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 134624 258 134882 47.0% 19866 661
Google 62576 9 62585 21.8% 3694 73
Bing 37414 639 38053 13.3% 4845 279
Meta 29831 7 29838 10.4% 11730 9
Apple 3267 3 3270 1.1% 370 8
DDG 2067 0 2067 0.7% 161 11
Bots 16300 8 16308 5.7% 7386 597
Total 286079 924 287003 100% 48052 1638

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


Recent History

Date Day Hits
2026-07-22 Wednesday 661
2026-07-21 Tuesday 1075
2026-07-20 Monday 562
2026-07-19 Sunday 552
2026-07-18 Saturday 1307
2026-07-17 Friday 546
2026-07-16 Thursday 972
2026-07-15 Wednesday 958
2026-07-14 Tuesday 655
2026-07-13 Monday 896
2026-07-12 Sunday 1565
2026-07-11 Saturday 1016
2026-07-10 Friday 445
2026-07-09 Thursday 563
2026-07-08 Wednesday 1208
2026-07-07 Tuesday 483
2026-07-06 Monday 1301
2026-07-05 Sunday 947
2026-07-04 Saturday 1143
2026-07-03 Friday 311
2026-07-02 Thursday 283
2026-07-01 Wednesday 795
2026-06-30 Tuesday 611
2026-06-29 Monday 690
2026-06-28 Sunday 1261
2026-06-27 Saturday 1768
2026-06-26 Friday 913
2026-06-25 Thursday 893
2026-06-24 Wednesday 512
average 28 days 865

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 .


Mar 9, 2016

image

I have several of these necks and bodies roughed-out, and they feel much better than my first one, much better balanced. I knew that banjo neck would never play well, which is why I used a standard Fender profile on my first one. Banjos are made for picking. Intonation is one of those things where close is good enough, and with only 16 frets, I doubt it will ever be a problem. You'll be forever wiping smudges off that copper pickguard. I would shine it up and clear-coat it. Make a brass headstock tag and print out a waterslide decal to put on it. I posted the graphic above.