I started blogging here at KN@PPSTER in 2004, and I think I installed Sitemeter shortly thereafter (within weeks, I'm guessing). It's about to go away. More on why below, after the sentimental crap.
Between then and July 28, 2008, I racked up -- according to Sitemeter -- 559,104 visits to the site and some unknown number of page views. I know the visit number because when I switched Sitemeter accounts (the first one was linked to an ISP email address that went away, I forgot the password, etc.) I punched that number in as the starting point for the new Sitemeter account and it still mentions that at the bottom of the summary page.
Since then, Sitemeter says KN@PPSTER has climbed to a total of 906,317 visits, with about 1.15 million page views since the changeover. I was kind of looking forward to ticking over the 1 million visit mark, but it's not nearly as important to me lately. A million visits is cool but it's not like an earth-shattering number for web traffic or anything.
So anyway, I've actually made a habit of putting Sitemeter on sites I run. It's not necessarily better than e.g. Google Analytics or the stats that Wordpress has started offering lately, but it is a pretty quick and easy way to see where the last 100 hits came from and that sort of thing.
But lately I've been noticing that some of my sites are loading slowly, that after they've loaded they tend to start "churning" again seemingly at random, with strange "connecting to" statuses regarding sites I've never heard of. In particular, x.vindicosuite.com slash yadayadayada. And sometimes I'll get a blank page with a "couldn't load" message and a vindicosuite.com URL before the page fully loads.
I was starting to worry that I had some new kind of ChromeOS malware or something going, or that it had to do with the ad broker I use to monetize some of my sites, but after a bit on the search engines, I came across this blog post by Jim McBee. And I immediately realized and quickly verified that yep, this stuff seems to be happening to me on my sites (and other people's sites) that run Sitemeter, and to not be happening on sites that don't have visible Sitemeter installations in their sidebars or footers.
Nope. Nopenopenope. I'm done with Sitemeter. If it's not gone by the time you read this, it will be gone shortly thereafter. Maybe I'll replace it with some other visible counter, maybe I won't. I wouldn't mind being able to note and celebrate one million visits. But it's not that important.
Buh-bye, Sitemeter. Sorry it didn't work out.
Showing posts with label Sitemeter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sitemeter. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Traffic Bump, or Traffic Measurement Bump?
Over the last couple of days, KN@PPSTER's traffic has jumped by about 70 visits a day (average as of right now, per Sitemeter, 319 visits and 516 page views; as you can see, 70 visits is a non-trivial percentage of the total).
I'm not sure how much, if any, of that is a real increase in traffic, though. I've made a change in how I measure traffic, and given the now-larger proportion of traffic that lists the referrer as "unknown," I suspect that measurement change is largely responsible for the increase.
The change? I added the Sitemeter button to the site's RSS feeds.
I don't consider that dishonest, or a "trick." The traffic is real; I've just never measured it before. Apart from the Feedburner chiclet that says how many people subscribe via that particular burn, I've never had any idea how many people are reading KN@PPSTER via RSS instead of direct.
It finally occurred to me to fix that measurement gap when I created the KN@PPSTER Android app, which uses RSS as its source. I'm just now getting comfortable with RSS myself, or it would probably have occurred to me to do that before.
I'm not sure how much, if any, of that is a real increase in traffic, though. I've made a change in how I measure traffic, and given the now-larger proportion of traffic that lists the referrer as "unknown," I suspect that measurement change is largely responsible for the increase.
The change? I added the Sitemeter button to the site's RSS feeds.
I don't consider that dishonest, or a "trick." The traffic is real; I've just never measured it before. Apart from the Feedburner chiclet that says how many people subscribe via that particular burn, I've never had any idea how many people are reading KN@PPSTER via RSS instead of direct.
It finally occurred to me to fix that measurement gap when I created the KN@PPSTER Android app, which uses RSS as its source. I'm just now getting comfortable with RSS myself, or it would probably have occurred to me to do that before.
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