Sites hosted with Northwest Village will be receiving their first, new stat reports on or around the weekend of April 2-3, 2005. If you have any questions regarding the reports, please feel free to e-mail or call. js

is “told” to keep count of how many people have visited the page. To do that, the script needs to connect to the SiteMeter servers and therein lies the decision-factor.

All is well and fine when the SiteMeter servers are having no trouble handling the load, or when the internet isn’t conjested. But, once you swerve those two variables to the negative – that is to say the SiteMeter servers ARE busy, or your particular internet connection is a congested line – it takes longer for that particular page to load for viewing. Sometimes, regretfully, it takes MUCH longer. And, other times, it may not load at all and you start seeing nasty little error messages, etc.

So? It’s a New Year and I have this silly idea that each New Year offers an opportunity to improve on things from the year past. I’m now in the process of removing the SiteMeter java-coding from most of the websites.

In some cases it actually takes some time – tricky little coding that it can be.

On some sites I’ve actually (by intent or mistake) included incomplete scripting or simply used the cut and paste method when creating new pages, so looking for the scripts can actually take some time – finding which pages they are on is always the hard part.

After that, "No more counters?"

Nah….remember the idea is improvement! I’ll be taking the real statistics directly from the servers themselves. These are actually a bit purer than the SiteMeter records and offer some nice extras that SiteMeter didn’t. At the end of each quarter I’ll be emailing the stats of individual sites to their respective site owners, along with some notes, idea and suggestions.

For many years I’ve relied on a neat, convenient html counter from a company called SiteMeter. If you’ve ventured onto any of the sites I’ve designed, chances are you’ve noticed the counter(s) on the bottom of pages and they usually tend to look very much the same. For all intent and purpose, they are exactly that, the same. They all originate from the same place.

Well… years, experience and a little bit of new-found unlaziness have led me to yet another of those damned New Year’s resolutions. "Ahhh… the sweet demise of SiteMeter from quite a few sites."

As I mentioned before, they are convenient, cheap (if you use their freebee version it's a 'non-expense') and for the effort involved… a useful-bargain. I still recommend them, though I will probably not be using them as much as I have in the past.

So, why erase their existence from websites? It’s a simple matter of practicality. It has to do with how third-party java-scripts work.

When someone visits a page, the browser reads the html code (which pretty much tells the browser how to display that particular page). When you add something (a java-script) like SiteMeter, your browser