What makes the Internet fun – when you’re not being scammed, spammed. phished, hacked and generally annoyed—is when someone in an unexpected location visits your website.
I periodically check the stats on my site to track users, etc. I also make note of entries from some foreign hacker-friendly nations.
But, today was a sort-of delight.
Someone located in Sint Maartin, a nation in the Dutch Antilles in the Caribbean looked up an old post on my website.
Yeah, it could be a hacker, but what the hell.
Sint Maartin is the Dutch half of an island which it shares with a French colony, Saint Maartin.
Sunny, beachy, touristy.
Sint Maartin is 41 square miles and has a population of 41,000.
The capital is Phillipsburg.
Which is what got my attention.
Because the post that was accessed was something I wrote a year ago about the Phillipsburg, N.J. town council messing with the Phillipsburg Free Public Library, in fact, considering closing it. Thanks to a strong civic outcry, the council backed off, although it is still hard to consider them friends of the library.
Now it’s possible the Phillipsburg, Sint Maartin town council is also feuding with its public library.
But I doubt it.
Had someone wanted to read about such a feud and Googled “Phillipsburg library budget” or something like that, my item would have appeared among the 22 million other references, including any potential such items from Sint Maartin.
If that had happened, and the reader clicked on the Google link it would taken them directly to the post.
But, according to the tracking info on my page, the reader first used said Google search to access the main page of the blog.
They then accessed the archive link and searched specifically for the Phillipsburg library item they read. A lot of work unless you were doing it on purpose.
Holy Dewey Decimal System, Batman.
Slow day on the beaches of Sint Maartin?
Anyway, thanks , and I hope you enjoyed the post.
Got me thinking, though.
I’m plotting out the next Frank Nagler Mystery, so far called, NAGLER’S SECRET, and this type of sneaky, Internet search and messaging would be a way for the person behind the secret, or who is the secret, to reach out to Nagler.
We’ll see.
