What happened between 2015 and 2026

Before this week, the most recent post on this blog was dated September 2015. That is an eleven-year hole in the middle of it, and it seemed better to explain the hole than to quietly backfill it with articles nobody wrote at the time.

The short version

The site was left alone. It was not shut down, not sold, not moved somewhere and forgotten. It simply ran without anyone minding it, and for three of those years not one new counter was created here. Nobody wrote anything, fixed anything, or answered anything.

The counters kept counting the entire time.

What did not happen

If you have a counter here, this is the part that matters:

• Nothing was switched off. A counter embedded in 2013 went on incrementing straight through the quiet years.
• No history was thrown away. The statistics from before the gap are the same statistics you can open today.
• Nothing was sold and nobody was handed your visitors. The quiet period was neglect, not a change of ownership.

The oldest counter on this site that is still counting was created in 2006. It has been running for twenty years now — through three years of nobody watching, and through a complete rewrite of the software beneath it. It noticed none of that, which is close to the highest praise a visitor counter can be given.

What it looked like from the inside

Software that nobody maintains does not sit still. It decays, quietly, and from the outside everything appears fine. When work started again this year, the site had counter designs that had stopped drawing and returned nothing at all, database queries still pointing at tables that had not existed for years, and a log file that had grown past a gigabyte because one compression setting had been wrong for a very long time.

None of that was visible to a visitor. All of it was real, and all of it had been true for years before anybody looked.

What changed this year

The whole thing was rebuilt rather than patched. The parts most likely to matter to you:

• The counting path sets no cookie and reads nothing from the visitor's device.
• Bots are recognised and measured separately, so you can see how much of your traffic was never a person.
• The old designs were kept. The bitmap counters from 2006 still work, and there are new ones alongside them.
• Statistics pages can be made private, and you can export your data.
• There are no adverts on the statistics pages any more.

Each of those deserves its own post, and will get one.

Why write this at all

Because the alternative was to start posting again and let the dates sit there unexplained. A gap that gets acknowledged is just a gap. A gap that gets papered over is a reason to distrust everything published after it.

And one practical note to end on: if you had a counter here before the quiet years and it broke at some point, it is worth looking again. A great deal of what was broken has since been repaired, and your counter and its history are almost certainly still where you left them.