How I (Don’t) Collect Blog Statistics

Inspired by Becky‘s post How I Collect Blog Statistics, Respectfully,1 I thought I’d share what I do.2 tl;dr: I collect virtually nothing and I use even less. Let me take you on a journey through the different kinds of analytics tools I’ve used: 1996 —1999: Hit counters! My original websites used a hit counter that I wrote in Perl based on a sample from Matt’s Script Archive. Because I was edgy and dark, I made it look like this: I made the flaming digits using a stock effect in Corel Photo-Paint; this is an attempt to replicate the “feel” of them. Hit counters are pretty dumb for a variety of reasons. Counting “hits” was never a terribly-representative reflection of the popularity of your pages. But also: because they’re a public representation of your popularity, there was every incentive to “game” them… even just by hitting refresh a couple of times. Making them untrustworthy and pointless. 1998 — 2006: Webalizer Who can forget The Webalizer? Those Microsoft Excel ’97-grade…