May 29, 2008
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Yes, Virginia, I’m beginning to wonder…
I don’t want to be paranoid about this, but I am starting to wonder about my visitor with the Virginia footprints. I mentioned this in a pulse yesterday and one recommendation was to turn off the RSS feed. If you are reading this and recognize yourself in these footprints, snipped from my feedback page, please send me a message and identify yourself, or I will feel that I must turn off my RSS feed for my own peace of mind. I appreciate readers, and don’t mind anonymity, but I guess the frequency of these visits is what is starting to cause me some concern. If you are someone I “know”, then I don’t really mind. If you are someone who just really enjoys my writing and photos, then I don’t mind that either. But I am curious about why I am being visited 8 times in less than 24 hours (I don’t update that often!).
visited today at 3:12 PM
visited today at 1:42 PM and 12:15 PM
visited today at 10:44 AM
visited today at 9:16 AM
visited today at 6:06 AM and 4:34 AM (what’s up with that — 4:34 AM???)
visited last night at 11:37 PM
Comments (16)
Ooooo ~ okay……that does seem a bit freaky hey…..I also get them, but not that regularly!!!
I think I had some from Virginia the other day. Hm.
I just looked and I have a lot of Virginia rss on my footprints for the last several days. Very strange.
I get them from Virginia and New Jersey almost every day. Though I tested myself one day and my anon. footprints say I am from Illinois!
Quite a mystery!
I don’t really even understand what RSS is. I get all kinds of anonymous footprints, from European places and places like Korea, where I know no one, as well as all kinds of states. I get a lot of them repeatedly. At first it really freaked me out, but then I decided, eh, I’m putting it all out there, after all…what bothers me is the few readers I have who have “dummy” Xanga sites…with no personal information, no blog, nothing. Just a site they use for…??
You know, it could be a search engine scanning your site. There is a really nice person at Xanga by the name of Natalia, maybe you could ask her what she thinks it might be.
http://www.xanga.com/Natalia
You could also change your settings to limit your visitors to only signed in Xangans.
My son has a Xanga that he hardly ever uses and he doesn’t limit his visitors and has tons of those kinds of visitors.
I know when you get that kind of stuff it is really creepy, but most likely it isn’t even a real person just a bot.
The RSS feature has always confused me. My sister had a situation where it appeared that this one blogger was hitting her site hundreds of times in a 24-hour period (via the RSS feed). She got a bit spooked and turned off that feature. I’m not even sure what the RSS feature is for, nor how it works.
Interesting. Would you believe I don’t actually check my footprints????
Maybe they’re trying to think of something clever to say….
Whatever it is, I hope it gets sorted out, for your own peace of mind!
Have a wonderful weekend!
i don’t check the footprints either. i have it all barb wired and on lock down so only signed in xangans who are my friends can view my site!
talk about paranoid. 
but with a lunatic ex husband and a lunatic mother… one can never be too careful.
of course, i’m from virginia but, i haven’t been to your site in many days so, i don’t think they are from me…
@skanickadee - That actually makes sense, and also makes me feel better!
@Neeka1 - @BluebirdChris - @MooncatBlue - @ordinarybutloud - @skanickadee - @WriteOnWriteOn - @meganbarnard - @SoImaNeatFreak -
Mary Beth (skanikadee) suggested I ask Natalia from Xanga about the footprints, which I did, and I got this response:
“If it’s from an RSS feed, there is a very good chance that it’s a site indexing bot. RSS is a great option if you go through a reader (some people will dump feeds of blogs, sites like the NY Times, ESPN, whatever!) and want to aggregate a whole lot of content into one place – it’s like your own customized newspaper every day.
In my experience, Googlebots will scan Xanga pages every time a new item (pulse, weblog entry, etc.) is added so that Google will have the most up-to-date version of your site. This means going through all 25ish pages of your blog and making sure there’s nothing new, including the rarely used RSS.
If you know you won’t use it and would rather avoid the annoying footprints, I’d say to turn it off. We offer RSS so that those people who read a jillion sites a day have the option to read Xanga pages, too, but it’s not a feature that too many people use.
No worries . . . just annoyance.”
Questions answered — no one is silently stalking me! Whew! not that I have anything worth stalking — but it was getting a little wierd. Not so much, now that I have an explanation.
YAY! Here’s some comfort cookies ‘n milk!
When I found an Arabic translation of my sebsite last week, I also found a lot of hits from Montana. I checked it several times and finally discovered that somehow the blocking cookie for my IP address had turned off and I was logging myself. Why from Montana, I don’t know, unless my ISP was getting its bandwidth from a company in that state.
I was a bit worried for a while.
I don’t mean to be rude or disrespectful of your concerns, but eight visits in a day really isn’t that many. Shoot, I get unknown visitors all the time from California and Quebec and Korea and many other places. The other night, someone from Quebec hit my site over 40 times around 3 in the morning. Why? No clue. I mostly post protected, so I don’t know what they’d get out of it. What really freaked me out though was a week or so ago, I got over 340 hits in one NIGHT from Korea! That was a little too bizarre. Eight hits in a day though, I wouldn’t worry too much. Plus, like that person said, it’s probably a bot, not an actual person. Cheers!
@Bukowski_Rules - ah, but you are a much “bigger” personality on Xanga than I am. It was out of the ordinary for me to get repeated hits from the same location, especially at varying times throughout the day like that. But yes — it is probably a bot, so I am not worried any longer. Truthfully, I didn’t really know whether to be worried — or flattered — (that someone would visit me repeatedly like that). Turns out — probably neither! And so it goes.
I just saw Natalia’s response. I’m glad it eased your mind. Natalia has been very helpful to me in the past.