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 152479 309 152788 45.8% 27596 132
Google 67457 9 67466 20.2% 4615 14
Bing 46874 799 47673 14.3% 7452 117
Meta 37921 8 37929 11.4% 17598 53
Apple 4163 3 4166 1.2% 435 15
DDG 2842 0 2842 0.9% 308 2
Bots 20617 11 20628 6.2% 9614 102
Total 332353 1139 333492 100% 67618 435

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


Recent History

Date Day Hits
2026-09-06 Sunday 132
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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I started putting together the Kubicki guitar. So far, just simple mechanical stuff: tuners, bridge, pickups, etc. In this picture, you can see how the wires pass through the battery compartment and everything collects under the bridge pickup and then goes into the control cavity. Soldering tomorrow.