to be many people who are fascinated by these two monsters.

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Capodimonte Figurines
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What else can I say? There's no accounting for taste.