I have to thank Russell Beattie for writing about StatCounter.com, the service that he uses to monitor his website. In the days immediately after the Apple Keynote, his website showed a significant bump in traffic. Neat. I decided to give it a whirl (for the level of traffic that I use it for, it is free, and presents no annoying ads or popups for my readers). I’m only a week into using it, but it’s really very helpful, and now it’s part of my daily “web maintenance” routine. It filters out spiders like Google and leaves you with raw counts on numbers of visitors, where they came from, and what search terms they may have used to find your website. All it requires is the addition of a small chunk of JavaScript to your webpage, and no muss, no fuss, you can access your account on statcounter.com and find out just how few actual readers you actually have. 🙂

One small thing that could be improved is that it doesn’t do any monitoring of RSS feeds, so I can’t use it to monitor who is downloading my podcasts or reading brainwagon just on an aggregator. The reason is of course that even if you put JavaScript in the feed, no aggregator would know what to do with it. It would be nice to have an all-inclusive solution to monitoring downloads, but that would almost certainly require direct access to the Apache log files.

Incidently, I have no interest in this company other than as a satisfied customer. Give it a try if you like.