Today, a strange day without much news so far

It does not happen very often and it is not even a holiday season etc.

Could it be that Google statistics for the Blogger website regarding my blog are screwed up today?

Update of 8/13/2026: This issue still continues. According to Google Search "If your analytics show a massive surge of web traffic routed through the Seychelles, it is not real human readership. It is a widespread form of fake automated "ghost traffic" or bot activity designed to manipulate website data and pad metrics."
Apparently, Google, the owner of Blogger.com is not capable or willing to prevent this from happening!

Views by country over the last 30 days

View over the last three months

Today [8/5/2026], I discovered that the Seychelles islands had almost 13,000 views by 12:30 on 8/5/2025 since 17:00, 8/4/2026. This is highly unusual for a 24 hour window!

Maybe some tourists arrived on the islands and while they spend time on the famous white sand beaches, they discovered my blog! 😊

"The population of Seychelles in 2026 is estimated to be approximately 134,959 at mid-year" (Google Search)

"Seychelles is famous for pristine white-sand beaches, giant Aldabra tortoises, and the massive Coco de Mer nut. Located in the Indian Ocean, this tropical island nation consists of 115 islands known for luxury tourism and protected nature reserves." (Google Search)

It must be silly season

Hard to find interesting topics to blog about these days!

Hopefully, the silly season will end this weekend!

Back from China after a four months long stay

I hope to resume my usual blog posts as soon as possible!

It was very exciting to live in central China for four months and I am sure I will report here about may stay very soon.

Disclaimer

Since end of February, I  am blogging from behind the Great Firewall of China.

My Internet service in China is very spotty. Thus, I am not able to blog as usual.

Today, I was unable to connect to a VPN server from behind the Great Firewall of China

Only by around 8 PM (China Standard Time), I was able to connect to the Internet again via VPN.

I hope to resume blogging as usual by tomorrow.

Announcement

I will be visiting Hong Kong on Fri. 5/22 and Sat. 5/23. 

I expect to resume blogging on Sunday 5/24.

Announcement

I will be visiting Beijing on Fri. 5/15 and Sat. 5/16. 

I expect to resume blogging on Sunday 5/17.

I will be travelling, no blog posts until Monday 4/6

Beginning today 4/1 (no April fool's joke)! 😊

Why Blogger.com sucks!

I have been blogging for many years on Blogger.com. Sure it free to use, but I would not mind to pay for it to have better service and features. In the past, I have submitted some suggestions for improvement, but they were ignored. 

Reasons:

1. You can not configure your default font! It means for every blog post I have to manually change from the default font, I don't like to Arial. Very annoying! This should be a configuration setting for your blog!
2. You can not configure the default behavior of hyperlinks (I prefer to open it in a separate window/tab of the browser)! So every time I insert a hyperlink, I have to manually change the default behavior from opening the link in the same browser tab to open it in a new tab. Very annoying! This should be a configuration setting for your blog!
3. There is no label manager available. Manually managing the labels is tedious, error prone etc. Very annoying!
4. Several months ago or so Blogger.com completely changed how you can backup your blog. There is no option e.g. to choose only text! The new feature is awful it generates several two gigabyte large ZIP files. Previously it was much easier and straightforward! 

Blogger annoyances

 I have been blogging on Blogger for many years!

However, very recently Blogger changed the method to backup your entire blog completely. It used to be very simple and fast. Now, it takes hours, if not days and it creates huge zip files. Like the old method, the new one does not allow do specify that you want only the text to be backed up since I do not care so much about the media embedded with the blog posts.

P.S. I have a long time ago complaint that Blogger lacks basic configuration options like default font for every post, links to open automatically in a new window etc. This means a lot of extra, unnecessary clicks for me every day!

Of course, one could also say what am I complaining about since I am not paying anything for using Blogger. 😊