1,000,000 Hits (or Not)

The hit counter down there at the bottom of the page hit 1,000,000 a few days ago, and I guess I should say something on the subject. Here goes: It’s not true. Or maybe it is. I’m not sure. So I’m having trouble getting excited about it, but then, that may be due to this summer cold thing that’s knocked me for a loop.

You see, when I switched to Theobloggers, I had about 750,000 hits showing on the counter, “hits” meaning page views — which to me is the real measure of a site. You see, in internet lingo, you get a “hit” for each file downloaded, meaning you get one hit for the 1,000,000 cartoon, another for the text, and may a dozen more for the stuff around the edges. Anyway, hits grossly overstate reality.

The native hit counter for WordPress I used to have actually measured page views, which is how many times someone clicks to download an article to read, which measures something of real significance.

So I’ve been trying to get a genuine page view hit counter thingie on the page, and they seem to be hard to come by. And Theobloggers is about to switch to WordPress 3.0, which may or may not solve the problem. So in the meantime I’m probably not actually at 1,000,000 page views. But maybe I am.

You see, lots of people read my stuff via email, and email reads aren’t counted by hit counters or page view counters. So that’s several thousand reads per month that aren’t counted. And lots of people read by RSS reader, which has the very same problem. Add those in, and I might have passed 1,000,000 months ago!

But I have this cold and really don’t feel like doing the math to figure whether I hit a 1,000,000 page views. It would require higher level reasoning skills that are being denied me by lack of oxygen and sinus pain and coughing and all that. So I’m either over 1,000,000 page views or not. But my head definitely feels like World War III is going in my sinus cavities. That much I’m sure about.