I also decided that I needed to measure Web traffic -- commonly called "page hits" -- and after a quick survey of then available services on offer decided to use Site Meter for this purpose (by adding a small amount of script code to each page of my site). Then a year or two later  StatCounter entered the scene, and since it provides some different features I added it to the page design alongside Site Meter. Both of these offer a free service as well as a fee service, with the latter providing additional features (and catering for higher traffic volumes, which my own site didn't need due to its modest daily hit rate).

Over the years since 2000, I've put an enormous amount of effort into my site. Initially this was just to provide links to all sorts of useful resources on the Web, then a bit later also to act as a vehicle for my IBM Lotus Notes software development kit NotesTracker together with several handy Lotus Notes database applications that I offer for free.

After a few occasions when asiapac.com.au was unavailable for viewing or software downloads, I set up a backup/mirror site notestracker.com with both sites having essentially mirrored content. This is my own way of inexpensively providing a degree of availability and resiliency for customers and other site users. (Some SEO purists would decry this approach for its "duplication of content", supposedly a faux pas in regard to search optimization, but this doesn't much concern me.) I track both main and mirror sites, plus the various weblogs that I have at Blogger.com (in effect treating their content as an extension of the main web site).

What follows is a series of representative snapshots, images of recent tracking graphs mostly applying to the very end of August 2008.

Keep in mind that here we have a case of "horses for courses" and what applies for my site won't match what applies for others. Doubtless my site and blogs attract a certain mix of visitors, but they're not by any means all technical nerdy types! The site provides some general-interest resource sections (about surfing and oceanography, the sciences and medicine, spoken languages, and so on) quite apart from the remaining sections on various aspects of information technology.

What I'm trying to say here is that, by their very nature of my own site and blogs, the pattern of visits to will be different from the pattern for other sites, in some cases vastly different. Yet I reckon that my site is mainstream enough to have quite a bit of commonality with many others  and to be fairly representative of them, in regard to measures like web browser used, monitor resolution, JavaScript version, or whatever.

Enough with the words, already. Let's have a pictorial look, shall we.

Following are some half-dozen or so pages holding images (from Site Meter mainly, with just one or two from StatCounter) together with brief commentaries. Not a detailed dissection, but an overall anatomical perspective.

PLEASE READ ON...