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 164608 351 164959 45.2% 34288 245
Google 69911 13 69924 19.2% 5143 66
Bing 52441 873 53314 14.6% 8135 163
Meta 43545 14 43559 11.9% 20780 249
Apple 4860 3 4863 1.3% 488 19
DDG 3415 0 3415 0.9% 396 7
Bots 24814 12 24826 6.8% 10596 267
Total 363594 1266 364860 100% 79826 1016

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


Recent History

Date Day Hits
2026-10-01 Thursday 245
2026-09-30 Wednesday 393
2026-09-29 Tuesday 410
2026-09-28 Monday 498
2026-09-27 Sunday 406
2026-09-26 Saturday 564
2026-09-25 Friday 345
2026-09-24 Thursday 1098
2026-09-23 Wednesday 412
2026-09-22 Tuesday 602
2026-09-21 Monday 291
2026-09-20 Sunday 378
2026-09-19 Saturday 293
2026-09-18 Friday 413
2026-09-17 Thursday 421
2026-09-16 Wednesday 425
2026-09-15 Tuesday 256
2026-09-14 Monday 418
2026-09-13 Sunday 601
2026-09-12 Saturday 525
2026-09-11 Friday 657
2026-09-10 Thursday 790
2026-09-09 Wednesday 557
2026-09-08 Tuesday 387
2026-09-07 Monday 423
2026-09-06 Sunday 453
2026-09-05 Saturday 316
2026-09-04 Friday 346
2026-09-03 Thursday 710
average 28 days 478

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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The key is the shallow angle between the saddle and the string. A proper guitar bridge has a sharp break between the saddle and the string. This shallow angle causes the classic sitar buzz. This is a very easy part to make from any decently hard wood. A scrap of fretboard blank is ideal. A little experimenting, and you will get it. Then you can convert any guitar into a "sitar".