Or if you don't keep a journal yourself, are you aware that there are utilities out there that track your IP address, your browser, your operating system, your screen resolution, and where you came from? Do you know I can (or could, until today) see the path on your hard drive where you had your bookmarks saved? So if you had Bad Hair Days bookmarked in a directory called "fuckablegirls" or "stupid," I know about it.

I hate 'em. They're gone.

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

Answers

I usually remember to check my stats each morning (mine are generated on my host server - thus no foul trackers to screw up browsers) but I skip all the numbers because who cares? I want the referrer URLs. It's there I find the gold - new journals, new sites of all shapes and sizes. I even use other people's stats to find new URLs.

I am a web junkie. I'm not proud.

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

Oh come on now, you look at the numbers just like we all do!

I don't care if I have 190 hits and they are all from "bobvilla.com" ... the point is, I got 190 hits and that, my friends, is what counts.

Come on, don't you know that Kymm just has 300 cousins across the country who go to her site each day sothat she can have big numbers? It's true. I heard this rumor from its source.

I read other people's web logs for new journal urls, also.

That song "Too much time on my hands" comes to mind...

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

absolute junkie. not that anyone ever comes to my weak ass site.

[ha ha - fuckable girls. that's where you'd be in mine.]

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

I just got rid of my tracker. In all truth, it was making me to depressed.

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

I'm with Gabby. It's the referrer info that's neato. I also get my stats from my host, so I don't have to bother with little add-ins.

I check it every couple of days or so, unless I'm waiting for a specific individual to read something, in which case I occassionally check more often.

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

Okay, I must confess, I just found out that my ISP has vastly improved its web logs. I haven't used them in ages because they were just raw data with no referrers included. But now that they've got referrer logs and some semblance of organization, I'll probably check them now and again.

But Sitemeter or Siteflow or whatever it's called is still evil, okay? And you people who have five or six different free trackers, just stop that right now. Shame on you.

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

I know I'm the only person who reads my online journal anyway, so there's no logging myself. :-)

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

I know there are web logs and tools available.

I looked at mine a couple of times but didn't care enough to do it regularly.

Similarly I don't care if anyone is tracking where I came from, etc. I guess it would creep me out if someone sent me email saying "Hi. I see you visted my site. What did you think of it?" or something but so far that hasn't happened. That's kind of amusing, actually, that someone could see how I have my bookmarks sorted. Maybe I =should= start putting certain ones (not yours, Beth!) into folders marked "Certain Train Wreck Quality" or "Just reading it for the sex factor". But then I'd get that email, I guess.

I'm not aware of web logs making pages load slower, apart from graphics generally making pages load slower.

I'm pretty apathetic today, aren't I?

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

I repent! I repent!
I too, check my stats *all* the time! But I feel I have a really good excuse.. I have a sitemeter on my business page, because i really need to know what those potential customers are up to? Right?
I'd be interested to know exactly how *I'm* listed in someone's bookmarks... unless its under "Really Sucky One-Woman Businesses That Like to Seem Bigger"
Or maybe not.

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

oooh, hate 'em. At least those freebie ones because they seem to just kill the download time for any page they are on.

Yeah, yeah, nice to see who is visiting you and where you are linked.

But does it really matter? Really? I didn't recall that this was a popularity contest. Well, it doesn't matter for me, anyway, I'd write if nobody bothered to read it (not far from the truth! doh!)

Unless there was a way to block certain people from seeing your site (family, stalkers, ex boyfriends) then I could see them being helpful for a personal web site. Use them daily for the corporate one - the info really comes in handy. But on my dinky little geocities page which takes an hour to load as it is I see no need to add another outside connection to slow it down further.

- t

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

Oh boy, am I addicted!

I love my counter/tracker. I check it more than I check my e-mail. It's such a nice little rush to know that somoene from Japan has stopped by to read whatever drivel I happen to post.

I feel like I *know* the people who stop by on a daily basis. Hey, look! There's tide71@microsoft.com! A little later than usual, I see. When there's a new IP address, I feel like I've just gotten fan mail.

I won't repent! You can't make me! I could stop any time I wanted to!

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

I check my nedstat every day even though I know that the URL tracking part is broken. I check it to see if it got fixed. I'm sure there's someone I'm supposed to write to get it fixed, but I get busy and forget. I get some sort of log every day from the place that houses Squishy, but it doesn't tell me everything I want to know. Plus some people come in from my splash page and some from my inside page. I had put them there originally to track who read Squishy to get some sort of demographic for when I started pimping myself to advertising, but since that hasn't happened yet right now it's just a way to find out how many hits a day. That's about all I check now. How many a day, and which entries are getting a lot of traffic. It means something, to me, I guess. Something like, "Well, I didn't get a lot of e-mail, or the forum was light, but people were still there."

I can also find out which pages are just not getting any traffic, and then I know that I don't have to keep updating them (like the City Hunter section, or the books section that no one bothers to read). Then I can focus on the content that people like.

I use it to train myself to update web content. But, yeah, I just like knowing how many people came to my site from Glassdog's Word of Mouth.

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

Huh. Just this week I got an email from a reader telling me that it was taking too long to download my page because of my cute little cat counter (which told me nothing more than how many hits that page got a day...and only from those who bothered to load images). I had noticed it too - and was getting sick of timing when to hit the "stop" button so only my text would load, that I took it off my page. I feel free! Free, I tell you!

Of course, then I get an email complaining that the bottom of the page looks bare w/out the cat counter. He's a good reader who gives feedback, though, so I'm not hurt that he doesn't approve of my decision.

I'm not enough of a web geek (yet) to have a counter that tells me where my hits are coming from....how tempting *that* is. I've known that's possible for a while now, but I've let my apathy take over on that one. I suppose I should email my friend at my ISP and find out if there are any server-side trackers...

What I'm a junkie for is seeing my webpage listed under "other journals" on those pages I read regularly. I especially get a kick out of seeing it on high-traffic pages (like this one), as I know it will improve my readership eventually. I try not to care whether the owners of these popular sites read mine or not, but with a tracker it would be too tempting not to peek at it and wonder...

Ah, popularity!

- Heather

-- Anonymous, September 17, 1999

I do check the analog stats reports that my ISP puts up. they don't do referrer lookup, though, and they only list pages that get 5 or more hits a day. It does tell me that fewer than 5 people look at "year ago" or "two years ago" links, despite the number of kind people who read my current entries.

Anita of Anita's BOD and Anita's LOL

-- Anonymous, September 21, 1999

I was a web-tracking virgin until just recently, then I saw the light, amen, brother!

When I redesigned my site in August, I signed up with Extreme Tracking (http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/) for $5 a month (no, I'm not affiliated with them). It's so incredibly cool to see all the data I get: unique visitors, referrers, browser types, OS types, even monitor resolution. And it goes down to each individual page. (And this tracker doesn't display any graphic or anything on my pages and doesn't appear to affect load time.)

My favorite is to see how people find me in search engines. (I come up third when you search for "hello" in Lycos!!) It is also very interesting to see what websites are linking to me. I got lots of hits from this very forum when Beth recommended something on my site.

The tracker also helped me improve my site. I have five pages worth of writing about my experiences with eye surgery, and I noticed that lots of people stopped reading after the first page, which was the first essay (about having contacts). I put a table of contents/intro- type page there instead, and now people tend to read all the way through because they know what to expect.

(http://www.drizzle.com/~kate) (Yes, I'm a whore, and besides I need any hits I can get - I only have about 5 a day)

-- Anonymous, September 24, 1999