Referred

Occasionally* I have reason to look at my website logs and referrer lists. These tell me how many people visit this site and where they’ve come from. So, for example, I can tell if a page is linking to me if it has referred visitors to me. Every now and again I see that people have reached my site by searching specificially for my name. I don’t find this particularly strange or worrying because I’ve developed a habit of casually googling the names of friends or acquaintances. It almost never does me any good, because the vast majority of people have basically zero web presence and thus are immune to googling, but sometimes I find out something interesting.

The opposite is true with me. If anyone searches for ‘adrian hon’ then they will find all of my personal websites, several hundred thousand words of writing written by me on essentially every topic under the sun (apart from personal matters, hah!) and about 2000 other hits. You can find out my political views, my scientific views, my views on life, my personality, my hobbies, my friends, what I look like, what I know, where I am and where I’ve been. Again, this doesn’t bother me because I put it all there myself and I am ready to stand behind my words. Still, I do wonder exactly who it is that searches for my name, and what they think when they see all the hits…

* Occasionally meaning ‘every day’. Not that I am concerned about the number of hits I get – after running a weblog for three years, you tend to stop caring about how many people visit.