Haven't seen those in a while.
I don't know when hit counters on personal web sites went out of style, but
we rarely seem to encounter them anymore. (Come to think of it, that may be a
function of the fact that we don't see many personal web sites much either.) There
was a time, many years ago already, when a page counter (free from numerous sources,
of course) graced the bottom of the main page of a vast number of sites. I won't
claim that on a majority of those the counter didn't seem to work:
but there were certainly a very large number of these as well.
I don't
know why these went out of style, though as someone with a good deal of experience
with sites with a very limited number of hits, I can guess. With free counters,
the easiest way to check how many hits are on a page is to click into the page
... and register an additional hit in the process. If we do this often enough,
we start convincing ourselves that someone actually is viewing our site. But then
it becomes somewhat boring to enter the site again and again, only to discover
that hardly anybody other than ourselves is visiting. What's more, many of the
personal sites that carried these counters quickly became little more than archeological
sites, abandoned and forgotten, waiting for someone, sometime, to investigate
the phenomenon. Ultimately there was little value in offering a counter of this
sort because the big players needed serious statistics, and the little players
simply lost interest.
Go to: You name it, or
Go to: Still
running it up the flagpole
