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 152488 309 152797 45.8% 27599 141
Google 67457 9 67466 20.2% 4615 14
Bing 46885 799 47684 14.3% 7452 128
Meta 37926 8 37934 11.4% 17605 58
Apple 4165 3 4168 1.2% 435 17
DDG 2843 0 2843 0.9% 308 3
Bots 20728 11 20739 6.2% 9625 213
Total 332492 1139 333631 100% 67639 574

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


Recent History

Date Day Hits
2026-09-06 Sunday 141
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
2026-08-13 Thursday 342
2026-08-12 Wednesday 376
2026-08-11 Tuesday 293
2026-08-10 Monday 400
2026-08-09 Sunday 341
average 28 days 392

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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image

I finally got the WordPress image mess sorted out. Additionally, I resized all the images to fit in a 1000x1000 box. ( I kept backups of the originals. ) 1000x1000 is larger than the largest an image will display on this layout, about 800x800, so I have some upgrade room in the future if I want it. At the same time, it shrinks the files by 60-70%. Making even smaller images would be only slightly better, and I want to keep everything simple.