A little secret: Ever since this site came back from its multi-month hiatus last winter, I've been tracking most of the hits it gets pretty damn carefully on a regular basis. In fact, I even wrote a little custom web interface to make it easier. Every IP address that visits this site shows up on my radar, and I look at that radar quite regularly.

The reason for this, for those who don't know, is because of the event that triggered my decision to remove almost everything from the bitscape.org domain for a period of several months. In late August 2004, when my mom announced that she was "worried" about me, and went on to say it was because of some things she had read on my site, that was a "Woah, stop the presses" moment.

I concluded with a reasonable degree of certainty that she wouldn't know about the address of the nascent ivanova backup site (which Jaeger had put in place because of my worries that x13 as a functional hosting platform might be biting the dust). So I decided to start publishing there and only there. Redirects severed. Forwarding stopped. Notifications sent to people I knew through other channels. Probably a lot of legitimate readers were left in the dark. But what choice did I have?

When Bitscape's Lounge was resurrected in February, I started out quite cautiously, making sure everything I posted publicly was sanitized. Because I didn't feel like reading through and evaluating every one of them, all my legacy ramblings were designated as "Semi-public" (meaning anyone in the world could access them without being logged in, but good luck figuring out those urls unless you know somebody with a login).

After regular monitoring for a period of months, I concluded with a fairly high degree of certainty that mom was not visiting this site anymore, so I loosened up on what I felt safe posting publicly.

But still, I look at hits.pl daily, or sometimes several times a day. (Don't bother. You won't see anything interesting. Unless I made some terrible coding mistake.)

One thing that occassionally pops up are hits with referrers from places like sitemeter -- which generally means that that somebody running a site I linked to saw me in their referrer logs, and clicked their web-based admin tool to get to my site. Often, the domain name of the site I linked to even shows up in the url.

Tonight, one such hit came in, which had me... well... wondering. Obviously, someone who runs the communitycrops.org site (which I linked to last week) was looking at their referrer log, wandered into my little place, and spent several minutes reading stuff I wrote during the past couple weeks.

I researched the IP address(es) (actually there appeared to be two people surfing simultaniously from separate terminals). Unsurprisingly, the locator pinpointed their location as Lincoln Nebraska. Also, notable: both user-agents identified as Firefox running under Linux. (cue clapping)

So I'm sitting here wondering. "Could this be anybody I know? Could this be somebody I might meet in the not-so-distant future?" And then, "Hmmm, might anything I wrote here make things awkward or embarrassing? For example, what if 'T' were to read my little account of our dealings?" (Not that I think for a moment that it's her, but on the hypothetical...)

I don't think so, but it's still a little wacky to contemplate that people who I think only know me in meatspace might be finding all sorts of interesting stuff about me online. As you all probably know, I've gone out of my way to make sure this site stays off the radar of potential or current employers; this due to some unpleasant past experience. But what about others, like those at church, the coop, or elsewhere? People who aren't close personal friends, but circulate in the same social groups.

Here's my dilemma: On the one hand, I'd like to be able to walk up to just about anyone I meet and say, "Yeah, if you feel like checking out my website where I philosophize and ponder the meaning of life, here's the address. And share it with other friends too if you like." Be proud about it, and if there's anyone who doesn't like it, screw them.

But there's also this part of me that wants to keep up the tradition of venting my spleen about everything that's going on in my life, and that might involve saying some stuff about people I know, and if I want to be truly honest about it all, I feel like I can only be comfortable doing so if I'm confident that they're not going to read it.

I suppose I could move back to posting that type of stuff as viewable to logged-in users only. The problem with that is that I really don't mind someone halfway around the world reading about my shyness with T, or $other_personal_issue_of_the_week. In fact, I want them to be able to read about it. But I don't think I'd feel comfortable if T or any of her friends saw what I wrote. At least not right now.

I have no firm answers.

But anyway, I guess what I just wrote falls squarely into the "spleen-venting" category. And so, it's accessible only to those whose logins have been chosen. Now don't you all feel special?

(I suppose this is also a component of the larger identity crisis I feel this website has been having, which only seems to deepen futher with time. That is to say, I often become confused when considering the questions, "Why am I writing here? What am I writing about? Who is my intended audience?" Depending on the answers to the those, the follow-up would be, "How can I make it more effective at conveying whatever it is I want to convey to whomever it is I'm trying to convey it to?")

Anyway, that's enough on that. Back to contemplation. And perhaps a little further tweaking.

(P.S. And yes, this also means I am well aware that someone from the development division of eSoft still reads this site almost daily. Based on the time of day of the hits, this person almost certainly is someone other than Zan Lynx. (If he still keeps the same habits as a few years ago, he'd never been in the office anywhere near that early in the morning.) The MSIE user-agent string suggests a strong likelihood that it's someone from management. You know what? I'm fine with that. Bygones. In fact, I actually find it somewhat flattering. Just thought I'd share.)