Another small milestone for WUWT

Yesterday, almost unnoticed (except for Ric Werme in Tips and Notes) WUWT passed another mile marker in the travel of this blog.

Here’s the marker today:

75 million. The word “hits” isn’t really accurate, as it implies total HTTP requests of which there may be several in an HTML page (images, elements, etc). Whole technologies are dedicated to minimizing the number of HTTP requests per page.

The wordpress.com Blog Stats measure on the WUWT sidebar is actually full page views, not “hits” or HTTP requests.

Astute readers may notice this little smiley face at the bottom of each wordpress.com web page, which I’ve highlighted in yellow.

That little smiley face which is automatically inserted, besides denoting the general happy outlook of this blog, serves an important function. It is the last element in every page to load and gets logged by the wordpress.com statistics counter. What you see in the blog stats is the raw unadjusted page view count from wordpress.com, over which I have no influence or control.

The reason I point this out is that one well known paid disinformational blogger went ballistic the last time I announced such a milestone and proudly proclaimed that his blog “got more hits in a few months than WUWT did all time” (paraphrasing since I can’t find the blog post now). He put up a graph from his server log.

What he didn’t realize is that he was displaying his internal server log of HTTP requests, and it showed all the HTTP page requests, not full page views. Big difference. This Microsoft Tech net forum entry sums up the HTTP request issue pretty well:

“The average number of requests per page during testing was four. Therefore, the ratio of requests per second (RPS) to pages per second (PPS) can be calculated as r=(p*4)+x where r=RPS, p=PPS and x=background requests such as requests for search queries and non-cached pages.”

I don’t think that a general interner page would have only 4 requests per page. I validated that with a few sites:

• · Microsoft.com home page – more than 70 requests per page
• · hawaiianair.com home page – more than 50 requests per page
• · mysite on our intranet – more than 30 requests

For example, WUWT has a bunch of small images on the right sidebar, each of these requires a separate HTTP request. I count 24 images on the sidebar. The header image, plus any images in posts each count as an HTTP request, plus each post itself, drawn from the database, is an HTTP request, We typically have 15 stories on the front page. This sort of multiple HTTP requests per page is the same for most any blog.

Page views counted via the wordpress smiley, circumvent that problem.

So I figured I’d point all this out, lest the same erroneous hits -vs- page views argument be repeated again.

So while we are on the topic of smileys, let me just thank everyone for your continued support, with a hat tip to guest posters and those who leave comments in the Tips and Notes section. I especially thank our moderators, who toil in the background moderating hundreds, sometimes thousands, of comments per day.

For those that wish to help spread the message, here is what you can do.

• Repost excerpts with links on your own blog, this help builds traffic and reach for WUWT. If you don’t have a blog, get one. It is free and easy.
• If you can, please Re-Tweet and Facebook the WUWT posts – with the problems we are having with Google and Facebook, these help build rank.
• Put links to WUWT in comments on other blogs (assuming they won’t be snipped). Some blogs, like the one I mentioned above are so threatened that the proprietor will delete the links because he doesn’t want to give any link backs.
• If so inclined, visit the advertisers (such as the Amazon book links -soon to be a special subsection) and others shown here, they often have relevant and interesting topics, but sometimes it is just humorous bot context placement.
• If something important moves you here to make strong comments, write letters to the editor to your local newspaper. There is a strong division between the blogosphere and the rest of the news reading world. Invite them in.

Thanks for your consideration – Anthony

[UPDATE] I trust Anthony won’t mind my adding this graphic, showing today’s reach for WUWT compared to ClimateAudit, RealClimate, and SkepticalScience. – w.