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 67128 149 67277 38.5% 7483 187
Google 50125 5 50130 28.7% 2099 55
Bing 21270 398 21668 12.4% 2493 61
Meta 26527 4 26531 15.2% 3436 65
Apple 1835 3 1838 1.1% 128 10
DDG 991 0 991 0.6% 0 2
Bots 6154 8 6162 3.5% 4351 156
Total 174030 567 174597 100% 19990 536

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


Recent History

Date Day Hits
2026-04-25 Saturday 187
2026-04-24 Friday 609
2026-04-23 Thursday 511
2026-04-22 Wednesday 497
2026-04-21 Tuesday 396
2026-04-20 Monday 1047
2026-04-19 Sunday 332
2026-04-18 Saturday 464
2026-04-17 Friday 345
2026-04-16 Thursday 477
2026-04-15 Wednesday 444
2026-04-14 Tuesday 352
2026-04-13 Monday 472
2026-04-12 Sunday 396
2026-04-11 Saturday 449
2026-04-10 Friday 546
2026-04-09 Thursday 403
2026-04-08 Wednesday 317
2026-04-07 Tuesday 638
2026-04-06 Monday 913
2026-04-05 Sunday 411
2026-04-04 Saturday 451
2026-04-03 Friday 480
2026-04-02 Thursday 547
2026-04-01 Wednesday 380
2026-03-31 Tuesday 526
2026-03-30 Monday 345
2026-03-29 Sunday 409
2026-03-28 Saturday 359
average 28 days 482

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.

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This bass is a 21" scale, with a piezo saddle mounted in an adjustable bridge. The soundhole is just for looks. The strings are metal-wound Kalas. The fretboard is cut out of the ugliest piece of wood I ever received. For such a small neck, I managed to cut around most of the ugly, and the result isn't half bad.