Blog Patrol

Blog Patrol Visit Blog Patrol
IP Address	71.163.171.76
Server Type	Apache/2.2.8 (EL)
Registrar	eNom.com
Hosting Provider	Verizon Internet Services
Price	Free

Blog Patrol comes from the USA. It claims to be a blog optimized counter, but it doesn't appear to be any different than the other counters in feature or function. The forum, however, is entirely dedicated to blogs. Another nice thing is that the bug list is published on the site. I don't see too many software vendors posting their bugs. There is also a definitions section on the bottom half of some reports that describes the values to expect in each column of each report. The reports were recently updated using Fusion animated Flash charts. They are a little slower to load, but if you are reading your stats, it will be painting the bottom of the page before you get there.

The Stats Total Report is just that. The all-time total of visitors and hits. It does not seem to be working exactly right, though. It shows 33 visitors and 36 hits, where hits are defined as non-unique page views. Other counters show 30 - 78 visitors and 200+ page views.

The Weekly, Daily & Hourly Report shows three graphs. The first graph is "Daily Visitors for the Week of...". It shows one bar for each day in the last week (last seven days - not calendar week) that had stats. If a day did not have any stats, the bar is not included, so for instance, this site had hits for Thu 13, Mon 17, and Tue 18. The graph had only three bars, not seven with some showing zero. It is a little strange seeing the graph with a non-linear X-axis like that. There are also "Hourly Visitors for Today", and "Hourly Visitors for the Week of..." graphs. They show what you would expect. The top graph contains a "<Previous" and/or "Next>" link that will take you to the previous or next week's stats, for Daily Visitors and Hourly Visitors. If you Click on "Previous", you will be taken back one week, but don't be surprised when you find that the Daily Visitors is still for the current week, but the Hourly Visitors is for the week you selected.

The Visitor Activity Report shows the "Top 10 Pages Viewed for the Week of..." (current week only), and the "Last 10 Pages Viewed". The second would be more appropriately named "Pages Viewed by the Last 10 Visitors", since the same page is listed 10 times. Like a lot of stats packages, this one doesn't know that "http://www.realtimetestcomp.com" and "http://realtimetestcomp.com" are the same thing. The DNS guys tell me that they really aren't the same, and could legally point to two completely unrelated servers, but I've never seen it in practice, and "www" is supposed to be the subdomain for servicing the World Wide Web.

The Referrers Report shows the "Top 10 Referrers" and the "Last 10 Referrers". Again, the second box should be titled "Referrers for the Last 10 Page Views".

The Search Engine Data Report shows a pie chart for the "Top 5 Search Engines for the Week of...", a bar chart with the "Top 10 Keywords for the Week...", and a table of the "Last 10 Keywords". This time, the second box is the "Last 10 Visits that had Keywords". Not page views. At the bottom is a pie chart showing the "Visitor Countries for the Week of...".

The Visitor Technologies Report shows pie charts with OS in Use for the Week of..." and "Web Browsers in Use for the Week of...", and a bar chart for "Screen Resolutions inUse for the Week of...". The OS chart shows Windows XP and Macintosh. Macintosh is not an operating system, but it may be close enough for most. The Web Browser box shows most of the browsers. It misssed IE8, Google Chrome, Maxthon2, and Flock.

The last report is the Details of Last 25 Visitors Report, which shows the visitor path, one line per page view, with these columns:

Visit - The visit (possible page view) for BlogPatrol. Mine shows #290630906 as the latest visit, and #290630699 as the visit 23 seconds earlier.

Date/Time

IP Address - Actually the host name.

Country

Browser, OS, and Screen Resolution.

In Summary

Blog Patrol is a very straightforward counter/stats package that doesn't over or under perform compared to the rest.

Seconds	File
0.373	http://www.blogpatrol.com/counter.php?...

Blog Patrol