On my readership

Fighting the Internet censorship is not that easy in Iran. Instead of using a sophisticated keyword-based technology, similar to one that China uses, they are heavily dependant on human beings in defining what is appropriate and what is not.

So the fight is more like a a psychological war than a merely technical one, especially for me.

For the past two years, since my blogs have been blocked in Iran, I've been trying to facilitate my readers visit through some alternative domain and sub-domain names. So people could have used i.h0der.com or heyroon.h0der.net or editormyself.info instead of the usual hoder.com. But now they're all filtered and I've got really tired in this cat and mouse game.

But now I want to start another round of this on-going cat and mouse game.

The trick is if the authorities didn't know how many visitors come to my Persian blog, they wouldn't be able to understand how effective their filters have been. Neither would they realise how my new efforts have been effective in increasing the number of visitors to the blog.

That's why I have removed the link to a publicly available web statistics web application which could easily provide the authorities this kind of information. Instead, I'm now using the amazing Google Analytics application which produces amazing detailed reports on various aspects of your website's audience.

Meanwhile, I'm using another great service by Google (Google Groups) in order to send my blog posts to my readers everyday.

The number on my mailing-list is public ally available on its main web page and the number of my visitors to the website itself (excluding those who use proxies to access it) will be available to you at your request. But I still manage to reach to nearly 20,000 people inside or outside Iran every day. Add to this another 500 page views the English blog gets everyday.

Hopefully, it'll jump up a few thousands up after I take the new measures by the end of the summer.