A full month on DreamHost is now over and I’ve been looking at their comprehensive statistics and access logs.

Several interesting facts stand out. There have been unexpected traffic peaks on Jan. 17, 25 and 26. A significant number of requests came from wb5.stanford.edu (171.64.75.198 (apparently some sort of webcrawling robot called WebVac?), but they’ve been off the air again lately. Only 29% of you are reading this over a RSS reader, and most of you are using NetNewsWire. The most popular browser (33%) is Safari, but about 20% are still using Internet Explorer. Mac users are, unsurprisingly, more than twice the number of Windows users.

The overwhelming majority of referrals came from Google and similar index sites, while the rest was equally divided between VersionTracker and the link I placed on Martin Hering‘s site because of the XRay name mixup. There have been several attempts at referrer spam which of course didn’t work, as I don’t publish automatic referrer lists.

A couple of thousand visits came from search engine users searching for the expected terms: “x ray” and “xray” – strangely, more for the first variation, which I never use myself. A surprising number of visitors came from pages cached by Google, and another significant fraction was searching for “viewtopic.php”. The latter search is well-known to be used by the Santy/Spyki worm. In fact, the various variations of these worms still seem to be active, and were responsible for 44.4% of all accesses to my website! Still, worm attacks have dwindled to 15% over the last few days, so I hope this will die down soon. In any event, nearly all such attacks are being rejected outright by some mod-rewrite magic and the few that may come through will have no effect, as I did the necessary updates as soon as the first attack happened last December.

Some comment spammers have appeared too, and I promptly deleted their comments. I also implemented the new nofollow tag which is now automatically and retroactively applied to all links posted by non-registered visitors, so they won’t have any effect.

I’m also seizing the opportunity to patch little defects here and there, but much still remains to be done…