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 header and footer now run full width
A small change you will see on every page here: the dark band at the top and the footer at the bottom now run the full width of the window. Until today they sat inside the same 1180-pixel…
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…
How to read your referrer list
The referrer list is the part of your statistics that looks the most like insight and misleads the most reliably. It is a list of the places people came from. Reading it correctly takes…
Export your data as CSV or JSON
There is a link on your statistics page marked CSV, and next to it one marked JSON. They hand you your numbers as a file. No account, no request form, no waiting for an email with a…
Animated counters without JavaScript
A fair number of the counter designs here move. The number counts itself up, or the panel draws itself in, or something falls into place and settles. None of them use a single line of…
An invisible counter for your page
Not everybody wants a counter on their page. Plenty of people want the numbers and would rather not have a badge in the corner announcing them — a portfolio, a company site, a page where a…
Adding a Stats4U counter with Google Tag Manager
There is a guide to this on the blog from 2015. Its screenshots show a Tag Manager that no longer looks like that, and one of its seven steps — ticking document.write — is no longer needed…
Your counter on an HTTPS page
Your site is on HTTPS. Your visitors see a padlock. Then you paste in something from another site, and the padlock goes away — or the thing you pasted simply does not appear. That is mixed…
A counter for static sites
Static hosting has quietly become the sensible way to put a small site on the internet. GitHub Pages, Codeberg Pages, Neocities, or a folder of files on any cheap host: no database, no…
What to do with the country map
The map is the page people look at first and use least. It is pleasant to see that somebody in Chile read your post, and then the tab gets closed and nothing follows from it. This article…
The who-is-online list, promised in 2012 and now live
On 25 August 2012, a post on this blog announced that the statistics fields had started refreshing by themselves, and finished with a sentence: "The planned feature, the 'Who is online'…