This morning I was wandering through the web traffic on my website. I check periodically. Usually, I check if I’d had an influx of scammer emails, today there were less than normal. Lately there has been a ramp up in the number of Chinese cities featuring in my stats. It’s gone from 0 to 32. Some of the hits are downloading press releases. I get it, scrapping data wise a press release has a lot of information.

But, my writer brain … it’s not seeing bots scrapping data. Oh no. It’s seeing purposeful acts by multiple people. Why? Because of the high hit rate of Veronica Tracey posts, pages, and press releases. Next minute … I’ve got a thread to pull and Ronnie is doing the pulling.

Seriously, it’s that simple. My mind sees the pattern and says it’s normal bot behaviour. Then, the what if creeps in. It does it all the time. Want something twisted let a crime writer look at it. 🙂

Normal person: “Huh. Weird website traffic.”

Crime writer: “Interesting. Who are they, what do they want, why now, and who the hell gave them my press release?”

Ronnie: “Get the coffee. We’re going to need the murder board.”

Me: “It’s probably a crawler.”

Ronnie: “That’s what they want you to think.”

Please ignore the huge paragraph gaps … I used to be able to stop that happening with a shift/enter but for some reason I cannot now. It’s pissing me off because gaps between paragraphs are horrid things.