Not 2005 Anymore
The hit counter on our sidebar has almost reached three million visitors. That’s a big milestone for us since blog hit counters are so 2005 and it should have been removed years ago. The only reason that it has lived for so long is that it was my first WordPress plugin, and later my first WordPress widget. I’m actually surprised that it still runs since it was written for WP 1.5. It only has a few more days. Once it reaches three million hits, I’m going to take a screen capture of it on the sidebar and then deactivate it.
I will not be switching to Google Analytics. Google already knows enough about us and our browsing habits. All of the plugins that I write and, for that matter, everything used on this blog except for the Gravitars is completely self-contained. And Gravitar.com is an opt-in service that doesn’t get sent any information except a one-way hash of a commenter’s email address. If you don’t mind doing a bit of work yourself, you can still do cool things. Like the local weather forecast or heat map of visitors on the sidebar. They are 100% created on our server and don’t use any JavaScript.
If you happen to see our hit counter with more than three million visitors please leave us a comment or an email. We’re moving on to more sophisticated add-ons (like the photo animation we did a few weeks ago). Time really passes quickly in blogland.
Time does pass by quickly in blogland. Congrats on your visitor milestone.
TemptingSweets99: It doesn’t seem like we’ve been blogging for over five years until we reflect on how much blogging has evolved since we first started. Today, I can do an entire post complete with pictures from my phone. In the early days text posting via email was a hot feature.