Readers and writers blog

As a newcomer to blogging, I’m learning about web statistics — specifically, those free programs that count your site’s visitors. So what do these so-called stat counters give you?

The word ‘hit’ is involved, but only because that’s what the answer rhymes with.

If that sounds crude, so are the statistics we’re getting here at Readersandwritersblog.com. I mean, what else are we to conclude from the two stat counters we’re now using? Either we’re conversing with several hundred readers a day — on one day last month, nearly 700 readers requesting nearly 2,400 page loads — or we’re listening to crickets out there.

The trouble started when we installed that second stat counter. We were happily cruising along with the hundreds of daily readers shown on our original stat counter, Analog 6.0, when we finally gave in to a nagging question:

Does the counter count us? That is, when we go into our site administrator to post entries, make corrections, let in comments (and weed out spam), does Analog 6.0 count us as visitors?

We still don’t know the answer to that question, despite reading and rereading about inclusions and exclusions in Frequently Asked Questions, Section B: Basic Configuration, No. 7 (How do I ignore accesses from my site?) of Analog 6.0’s introductory Readme page. Whew.

I suspect Analog 6.0 is counting our visits, but if you understand how we’re supposed to prevent that (see the instructions here), then stop reading this blog and go get yourself a job as a senior computer programmer.

(I should say right here that I have no complaint about Analog 6.0. It’s a great program, always accessible, and it’s free. My complaint is that I don’t understand it, but that’s a reflection on me, not it.)

So we installed StatCounter. It’s also free, but what’s more to the point is that it’s blessedly simple to exclude your own visits to your site. A few clicks and you have your IP address blocked from the count. How do you find your IP address? Well, you visit the website WhatIsMyIP.com, and there’s your address.

Problem solved, right?

Wrong. Because according to StatCounter, our visitors are a few dozen a day, not Analog 6.0’s few hundred. And it’s not clear why.

In a post similar to this one but predating it by more than two years, writer Daniel J. Solove in his Nov. 17, 2005, entry on the law blog Concurring Opinions asked his readers, “Is anybody out there?” He then went on to discuss some of the factors that can skew the numbers on stat counters — search hits, spammers and web robots or bots, all of which can add numbers that aren’t visits by readers.

The one that chilled us was the one that takes away numbers, numbers that may represent the most devoted readers — those who use RSS network feeds that notify their computer when something new is posted on a website they’re following. According to Solove, an experienced blogger, readers with RSS feeds are not counted as visitors unless, after reading the new content on a site, they also click through to its comments section. That drastically reduces the count for RSS readers — that is, those readers who care enough about a site to subscribe to it through RSS — and virtually eliminates the RSS reader count for new sites without comments.

We were so enlightened by Solove’s piece that we stole the photo he used to accompany it — a couple sitting in an otherwise-empty auditorium — and posted it above.

We still have no idea what’s going on out there. Frankly, we don’t visit our own site that often. I write the blog entries on Notepad and paste them into the site with little editing there. The comments directory is checked a couple of times a day. We keep a parallel blogroll off the site so I can check our blogger friends every day without opening our site. All in all, we visit our own site, even on a busy day, maybe a dozen times.

So why are we getting different stats from the two counters — different by factors of 10 to 20 times? We don’t know. But we really can’t complain. Even in the worst-case scenario, our visitors are in the dozens. In our house, that’s a crowd.

And it means that you, dear reader, are one of that very select group of people.

– Sid Leavitt