Back in February I declared that I wasn’t tracking visits to zerosleeps.com beyond what gets logged - and retained for only a short period of time - by my web server.
Something about that crawled around my brain for a while and in July I added a little bit of middleware to my Django stack to reliably log access requests. For every hit for a non-static resource I’ve been logging the datetime, requested path, the request’s User-Agent header, and the response’s HTTP status code:
class AccessLogMiddleware:
def __init__(self, get_response):
self.get_response = get_response
def __call__(self, request):
response = self.get_response(request)
try:
AccessLog(
path=request.path,
user_agent=request.headers.get("User-Agent", ""),
status_code=response.status_code,
).save()
except:
# Don't care if logging fails, just serve the response
pass
return response
That is, until a few moments ago when I ripped it all out again. I just don’t care. I’ve never cared. I enjoy knowing that the nonsense I put on this thing is being viewed by fellow citizens of planet Earth, but I don’t need detailed logs to know that. I’m honestly not interested in which posts garner interest and which ones don’t. I do this for myself, which means I write about whatever I want. The numbers don’t change that.
Besides all of that the data just isn’t otherwise useful. The overwhelming majority of traffic is from self-identified bots (Bytespider, Amazonbot, SemrushBot, ClaudeBot, Thinkbot, ChatGPT-User, PetalBot, and developers.facebook.com are all in the top 20 user agents), and I’m not entirely sure what percentage of the rest of the traffic is from humans. There’s no way of knowing without drifting into creepy-tracking territory and even then I’d be super sceptical of the accuracy of any stats generated. That’s a hard pass from me anyway.
And the shit that these requests are for. About 20% of all requests have resulted in HTTP 404 responses, a very high percentage of those being for a path ending with “.php”. To the surprise of absolutely nobody who has ever put something on the internet the path at the top of the 404 list is… wp-login.php. Gross.
So it’s all gone. Web server logs as well.