Help with PHP counter activity...?!

[Littleodie914]

Hey guys, I'm asking a bit of a weird question here, but maybe somebody will be able to lend a hand. I have my own personal blog (sig) that I installed
Wordpress onto. I've been using K2 as a theme, and just upgraded both Wordpress to 2.0 and K2 to the Beta Two. I know that a lot of Mac users have Wordpress for their blogs, and I was wondering if you could help me out.

I have a PHP counter that I installed on the site, right in my about information, on the right-hand side of the page. Since December 17th the count started at 0 and has been climbing slowly yet constantly, and just two days ago I was at about 560 people. It climbed about 30-40 hits a day, so I was pretty confused when I checked it this evening and saw that the count had jumped to 1189 people. This has got to be wrong, there's no way I could suddenly see a jump of like 600 people in one day... Right? I mean I haven't solicited my website to any search engines, the only changes I've made are the K2 and Wordpress upgrades. I was hoping maybe somebody could explain why the counter has (erroneously) jumped so high so fast.

If tomorrow I check and it's at around 1800 people, then maybe I'll accept the fact that my site's gotten way too popular, but I know that's not the case. Until then, any ideas? Thanks!

 

[ChrisWB]

It's possible another (more popular) website linked to your website. Can you check with your host to see if the activity has increased? Try looking at the bandwidth and match today's against a date sometime last week.

 

[superbovine]

it probably a combination of things.

search engine bots increasing your hit count OR/AND
your hit counter counts the same visitor multiple times. You need to check your /var/logs files.

 

[littlejim]

Don't suppose you have access to Apache logs?

If not, and you can install php scripts, then you could use a more powerful visitor counter that will give you more information about your visitors.

Try HotScripts.com.

 

[Littleodie914]

Hey guys, thanks for the help so far. I just installed a few new themes on my site and noticed that when I changed to a different theme, then back to my original theme with the counter on it, the number doubled, from 1200-something to almost 2600. Any ideas why this would happen, and how to get my original count back?

The counter I'm using is the one at http://ekstreme.com.

 

[superbovine]

Hey guys, thanks for the help so far. I just installed a few new themes on my site and noticed that when I changed to a different theme, then back to my original theme with the counter on it, the number doubled, from 1200-something to almost 2600. Any ideas why this would happen, and how to get my original count back?

The counter I'm using is the one at http://ekstreme.com.

umm your'll have to look the code yourself and trace the counter code to figure it out.