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 155224 312 155536 45.7% 28808 267
Google 67927 9 67936 20.0% 4683 16
Bing 48014 815 48829 14.3% 7650 60
Meta 38989 8 38997 11.5% 18222 61
Apple 4298 3 4301 1.3% 447 9
DDG 2997 0 2997 0.9% 336 4
Bots 21698 11 21709 6.4% 9794 266
Total 339147 1158 340305 100% 69940 683

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


Recent History

Date Day Hits
2026-09-11 Friday 267
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
2026-09-02 Wednesday 550
2026-09-01 Tuesday 475
2026-08-31 Monday 359
2026-08-30 Sunday 307
2026-08-29 Saturday 268
2026-08-28 Friday 263
2026-08-27 Thursday 334
2026-08-26 Wednesday 466
2026-08-25 Tuesday 737
2026-08-24 Monday 448
2026-08-23 Sunday 340
2026-08-22 Saturday 258
2026-08-21 Friday 313
2026-08-20 Thursday 336
2026-08-19 Wednesday 417
2026-08-18 Tuesday 371
2026-08-17 Monday 397
2026-08-16 Sunday 512
2026-08-15 Saturday 456
2026-08-14 Friday 251
average 28 days 422

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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Here is a screen capture of this site running in a phone-sized Android virtual machine on my laptop. The site adapts perfectly to every screen size and every device, from a dinky smartphone all the way up to the biggest PC, with no loss of usability. Yet the code behind it is bit-for-bit exactly the same on every display. That's pretty incredible.