Question: How many numbers do you have?
Answer: I have 2000 numbers.

No, this entry is actually about statistics for the year 2000, statistics for this site for 2000.

Yes, I know, there are three kinds of falsehood: white lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I posted 155 entries during 2000 (including this one).

I started the year out with 18 consecutive entries in January before missing a day, a rate I would never even come remotely close to challenging at any other point in the year. I don't see how I managed to post an entry every day for 18 days, but that's how I ended up with 25 entries for the month. February, although the shortest month, yielded 17 entries, with July and August tied for third place at 16 entries each. I was bad in October -- only seven entries -- and not much better in September and November with eight entries each.

I have no idea how many visitors I've had. But wait, you may say, there are multiple counters on this site. True, but... none of them agree. I had a geocities counter on my index page for years and I reset it to zero after midnight on New Year's Eve, so it was recording hits to my site... but geocities ended that counter sometime this year and so I lost that counter.

I started using sitemeter toward the end of January. They show me with 1430 visits and 1974 page views. I added eXTReMe Tracking (hey, that's the way they write it and it's their name...) in February. They show me with 1529 unique visitors (which increases by half again to include reloads). Of course these counters don't agree... and eXTReMe Tracking shows a higher count than sitemeter even though I've used sitemeter for a couple of weeks longer. These numbers aren't accurate for two reasons... First, sometimes the counter site is down and it can't count anything if it's down. Second, sometimes access to their site is slow (both work by having a link from your page to theirs) and if a visitor clicks on stop before this link can work then that visit will not be counted. There is another problem with counters on the index page... they don't count visitors who bypass the main entry point. For example, when I send email to people on my notify list I provide a link directly to the new entry, so anyone following that link would read my entry without hitting the counter on my index page. (And I have seen the stats on an individual entry increment up without a corresponding increment in the counter on my home page.)

In January I signed up for geo plus, which gave me extra counters and for much of the year I maintained counters on each individual entry. I talked about some of the more popular entries back on March 11th and again on July 1st March 11th -- noting that the most popular single entry was the Feb 24th entry March 11th titled "Bedroom Farce" (which was the title of a play we had just seen)...

Another high hit count entry was Jan 10th March 11th -- thoughts about getting into shape which I called "Naked in the Men's Locker Room" -- not only did that one have a high hit count, throughout the year it was the target of search engine access hitting on those key words in the title.

I've dropped geo plus so those invisible counters I had added no longer work. Geocities has added statistics for each entry to their File Manager pages but I don't look at them very often. There's no way of knowing what these various hit counts mean, anyway. I know I have a group of regular readers (some of whom are on my notify list -- you can join too, just send me an email) and -- since I include a direct link to the latest entry in my notify email -- they often go directly to the entry, never passing through the index page (and thus bypassing any counters there).

Looking at sitemeter and eXTReMe Tracking I can see a pattern of return visits from various ISPs, websites, TCP/IP addresses, etc... plus, of course, unique visitors who never return... Ah well, can't please everyone. This isn't a high-traffic site, but I am grateful for the readership that I do have... Thank you for reading this. Happy New Year!

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