It is oft said, on Usenet at least, that they are merely for vanity, and all the numbers are phony. Both of these are wrong-headed assertions.

I use it to determine how much usage the space provided by my ISP as part of my services is getting, so that I will know if I am likely to max out the allowed bandwidth, and if I should start thinking about moving to a paid site, which will require some budgeting. (It is an approximately $36/yr retail value, the 10MB they allow us, as far as I can determine from comparable paid hosts.)

I also use it to understand what is going on with the site. Originally, all the traffic came from my ffnet profile. Then some began to come from bookmarks from those who had discovered Odd Lots through ffnet. Then little by little, some from other links. Most are from bookmarks, now, but a significant amount are from other links — including, amazingly to me, a number of google hits and other search engines.

What are people looking for? Why are they coming? Do they keep coming back? Since almost no one ever actually says anything via email or post, I'm left somewhat in the dark regarding the metaphysical Whys — but I can get a bit of a picture via a good hit counter. I can begin to understand why there are spikes and occasional traffic jam reports, with people being unable to get into the site, which is important.

—Therein comes the rub. Most free hit-counters are not good. They record every click, even if it's just a page reload, and so are completely unreliable in terms of providing useful information. The ones that offer statistics are few, and problematic.

(For those who wonder why I don't just upgrade to a paid one, then, the answer is simple: I am very poor. I do not get paid much, and my rent has increased drastically over the years while my take-home pay has drastically decreased. Various freelancing efforts over the years have not proven viable. Satis dico.)

(I also cannot simply get a script from one of the coders who provides free CGI programs and place it into Odd Lots, because the ISP, like most, does not allow end-user CGI to run on its servers. I would have to upgrade to a paid host, some of which include such scripts anyway. If anyone wishes to contribute $100 per annum for this purpose, let me know.)

For a long while I used Statcounter, and was fairly happy with them. Somewhat slow to access their stat pages, occasionally down, but overall a good service. Since day one the index page promising a new, improved, service, but no sign of it over the months — but the old one worked fine until it suddenly ceased in January, without explanation. No word on the main page, no word in the forums, no acknowledgment at all until over a week had gone by.

Then, sketchy, defensive, "Real Soon Now" reports. When the site came back, many users had lost their accounts. The hits started accruing for Odd Lots' pages, but no stats were updating. The instructions on the page for refreshing to deal with this problem did not match up to the buttons, and those who tried the nearest equivalent found that this caused their accounts to disappear. No response from the site owners except Hey, we're a free service and I'm a student and we're going to make it all better soon…

(For more detailed comments and responses to this, read the accompanying rant White Elephant In The Agora: Responsibilities, Rights, and Free Services.)

Then the page went up stating that there was a problem and they were upgrading to solve it, and to expect the fixed service in a day or so. Days passed. Eventually a new message again proclaiming "Real Soon Now!" and then more days, and then another explanation of more problems, and now yet another RSN. That's where that stands.

Meanwhile, I started looking elsewhere, not expecting them to get their acts together anytime soon at all.

The criteria for a free hit counter:
 

• Really free — not a 30 day trial period for a pay service.

 
• Reliable: it's worse than useless if the service  is so slow that the page locks, instead of loads, attempting to access a glommy or down server, and the reader is left waiting indefinitely while the page hangs.

 
• Records new visits, not reloads of a page. Best if able to indicate or omit webmaster's own hits to check page uptime.

 
• Where the visitor is coming from. (i.e., link, search engine, bookmark, email message)

 
• What OS/browser used.

 
• What monitor resolution and color # used.

 
• No popups or banners.

 
• Stats must be password protected.

Why these? The first I already explained; the others are for your benefit.

Very simply: is the page going to work well for viewers? If someone comes here and the page won't load, it doesn't help them at all. It happens to me when I use older browsers. So I try to make sure it works on a variety of systems. Will it fit on their monitor properly, or will they have to scroll annoyingly back and forth?

(Interesting factoid: six months ago most viewers were on 800 x 600, with some at 1024 x 768, a few higher and even fewer at 640 x 480. Now it's movng towards 50/50, with small percentages still at the other sizes. People maybe got big monitors for Christmas? Or they're getting cheaper? Either way, they're becoming more common.)

Now, here's another interesting fact: in the approximate one month that my statistics were gone, average hit count seems to have doubled. No wonder there have been some overloads when people couldn't get through. I've only had working statistics for 3 days, but it seems to be a real trend. Where are they coming from and why?

One thing which has been puzzling me for a while is the number of people searching for the JRRT cat poem. Where did they hear about it? Well, one answer is that someone posted a copy of it in a French forum a while back. Without telling or asking me. Since it isn't my work, except for the art and the typography, and I certainly don't have copyright permission to turn it into a piece of calligraphy, and the poster did not claim it, I'm not too bent out of shape about it. BUT — yesterday they posted as well the link to Odd Lots and there were 15 hits in the span of a few minutes.

This, folks, is why I need you to tell me you're linking to me. I don't want Odd Lots to get TORNed (unlikely though that is without a real TORNado.) If twenty people all of the sudden try to download a 500K file — that's 10MB of bandwidth right there. The free service from the ISP doesn't have the kind of fancy monitoring stats I can check to see if we're getting traffic jams or exceeding allowed bandwidth — without a good stat service, I never even would have known what hit us.

I say us, because so many readers are repeat visitors, even all the silent ones who never say what it is they like or find useful, that I consider Odd Lots to be an idiosyncratic little community, like a library. No one is obliged to say anything, but there are plenty of regulars, and I'm glad you're finding helpful things here, whether it's an obscure medieval melody, or a copy of the Lord's Prayer in Elvish, or reassurance that yes, there are other folk out there with similar tastes.

And this is why the stats have to be password protected. I tried two services which gave the info I needed - fine ones, both - but the stats were open to public view. I don't accept that: I am the only one with any business knowing that, and I would rather have no stats at all than unprotected stats. I'm that serious about it. I want it so one else can poke around and try steal IP addresses. (I don't know that it can be done, in such a way as to provide "hackers" with information they could use, but I'd rather not take the chance. And yes, I'm familiar with the "hackers" definition controversy - please don't feel defamed if you're a non-criminal coder.)

(By-the-by, I don't know specifically who you are, unless you tell me: what I see is an ISP address, so I know if someone is visiting from demon.co.uk or chello.fr or an .edu address, but I don't know your name, and have no way of finding it out unless we've corresponded AND you're the only one logging in from a given ISP and you've told me so, or your e-mail address matches, which not all of them do. Also, we now have visitors from as far distant as Mexico, Australia, and Russia, which I think is pretty cool.)

On the assumption that a company with a paid upgrade offering a crippleware version for free is likely to try to do a very good job to provide upgrade incentive (more on this also in White Elephant) — I turned there, although I approve of private coding and have recommended many freeware operations as far superior to known professional outfits.

The two stats I tried and rejected (you may have seen little icons appear and disappear briefly) were CQ Counter and NEDStat. I would very much have liked to support NEDStat — it's a venture founded by a scientist, an astronomer, in the Netherlands, and there was no limit to the number of counters one could have, and there were all kinds of other stats, like ratios by country, available. But both of them were open to the public: the ability to password protect was only available as a paid upgrade.

Nix on that. So I tried Bravenet, which I'd heard of, both through reviews and because several sites I have bookmarked have used them for a while. The bad, first. They have lots of popups and ads — but these only afflict me, when administering my account, not you the visitor. That's okay. The other thing, which is worse, is that I can only have 3 counters. One of the good things about Statcounter was that there was no cap, (undoubtedly part of their problem) so I could (depending solely on how lazy I was) put a counter on every page, if I so desired. And they allowed an invisible counter, so that I was able to track internal links, without mangling the typographical design of the page. (Why? I am a fussy graphic designer. I hate ISBN barcodes on books, for instance.)

I can't have that with Bravenet, but on the other hand I can have all the vital stats I need, in better format (there are bar graphs showing weeks/months/year) AND crucially, they're password protected. It is also fairly quick to log into their site and easy to use (though the initial set-up was a little complicated.) And it not only has the option to record only real hits, but it also marks off my own uptime checks in red, when I review the last 50 visits.

If Statcounter ever does get their act together, I may use them and perhaps recommend them again. But for the time being I am content with Bravenet.

And sure, some of this is just curiosity — it's fun to see how so many (mostly silent) readers care enough about what's happening to the folks in The Script to rush over there within minutes of my sending the Script Update Notifications or posting the link in the Updates section, or that there are people who know who Claude Gervaise is and want to listen to his stuff — but ultimately it is my way of ensuring, in so far as I can, with my extremely limited resources, that there is a workable site for you to visit, which provides at least something you find useful in some way. (Laughter is a useful thing, too.)

Final interesting fact: there are still a few visitors coming new to Odd Lots through ffnet, though the ratio is down to less than the google hits.