Lies, damned lies, ...

... and statistics! I think this phrase goes back to Sir Winston Churchill, when he was still First Lord of the Admiralty. He then was concerned with the German's statistics of the number of British ships sunk by their U-Boot Waffe.

Today's application is much more peaceful. I have ranted earlier about the reliability of my web statistics. Numbers minded person that I am, I have installed a new web counter in the sidebar of the blog. The counter is set to record visits only, and to exclude visits by myself.

Soooo, what do we see? If you go to the counter, you'll notice a whopping 6 visits for yesterday in the sidebar counter. The webstats of my website however reports no less than 72 visits, with a daily average of 78 even! Here's the graph:

So, the yellow bars showing visits look nice and stable. But I really don't like the huge difference of over 90% between the latest counts. OK, I admit that there are a couple of reasons why the count may be lower, but do they add up? I don't know:

webstats reports for the entire site, not just the blog

my visits are included in webstats, but they're verylimited

new counter presumably counts blog page only, but not archived entries (?), so direct hits are not reported there

Does that make any sense?