Monday, January 22, 2007

Visit Counters

Visit (hit) counters are a dime a dozen. When I started this blog I just found one on Google and added it. But hit counters are not all equal!

I found StatCounter on one of the myeloma blogs that I track, The Beast .... It has some nice features:
  • Separate counts of page loads, unique visitors, and returning vistors

  • Ignore hits from your own household (if you are on DSL or cable)

  • Slick graphs of all of the statistics, per week, per month, etc.

  • Invisible tracking (no counter showing) if you prefer

  • Statistics available for all to view, or just to you if you prefer

It's free, of course.

I especially like the feature that can ignore my own IP address, so that my own reloads don't advance the counter. My visitors are relatively few, I think, and without that feature I really don't know if there are any unless they comment.

That feature does depend on a "static" IP address, so I assume that I may need to go into my StatCounter account and update my IP address after each time the DSL (or cable) modem has to reboot, e.g. after any power failures.

1 comment:

  1. well this interesting info. i use sitemeter which i have been pretty happy with except that it allegedly has the feature where it doesn't count your own visits-except it doesn't work. i learned something new from the end of your post about IP addresses resetting, but i know that doesn't account for all of the times sitemeter counts me. well, thanks for the tip. i probably won't migrate b/c i'm all set up, but i like knowing what's out there.

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