Public Notices...

It has become commonplace for me to announce anomalies relating to business occurrences or issues with my sites. This announcement concerns my ever present counter issues and growing evidence that what is reported is not factual. Yesterday after returning from my errands, I linked to my blog and noticed that the counter had not changed from earlier in the day. Why is this a red flag -- because though I may have had no hits while I was away -- it should have incremented the counter based on my recent retrieval of the blog. And this has happened before, a lot [too often for the infrequent sampling that I perform]. The cgi counter would not be so important if this were not also a strong indicator that the transaction was not logged by the Apache server which provides service to my website.

The difference in counts as of 10:32 a.m. on August 27, 2004 -- between the two visible counters on my blog is depicted in the diagram below. Refer to the earlier post on counters -- Converging Counters, the CGI Server Counter was well ahead at that time. I have not reset this counter in anyway after the initial occurrence -- discussed in the earlier post.

One other interesting tidbit about the External Counter -- every night that I am up until 1:00 a. m. ET [which is often], this counter appears to stop working. When trying to retrieve the stats page for the counter -- an ASP/SQL error is issued and the count is not produced for my blog page. I am not sure at this time why. Why not replace it? Well even though it appears to disconnect every night -- it has more hits recorded than my server counter and I did place an invisible counter on the page.

My blog template is used for all of the posts from my blog which are generated separately by blogger.com. Every html file generated has the same side bar with the same counters as the index page. The counter should be incremented for each separate post requested. For instance sometimes I insert posts into forums. I do not insert the entire blog -- just the post I want referenced. If the user selects "home" at the bottom of that page or "current posts" the main blog will be provided with the same counters. Both of these pages should increment the counters on the page. There are not separate counters for each post. This however does not account for the referrer issue which has always been high for the blog. I just started the blog June 1, 2004 and in the beginning only averaged one post per week. So all of the posts were already on the page and I wasn't using forums then. Now I average about two posts per week.

Another use for your online journal -- public documentation of business transactions and anomalies that may be useful in the future. You know how newspapers sometimes run ads that explain that an individual is not responsible for any debts incurred... known as Public Notices. Well this is kind of the same thing -- A public journal to say I am not sure what to do about these problems -- but let's note it in rather a public manner.