So, how many people look at my pages?

One thing I hate is counters on each page. Why are these so popular? As if the fact that 3,000,000 people have visited a page before should impress me or make me think differently about the page. Most of the numbers are hyper-inflated anyway; all in all, a counter is a warning sign that the page author is probably insecure. Well, my pages have been visited times since next week, so nyah!

Also, counters are notoriously unreliable. They either don't work properly, or if they are working properly, they make your page much slower to various visitors. (Read "Why web usage statistics are worse than meaningless" for the technical details.)

Nonetheless, here are my real access statistics from most recent to most dusty (except for the current month for which I have projections only).

News:
Well, a Wired news story mentioning one of my pages created my record day: over 6,500 hits on July 23. Woohoo.

I accidentally nuked June's stats. Oh well..

Even though this process is semi-automated, I'm not always diligent about making sure the stat-gathering script is working, so some months are missing a day or two here and there. I was especially spotty at the beginning. I didn't keep stats from the birth of these pages (over on Netcom in late 1994) or before March 1995.

Best as I can remember, Zeigen's Dilemma was born in February 1995. I think the first actual public home page I created was in September 1994.

Now, aren't you glad you came to this page? What a fascinating example of anal-retentiveness.