I noted in my blog fairly recently that my website Analytics shows lots of visits to my site from internet sources in Boardman, Oregon. Well, that's still happening pretty much daily as summer rolls into New Jersey. As I mentioned last time I brought this up, every page visit is from a different address source. Every single one. No two originate from the same computer address.
So that's pretty weird.
I looked up Boardman, Oregon again yesterday, and looked a little closer. The stats indicate a population in Boardman with a per capita income of about $21,765 annually for females and about $30,000 for males. Population is split nearly 50/50 between females and males and the median age is 25 years old, which is young! These folks are overwhelmingly young and I wondered as I saw that, how do they pay the bills?
I was interested in academics- is there an institution of higher education in Boardman, Oregon that skews the age so young? Is some enormous ceramics class checking my website for commerce flaws or product design..? No, there is no college there. Is there an arts community, and people are loving my work till the cows come home? Not so I'd find on Wikipedia. At all.
What I did find on Wikipedia was interesting. "According to a November 2008 article in The Oregonian, a "huge data center linked to Amazon.com [was] under construction" at the 9,000-acre (36 km) Port of Morrow. The data center was to have a dedicated 10-megawatt electrical substation. A website focused on data centers suggested the Boardman site was created in response to the rapid growth of Amazon Web Services; earlier in 2008, Amazon had announced that Amazon S3 was storing 29 billion objects. The project made Boardman the second Oregon city along the Columbia River to host a power-hungry data center for web services: Google has a similar center in The Dalles. By 2012, Apple had announced plans for a server farm south of The Dalles in Prineville, where Facebook already had a similar farm. Rackspace was said to be considering a data center at the Port of Morrow."
No wonder there are so many 20-somethings in Boardman, Oregon. They work for Google's data center. What does that mean to me? Is something from my website- make that everything- because these bots (probably) are going each to one page only- stored in Boardman? What is someone trolling for? I have never seen this sort of thing at all before. And...what the heck? Is there maliciousness in it? Is there a real reason "spiders" are crawling all over the pages of my site? My website is simple. There are no particular holes in it. Unseen pages (stored from previous incarnations or attempts that failed to zing) are disabled and can't be viewed.
So I've disabled everything, and you won't even see this post until a couple of weeks have passed and I've re-enabled the blog.
If you have any ideas, comment on this post. I'm not as savvy about these things as I could be. Sure is odd. (Cue The Outer Limits music...)