One million plus, baby!
Website 09/27/2004 |
Yowza!
I haven’t been checking often enough to know exactly when this happened, but at some point in the past few days (sometime on Friday, I think), my hit counter passed one million.
Over one million hits to this little weblog.
Now, that’s hits, not visits, for those of you more picky about the fine print than I. Even so, that’s still a really big number.
Pretty damn cool, I’d say.
[See also: C-List Blogging | Five million in ten days | Not again | Been a busy weekend | Bring out the gimp! ]
12 Responses to “One million plus, baby!”
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Bryan
Michael Hanscom
Prairie
Ryan Waddell
September 27th, 2004 at 5:49 pm
Just curious. How long have you been blogging?
September 27th, 2004 at 6:03 pm
This is kind of a convoluted answer, actually.
I’ve been on TypePad since July of ‘03, when I was accepted into their second-tier beta testing period — this time period is all that my hit counter is tracking.
Before that I was on MovableType, and before that an old system called NewsPro, with preserved archives going back to Nov. 25th, 2000.
But before that, while I don’t have the archives to “prove” it anymore, I was blogging probably since 1999 or so via hand-updated pages, though I didn’t know it was ‘blogging’ back then. I could even make an argument for a starting date of at least 1998 (if not earlier), as the archival version of my website for Gig’s Music Theater (a club I DJ’d at in Anchorage) has a very blog-like structure for the Rumor Control/News section on its Schedule page.
So…roughly somewhere between four and six years, give or take.
September 27th, 2004 at 7:07 pm
Yeah, but we all know that hits are basically meaningless. How many page views? Visitors? Unique visitors? Bandwidth?
September 27th, 2004 at 7:16 pm
Unfortunately, TypePad’s statistics aren’t that detailed (part of why I put the note in specifying that it’s counting hits, and not visits).
Bandwidth, though — that’s one I can get a rough estimate of…and it’s one reason why I’m looking at moving off of TypePad and back onto my own server and MovableType soon.
And that’s with fairly decently optimized pages (hand coded with a minimum of needless cruft, css-based layout, etc.)! Eeep…definitely time to move onto my own hardware, I think.
September 27th, 2004 at 9:04 pm
Congrats - you had 14 jpegs today plus a bunch of “”(left bracket)div…(right bracket)”” (ah ha, outwitted your filter) and href lookups so you probably have about 20 or so minimum hits on average every time you update. Safari said it was loading “xx of 22” items on the current page - so you’re probably closer to 45,000 unique visits at this point - still a considerable number. Like I said - Congrats!!
September 28th, 2004 at 4:42 am
Congrats.
September 28th, 2004 at 6:36 am
W-O-W. 9GB? Really? If the next few days are big for me I might break the 1GB mark on my site for this month! A quick check of my stats shows that I’ve recently passed the 1/2-million hits mark.
But I’m wondering a bit now. How do you get the 9GB? I realize it’s very fuzzy math, but… 11532 hits x 4 weeks = (roughly) 46,128 hits this month. 9,285,940 bytes / 46,128 hits = 201 bytes per hit. And at 22 hits per page, that’s 4400 bytes (4.4 MB) per page… which obviously can’t be anywhere near right. So how does all your bandwidth get sucked up?
September 28th, 2004 at 6:38 am
Hrmmmm, that seems REALLY low… Either that, or my log stats are really miscalculating hits… Because I’ve hit over a million hits THIS YEAR already (with about 62000 unique visitors), and I would say that your site (what with the Slashdotting, and all that) is a fair amount more popular than mine (and I’m whopping out only about 1 gig in traffic a month, too).
September 28th, 2004 at 7:00 am
I mis-typed. The number I came up with would be 4400 bytes—as I typed—which equals 4.4 kilobytes, not 4.4 megabytes.
September 28th, 2004 at 7:10 am
This all had me confused for a few moments too, until I realized that I’d goofed up a bit earlier on. That hit counter isn’t counting “hits”, it’s counting page views.
Rather than being pulled directly from Apache logs, the hit counter is incremented when each page is loaded (there’s a small <MTStatsScript> tag at the end of each TypePad template, and I’d be willing to bet that each time a page is loaded and that script is called, the hit count increases by one). So I’m pretty sure now that what’s being counted is page loads, not individual hits.
So, while the numbers are still a little inflated per visitor (if I click through five pages on my site, I increase the count by five page views, rather than one visit), it’s at least not increasing 22 times (as Chas figured above) for every load of the main index page.
And on top of that, that count is actually a little lower than it should be — when I was getting Slashdotted, one of the things Mena had me do was remove the <MTStatsScript> tag from the pages that were being hit the hardest so that the system didn’t have to worry about running that script X times per second as the servers got hammered. If I remember correctly, I had the counter entirely disabled for about a week or two during the worst of the flood, so there’s probably a good few thousand page loads that didn’t get counted.
(And incidentally, having one of the head honchos of your hosting provider suddenly pop up on your IM list to chat about your bandwidth usage is an odd combination of both cool and disturbing!)
Also, that <MTStatsScript> tag isn’t in any of my RSS feeds, so while they’re getting added to the bandwidth when they’re pulled, they’re not adding to the visit counter, and I don’t have any statistics as to how much traffic they’re adding to my site. You’re all polling for RSS feeds no more than once an hour, right?
So, as long as I’m figuring all this correctly, that one million plus is page views, and is actually slightly low. I’ll see if I can get some confirmation on that from the TypePad folks, but if I’m figuring right…”Yowza” is definitely right!
September 28th, 2004 at 7:18 am
THERE we go… Page views makes a bit more sense. I’m only around 300,000 total page views since July 2003, so now my worldview makes much more sense.
September 29th, 2004 at 6:14 am
Page views does make a lot more sense, and I go back to the “wow” comment again. But a few more questions have popped into my head: what was the pre-slashdotting traffic like vs. the post-slashdotting? Did that cause a permanent increase in readership, or just a surge? As well, month-to-month, how much growth do you see?