turned out to be a huge misunderstanding. this is the old story. here is the new one.
there’s no need to name names. those of you involved probably have some sort of idea of what happened, i’m sure. but basically, the stalker turned out to be a personal and good friend of mine.
i first believed that whoever made that google search was someone my friend new personally from school who was stalking her. i then noticed that this person also visited other parts of my site. i thought it was just someone clicking around because of boredom, so i decided to ban them, just in case. turns out i get an email from a good friend of mine saying that he was banned, and that surprised me.
now yes, i can monitor what pages you visit and what blogs you read. it’s no biggie. any decent developer can set up a counter/tracker for their sites. i use statcounter actually. and i don’t obsess over who reads what, i really don’t. when i create blogs, i already expect people to read them. i use statcounter simply to monitor the daily amount of visitors and uniques i get as well as pages linking to my sites and search terms that link to my site. it’s an seo thing.
what i also check for is any suspicious activity going on. any suspicious pages linking to my sites or suspicious google searches. in this case, my friend made a google search that looked suspicious to me and when my blog came up, he clicked on it. now because statcounter actually logs the links that link directly to my page, i was able to see the google search being made. statcounter logs it. it’s completely legal and completely normal in our industry.
now the reasonining for my friend making that google search was completely reasonable and understandable. that person even got a bible study because of the google search and because of my blog, which i think is very cool.
it was just a huge misunderstanding and a crazy mix of coincodences and timings. you have no reason to be embarassed. you worry too much.
that is the story. and this is the end of it.
Related posts:
you should blog about the changes for the next round of assassin.