Compressing the same file every time
Apache compresses responses on the fly. For a page that is different every time, that is the only option. For a stylesheet that changes once a month, it means the server does the same work…
Why the exclusion list is not hashed
Building a site means opening it twenty times a day. On a counter with forty visitors a month, half the statistics are the author. So there is a setting: do not count visits from my own…
A page address longer than its column
On 9 August 2026, twenty counter images failed to render. Not drew wrong, not drew slowly — the visitor got nothing at all where a counter should have been. The cause was a page address…
What came off the about page, and why
The old about page had a feature list on it. Rebuilding that page meant reading the list line by line against the software, and four entries no longer matched it. One of them had 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 header and footer now run full width
A small change visible 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 column…
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 the referrer list
The referrer list is the part of the 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…
Exporting the data as CSV or JSON
There is a link on the statistics page marked CSV, and next to it one marked JSON. Both hand the numbers over as a file. No account, no request form, no waiting for an email with a download…
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 visitor counter for any website
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…