Doing Things Wrong

Is This Worth It?

I put the finishing touches on the web stats programming, and after a few days I can confirm that most of the traffic on the internet is bots. That is, machines querying other machines. Only about 20-25% of the traffic is human beings. So if you're one of those, consider yourself special.

* Pages Search Total Misses * Today
Humans 43687 103 43790 37.1% 4847 360
Google 38450 2 38452 32.5% 1757 301
Bing 13888 252 14140 12.0% 1648 67
Meta 17634 2 17636 14.9% 1777 18
Apple 1308 3 1311 1.1% 86 16
DDG 528 0 528 0.4% 0 12
Bots 2298 7 2305 2.0% 2943 622
Total 117793 369 118162 100% 13058 1396

* includes pages, posts and archives since 2025-12-05


Recent History

Date Day Hits
2026-03-05 Thursday 360
2026-03-04 Wednesday 319
2026-03-03 Tuesday 543
2026-03-02 Monday 436
2026-03-01 Sunday 341
2026-02-28 Saturday 379
2026-02-27 Friday 337
2026-02-26 Thursday 398
2026-02-25 Wednesday 463
2026-02-24 Tuesday 486
2026-02-23 Monday 434
2026-02-22 Sunday 487
2026-02-21 Saturday 326
2026-02-20 Friday 320
2026-02-19 Thursday 461
2026-02-18 Wednesday 244
2026-02-17 Tuesday 388
2026-02-16 Monday 338
2026-02-15 Sunday 235
2026-02-14 Saturday 292
2026-02-13 Friday 419
2026-02-12 Thursday 322
2026-02-11 Wednesday 573
2026-02-10 Tuesday 513
2026-02-09 Monday 242
2026-02-08 Sunday 628
2026-02-07 Saturday 1062
2026-02-06 Friday 730
2026-02-05 Thursday 424
average 28 days 433

Originally I used the built-in WordPress functions to update the counters. Those are big general-purpose routines that are slow and ponderous, and I noticed that there was some 'slippage' - numbers that should agree would slowly fall out of sync. So for the counter operations, I wrote my own code, which does only one thing, and does it very fast and reliably.

WordPress also provides hints for some browsers to 'pre-fetch' pages. In other words, the browser downloads a whole second page in the background on the off chance that you might look at it. Apart from doubling the load on the server and network, this also makes it impossible to keep accurate counts, so I turned that 'feature' off. Who thinks of these things?


Comments on Is This Worth It?

Keith:

September 14, 2020 at 5:20 PM

Keep it up - your stuff is special to us non-bots

Comments on Is This Worth It? closed.

Questions or Inquiries?

Just want to say Hello? Sign the .


image

The control cavity templates were reverse-engineered from a Gibson-style guitar. They are cut from 1/4" polycarbonate, while the matching cover template is MDF. Again, inspired by StewMac's design. StewMac does not include the cover template, they expect you to buy their cover.