{"id":783,"date":"2008-09-07T15:50:17","date_gmt":"2008-09-07T19:50:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=783"},"modified":"2008-09-07T15:50:17","modified_gmt":"2008-09-07T19:50:17","slug":"leaving-the-meter-running","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/leaving-the-meter-running\/","title":{"rendered":"Leaving the Meter Running"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" title=\"SiteMeter logo\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/sitemeter_logo.gif?resize=226%2C44&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"SiteMeter logo\" width=\"226\" height=\"44\" \/><em>Running After My Hat<\/em> and many, many other blogging sites use the <a title=\"SiteMeter Web-statistics service\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sitemeter.com\" target=\"_blank\">SiteMeter<\/a> service to track statistics &#8212; not just the number of visits and page views, but where they came from, how long they stayed, and so on. I thought the following news might be of interest to anyone who uses SiteMeter and might have missed the information.<\/p>\n<p>First, SiteMeter is moving to a new platform &#8212; probably different hardware, certainly different software &#8212; next weekend, September 13th-14th. You can read about the upcoming changes, including the reasons for them and so on, in a <a title=\"SiteMeter blog on page-counter display\" href=\"http:\/\/weblog.sitemeter.com\/2008\/09\/05\/visit-or-page-view-counter-display\/\" target=\"_blank\">couple<\/a> of <a title=\"SiteMeter blog on the new SiteMeter system\" href=\"http:\/\/weblog.sitemeter.com\/2008\/09\/06\/sitemeter-migration-things-to-know-%e2%80%93\/\" target=\"_blank\">entries<\/a> at the SiteMeter blog. But I thought these items would be of special interest:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;The SiteMeter Website will be unavailable during the Weekend of the Migration (tentatively scheduled for the 13th-14th of September). Your stats will still be tracked during this time but access will be restricted, including access from your SiteMeter tracking icon on your web pages.&#8221; (You won&#8217;t lose any statistics already gathered, either, although &#8220;You may have a small gap in your data while we switch all accounts over to the new platform.&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>Visit counts and page-view counts will be slightly different (higher or lower, depending on the specifics of your site and your SiteMeter account) but more accurate under the new system.<\/li>\n<li>Access to your account info: You&#8217;ll have to do something they call &#8220;activating&#8221; your account(s) to gain access to your new stats. (Presumably this means a one-time extra step, perhaps to set a new password, confirm your email address(es), and so on.) Also, account passwords will now be case-sensitive &#8212; that is, if your password is &#8220;<em><strong>M<\/strong><\/em>inor<em><strong>K<\/strong><\/em>ey&#8221; you won&#8217;t be able to access it with &#8220;<em><strong>m<\/strong><\/em>inor<em><strong>k<\/strong><\/em>ey&#8221; or other variations; the capital letters will count.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On another SiteMeter-related note:<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" title=\"Instant hello-goodbye visit\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/duration0.jpg?resize=342%2C111&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"342\" height=\"111\" \/>I was puzzled by something I was seeing in my own statistics &#8212; visitors who had apparently arrived at a page and departed it in the same instant, in that the duration of their visits (the &#8220;visit length) was zero seconds, as shown here.<\/p>\n<p>(I mean, I&#8217;m not so puffed up that I imagine visitors come here to, y&#8217;know, roll my words around in their mouths, savoring them for minutes if not hours at a time, wondering how they&#8217;d possibly survived all those years without the pleasure. But all the immediate hello-goodbyes were tough to accept, especially when I <em>knew<\/em> the person who&#8217;d visited at a particular time.)<\/p>\n<p>So I emailed SiteMeter tech support. The answer, maybe, should have been obvious. It certainly reassured me.<\/p>\n<p>Turns out that although SiteMeter &#8220;knows&#8221; the date and time when someone has arrived at a given page, it has no way of knowing when they leave that page&#8230; <em>unless<\/em> the visitor clicks a link on that page which takes them to another. The duration on Page A, then, becomes the difference between their arrival at A and their arrival at B. (And once they get to B, of course, there&#8217;s no knowing how long they&#8217;re there, unless they click a link.)<\/p>\n<p>SiteMeter doesn&#8217;t know that a visitor has closed his\/her browser. It apparently doesn&#8217;t know that s\/he has used the browser&#8217;s Back or Forward buttons. It knows about the visitor&#8217;s interaction <em>on the page<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>So if you too were wondering about all those fickle visitors, relax.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Running After My Hat and many, many other blogging sites use the SiteMeter service to track statistics &#8212; not just the number of visits and page views, but where they came from, how long they stayed, and so on. I thought the following news might be of interest to anyone who uses SiteMeter and might [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-783","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-cD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":787,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions\/787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}