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 65739 142 65881 38.5% 7403 415
Google 49678 5 49683 29.0% 2088 91
Bing 20979 389 21368 12.5% 2439 96
Meta 26383 4 26387 15.4% 3290 18
Apple 1796 3 1799 1.1% 125 11
DDG 965 0 965 0.6% 0 8
Bots 5035 8 5043 2.9% 4278 601
Total 170575 551 171126 100% 19623 1240

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


Recent History

Date Day Hits
2026-04-22 Wednesday 415
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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Black Polyurethane body. This is during the polishing process, you can see it is not even clean. The front came out like black glass. I smoothed the orange-peel with 1500 grit wet, then 2000 and 3000. Then I switched to the random orbital with a red sponge cutting pad and Turtle Wax rubbing compound that claims to remove 1200 scratches. Shouldn't be any 1200 scratches, since I started with 1500. That came out shiny, but with swirl marks in the light. Then I switched to another red cutting pad with Meguiar's Ultimate Compound, and finally a softer yellow pad with the same Meguiar's. At that point, it was pretty much a factory finish. I didn't work as hard on the back, it is nice, but will soon enough encounter a zipper or belt buckle, so the effort would be wasted.