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 65762 142 65904 38.4% 7405 438
Google 49679 5 49684 29.0% 2088 92
Bing 20982 389 21371 12.5% 2439 99
Meta 26389 4 26393 15.4% 3291 24
Apple 1796 3 1799 1.0% 125 11
DDG 965 0 965 0.6% 0 8
Bots 5455 8 5463 3.2% 4283 1021
Total 171028 551 171579 100% 19631 1693

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


Recent History

Date Day Hits
2026-04-22 Wednesday 438
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
2026-03-27 Friday 325
2026-03-26 Thursday 381
2026-03-25 Wednesday 429
average 28 days 465

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 got side-tracked onto this, and at risk of turning this into a furniture thread, I think it's worth sharing. This is just a box. It was motivated by two things:

  1. I often find I am filing something ( like a pickguard ) across the front edge of the workbench - a very awkward angle. I've ruined the natural spot - the right corner - with the vise - worthwhile.
  2. I need a place to store my growing collection of templates, which is getting pretty heavy.