Eyes on Costa Rica - Update/October 4, 2016

On November 13, 2012, I started to maintain a record of where visits to my blog were coming from. Aided by a widget called RevolverMaps which can be seen under the heading of VISITS SINCE 9/29/2016 as a spinning globe in the right hand column of the blog, this included identification of individual countries and their dependencies, subdivisions (states, provinces, etc.) within the countries; and cities, towns or other places within the subdivisions.

Since my last blog entry on this topic (April 15, 2016), the total number of recorded countries and dependencies has risen to 114; the most recent additions being Paraguay, Greenland, Guam and, most recently (October 1), Isle of Man. Earlier today, the number of recorded visits from over 3100 different places surpassed 24,000 – the 24000^th visit coming from Norman, Oklahoma. TOTAL PAGEVIEWS as seen in the right hand column exceeds 89000. This indicates that the average visitor has looked at between 3 and 4 different pages of the blog.

Why “VISITS SINCE 9/29/2016” and not “VISIT COUNTER” as it read before?

RevolverMaps identifies each place from where a visit occurs with a little red dot (or some other color of choice) on the spinning globe. By navigating from the blog to RevolverMaps itself, the same collection of dots can be viewed on a 2D flat map projection. Here is a snapshot taken on September 29, 2016.

Unfortunately, while tinkering with the blog on my new iPad, I somehow managed to break the link between the blog and RevolverMaps. The break could not be mended – or at least we could not figure out how to mend it. The solution was to reinstall RevolverMaps with the consequence that the visitor count and the placement of little red dots had to start all over again. Here’s a snapshot taken earlier today:

No more clutter of dots but all was not lost. Records up to the time of the break had been backed up in a separate database. It was fairly easy to modify this database setting numbers as they were on September 29 as initial conditions and then enabling the addition of new numbers reported by RevolverMaps to the initial numbers. Under the old scheme, new numbers provided by RevolverMaps would be used to overwrite rather than add to existing numbers because all the initial numbers were zero.

The above being said, it became apparent that there was no harmony between TOTAL PAGEVIEWS as seen in the right hand column and RevolverMaps visits as seen in the right hand column. Over 89000 page views does not reconcile with less than 100 visits. The heading VISITS SINCE 9/29/2016 provides a hint as to the reason why. The widget that records total page views is independent of RevolverMaps and has been in service since before the inclusion of RevolverMaps in November 2012. The link with this widget has not been broken (at least not yet).