Blog Stats

How does it work?

Every time a visitor views a page, the browser requests a little smiley-face image from our stats system. That action is logged and the logs are summarized every few minutes to update the graphs, charts and lists you see.

The following are not counted:

• Visits from registered users of that blog when they are logged in
• Documents that do not display in the chosen theme (feeds, uploaded files)
• Browsers that do not execute javascript or load images
• GoogleBot and other search engine spiders

What is a Referrer?

Most web browsers provide the address of the previous page every time they ask a web server for a new page. This is called the Referrer because it is assumed that the previous page included a link referring to the current page. When you type an address into the browser or click one of your bookmarks, the Referrer is blank because you didn’t come from a referring web page.

Where do Search Terms come from?

Referrers! Usually a search engine includes the search terms in the URL of the results page. For example, in www.google.com/search?q=cat+blog the search terms are cat and blog. Whenever the stats program recognizes a Referrer like this one, it extracts the search terms and then discards the referrer.

We maintain a long list of search term extraction patterns but sometimes a new search engine escapes our attention. If you see search engine URLs in your Referrers list, please send in feedback so we can update our system.

Why don’t Post Views add up to Total Views?

Post Views accounts for visits to each single article. There are many parts of a blog that cannot be counted as Post Views: the front page, archives, search results, etc. Thus you may have more Total Views than Post Views, but not the other way around.

Why does the new day begin hours before or after midnight?

All blog stats are aligned with UTC, which is similar to GMT except that it does not get changed twice a year for daylight savings. This method allows us to keep the stats database lean and fast. That translates into free stats for everyone.