Mysterious traffic

I was just looking at my blog's stats and in the last few days people have taken an interest in my post about a sunrise at dead horse point. The amount of traffic is quite extraordinary. This is just a day:

This is the statistics on the smugmug gallery that the images are hosted from:

That's with only 1/3 of March 2 done by now, so it seems that sunday will be a 4000 image day too. Somebody big must have started linking to it as these images don't draw a lot of traffic normally. Strangely, I cannot figure out what triggered the traffic as google analytics does not show the origin of the traffic. As the graph above shows, my smugmug site (which serves up the images) shows the traffic quite well, but of course thinks it comes from my blog. These are some of my favorite images and it's nice if people enjoy them but I am still curious where the traffic came from.

Cradled. Buy a print.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 24 mm, f/16, 1/6s, ISO 100.

EDIT: 3/2/14. This is probably a consequence of referer spam. Traffic generated by bots hoping to generate links back to them. Evil spammers.

What browser do you use?

A few days ago I started tracking site visits using the fantastic and free google analytics. Checking it out this morning, I noticed something extraordinary in the browser statistics. First, let me show you the stats over the last week (click for bigger)



Internet Explorer is in 4th place here! The top two browsers are color managed (Chrome on Windows is not color managed by default contrary to the mac version). Of course this is just one site with a built-in bias towards more geeky folks so it doesn't mean much for the wider web, but still this is extraordinary and a great sign of progress.

Lastly, I am surprised at the number of mobile visitors. I had 8 iPhones, 3 iPads, and one Android device visit the page. Strangely my Blackberry doesn't show up even though I know I looked at the site with it. This probably has to do with everything going through a proxy.