updated daily

The numbers on the left side are the peak values for the entire chart. The right-most traces are supposed to represent the extrapolated counts for the current month (based on daily numbers averaged over the days that have passed, and multiplied by the number of days in the month). It counts the current day when doing these averages, even though numbers have not yet been accumulated for the current day (it runs early in the morning). This causes the trace to be low early in the month (a bug?) when the current day effects the average strongly. The chart itself shows the changes in these numbers (month to month) over the past 12 months.

Hits are almost meaningless for us. They count every single request made to the server including requests made for each graphic on a page, as well as cached items. For this reason they will tend to be skewed low here relative to other sites because this site uses very few small graphics files (such as rounded table corners and spacers) to compose our pages.

The most important values for analysis are Page Views, and Sessions.

Page Views counts the number of full pages that have been sent to visitors. These don't care how many or how few other objects are on the page. One page --no matter how many requests the browser makes for graphics and scripts in order to display it-- is counted exactly once.

Starting on 22-July-2003 our stats began to include dynamically loaded pages as part of the page views number. Because many of the pages at this site are generated dynamically, this new counting method has greatly improved the accuracy of the "page views" number on the chart. This also explains the sudden jump in page views relative to other counts on the chart at that time. Keep in mind that when analyzing trends, one should consider both page views and sessions.

Sessions counts the number of visitor sessions recorded at the site. This can be thought of as the number of unique visitors, where uniqueness is determined with the aid of a one-hour window.

For example, if a visitor comes into a product page from a search engine, clicks through to the home page, clicks again to view the forums, clicks to our contact page to send an inquiry, and then finally goes back to the search engine, this will count as one single session.

The session window for our statistics is one hour, so, if the visitor remembers something else he or she wanted to ask 20 minutes later and returns to the site to send another inquiry, it will still be counted as part of the same session. For us, the "Sessions" value is by far the most reliable statistic for analyzing site traffic. But must be understood in context.

updated daily

The month chart shows a set of bar charts for each day of the current month. The daily set of bars are presented for each statistic type with numbers on the left showing current highest (peak) values.


The Week

updated daily

updated daily

The most compelling reason to study agents is that one day, the older browsers will stop being used to access our site's content. We can then finally begin to concentrate on building web pages that are mostly standard.

There will likely always be some need to do things outside of the standards, just because the standards are concerned with doing things that have already been done. Still, one should be intimately aware of the rules of the trade, if for no other reason than so they may be broken with style.