Thanks for the information and suggestions. I’m sorry your comment didn’t show up right away; Akismet marked it as spam (I guess because you included two links in your comment), and I haven’t checked my Akismet spam since probably last Friday.

Anyway, I’ll try the Google Analytics, but I wonder why WordPress doesn’t offer this service. They do have it in the Dashboard of their WordPress.com blogs (like my blog at http://danielgreene.wordpress.com), but they don’t have it in their “powered by WordPress” blogs that are hosted elsewhere. At least it doesn’t show up in my Dashboard!

Although if someone’s got your RSS feed in their bloglines, the pageviews will artificially go up, because bloglines automatically checks your feed several times a day.

Webalizer is a log analyzer, as is the general stats provided by the ISP, and there’s no way to bypass those when you want to look at raw pageviews.

I use Google Analytics to address this problem. They give you this piece of code to insert into your blog’s header or footer and isn’t included in your RSS feed. Analytics accounts are free, and the data gathered is quite in depth.

Since you’ve got a WordPress blog, here’s a plug-in to make code installation easier.

Hits: 1504, Files: 1208, Pages: 703, Visits: 270

I guess that gives me a more accurate assessment! Thanks for prompting me to get more detailed statistics. Still, 270 daily visits including 703 pages a day is pretty good, ain’t it?

The reason I ask is because by strict interpretation, hits is the number of elements loaded with each page. A CSS file is an element, an image is another. So if you had one of each of those (CSS, image) you’d get 3 hits with a page load.

Pageviews are a better measurement of traffic. What analytics program do you use on this blog?

I probably should qualify that my site has received an average of 1,000 hits a day for many years now, and I’ll never know how much of that is due to people looking for Daniel Green Slippers or an action movie actor named Daniel Greene whom I had never heard of before I registered the domain danielgreene.com in 1998.

That said, I’m sure a lot of my site traffic also comprises readers of my “vintage” Web content such as my Style Sheets Demo Page and my Voicing with Valor articles.

I guess one thing any writer must remember is that very few of your readers will respond with comments or letters, and when a writer does get a response from a reader, that one “thank you” may be representative of hundreds of other readers who appreciate your writing but are too busy or shy to say so.

In any event, your two short but sweet comments warm the cockles of my heart!

Daniel