Two ways to miscount your access log
A week of changes here rested on counts taken from one day of the access log: a million lines, a hundred thousand of them ours. To find out whether any of it worked, the same counts have to…
What stats2.gif actually is
There is a file in this project's image folder called stats2.gif. It is 366 bytes, dated March 2018, and it appears in exactly zero lines of source code. On 23 August 2026 it was served…
Six finished features and the way back to them
On 23 August 2026 this site answered 101,461 requests. In all of them, the owner token — the ?t= that unlocks the settings box on a statistics page — appeared exactly zero times. Not…
Where the about page numbers come from
There are six numbers across the top of the about page now: people online right now, visitors yesterday, counters in use, countries in the last thirty days, designs to choose from, and the…
The number on the badge is not visitors
A recurring question here is why the number printed on the counter image does not match the number in the statistics. Both are correct. They are answers to different questions, and the…
Your counter has been counting robots
Your counter has been counting robots. So has everybody's. Until this month nobody here could tell you how many, because nothing was measuring it — and a crawler that requests a counter…