Counts
What visited and online mean on this homepage
· 3 min read
Visited is stored. Online is who’s here.
A counter that climbs while you stare is usually fake. We tried a version of that once. It made the page feel busy. It also made the numbers meaningless.
Visited is stored in a shared table, one row for this site. A new browser session bumps it once. The Views figure in the strip at the bottom of the homepage is that same total.
What this is not
Online is whoever has pinged recently from this app. On a quiet night that’s one or two people. If it sits still, that’s fine.
None of this is unique users in the Google Analytics sense. Cookie analytics, if you turn it on in cookie settings, is a separate thing and stays off until you say yes.
Common questions
- Are the homepage numbers fake?
- Visited is stored in our visitor table and goes up once per new browser session. Online is recent pings from this site. We used to animate a crowd. We don’t anymore.
- Why doesn’t online match how busy the site feels?
- On Vercel, different servers don’t always share the same live list, so online can look low. Visited is the number to trust for history.
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