How fun, starting a new year with a bland post on Web statistics.

December 2004 was a record month for this blog, with record highs in visits, pages and bandwidth. I exceeded my monthly transfer limit of 20GB by just a little bit as well.

Getting an average of 4.7K visits per day, or 10K pages per day.

Thanks to the “Homer Simpson uses tabbed browsing” post, transfer spiked to almost 3GB on Dec 15.

Top referrers included SpreadFirefox.com and Bloglines. There was a referrer spammer (brushed out in the screenshot) which made it to the top 10 before I caught it and blocked it.

Here’s how referrers are blocked (with .htaccess), for those who are still looking for a solution. What these 2 rewrite rules do is to, respectively, rewrite the listed IP addresses, and rewrite the referrers with the following strings in them, back to the client’s IP. This works extremely well, and I know because I’ve had my server (a VPS) brought to its knees from constant referrer spamming. The hit rates from these spammers were so high that it practically became a DOS attack. Since I’ve implemented these rewrite rules, all has been peaceful and I can finally see uptimes of more than 3 days (believe it or not, the VPS did go down that often).

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^195.175.37.26 [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^195.175.37.24
RewriteRule ^.* http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/ [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} texasholdem [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} example\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} example2\.com
RewriteRule ^.* http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/ [L]

The referrer spammers are still going at it (though they don’t appear in AWStats) – I can see them hitting me when I check my server-status page (see the mod_status module).

I don’t think I’ll need to upgrade my hosting plan yet, since the bandwidth spike was a one time thing caused by the crazy Homer Simpson entry.

And here’s the top 10 browsers as requested. Unsurprising that Firefox tops the list.

Well, here’s to a better year ahead for everyone. For myself, I look forward to having a good time at my new job, (finally) getting published, finding religion, and finally getting a move on in life. I’m not one for “Happy New Year”s and new year resolutions though. So blah, have fun.

Look me up in the Cenarius server if any of you are playing World of Warcraft – my main character’s Lucita (gnome rogue).