Keeping track of user traffic

From now on there will be no illusions about how many people read my blog because I included some code to analyse user traffic.

I use statcounter. It is free and very powerful. Time will show if there is any downside to it. They say they don't sell any private information, neither of me nor of my users. They say they earn money from ads shown to me on their site when I check the statistics and from nothing else.

There is an option to let anyone see my statistics but I don't plan to use that option. Unless there is a way to limit the results shown. For example, I would show from which countries users access my site but not from which town or IP. Haven't figured these things out yet.

A good thing is that my own visits on my blog won't be counted because a cookie is blocking that function for my browser. I guess since I probably only have very few readers my own visits would distort the results a lot.