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 110886 237 111123 44.7% 16276 642
Google 59163 9 59172 23.8% 3198 115
Bing 31048 561 31609 12.7% 3971 93
Meta 29084 7 29091 11.7% 8594 27
Apple 2786 3 2789 1.1% 305 11
DDG 1732 0 1732 0.7% 113 15
Bots 12996 8 13004 5.2% 6416 90
Total 247695 825 248520 100% 38873 993

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


Recent History

Date Day Hits
2026-06-25 Thursday 642
2026-06-24 Wednesday 512
2026-06-23 Tuesday 695
2026-06-22 Monday 402
2026-06-21 Sunday 469
2026-06-20 Saturday 702
2026-06-19 Friday 446
2026-06-18 Thursday 737
2026-06-17 Wednesday 362
2026-06-16 Tuesday 324
2026-06-15 Monday 369
2026-06-14 Sunday 318
2026-06-13 Saturday 375
2026-06-12 Friday 282
2026-06-11 Thursday 337
2026-06-10 Wednesday 245
2026-06-09 Tuesday 560
2026-06-08 Monday 616
2026-06-07 Sunday 603
2026-06-06 Saturday 578
2026-06-05 Friday 1512
2026-06-04 Thursday 494
2026-06-03 Wednesday 491
2026-06-02 Tuesday 631
2026-06-01 Monday 483
2026-05-31 Sunday 546
2026-05-30 Saturday 1538
2026-05-29 Friday 1066
2026-05-28 Thursday 899
average 28 days 592

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 .


This is a stand you see in a lot of the photos. I cobbled it together from scrap and a dollar's-worth of self-adhesive felt. The neck support is just a padded bolt that adjusts up and down on either side. The stand fits everything from the most bloated Jazz bass body to my smallest Audiovox. It is not a secure stand by any means, just a temporary support for photography. The angle avoids most reflections.