I know, I know. Curiosity killed the cat. But sometimes when I blog "something fancy", I totally want to know who's looking at it. Or why some things are so popular... (darn image stealers...)
-- Knowing that my RSS feeds get a few thousand hits a week sometimes just isn't enough to know :)
Thank heaven on my ISP's server, I have access to my apache log files.
So, let's find out the hostnames of the people reading my (imaginary) article about someting-fancy.
for ip in grep <em>something-fancy</em> access.log.current | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u; do resolveip $ip; done
... Host name of 128... is 128-...public.oregonstate.edu Host name of 128... is pxxx.wlan.cs.mu.OZ.AU Host name of 131... is Cs-xxx.CS.UCLA.EDU Host name of 147... is ...FSV.CVUT.CZ Host name of 132... is ...rz.uni-wuerzburg.de Host name of 210... is ...stu.edu.tw
You wouldn't believe how much information a hostname can give you. (Or sometimes not.) The usual customer lines don't give you much - however it's interesting what universities people sometimes come from. Who in Taiwan, Czech or at the University of Melbourne is reading my blog??
Anyway. Good to know that it's not just the usual search engine bots creating traffic on my blog :)
Curiosity appeased. For a while.