Gerald C. Matics -- Author

I don't know about you, but whenever I visit a Web site, even one I've been on before, I scroll down to the bottom of the home page and check the number of visitors the site has had.  I've always wondered why this is so.  I think maybe, in some deep-seated, Freudian manner, I'm looking for validation for having chosen that particular site in the first place.  After all, there are buckets of truth behind the saying about there being safety in numbers; in this case I'm not talking about physical safety but, if you will, social safety.  I guess I just want to know that I'm cool for having chosen a site that 237,704 others have already visited and have presumably gotten something out of while they were there.

This is, I believe, the same thing that leads people to be fashionably late to parties: they don't want to look like geeks for being the first, and possibly only, ones to arrive.  They can wait out the ice-breaking period and let the party seek its own level like water in a roiled-up pond.  If the parking lot outside is half-full or worse, they can make a judgment call about whether the party has reached a critical mass of fun, and if they judge that it hasn't, they can make a quick and unobtrusive getaway before anyone notices how uncool they are for having shown up at such a lame gathering.

Anyway, this was supposed to be a two- or three-sentence post to say that the counter on The Home Page, for some unknown reason, keeps starting over at 00001.  I've seen some of the behind-the-scenes statistics and I can categorically state without fear of contradiction that there have been more than 00001 visitors to the site.  (Of course I can say it without fear of contradiction -- you don't have access to the behind-the-scene statistics, so how could you contradict me?)  (By the way, I imagine I'll have something to say in a future post about the value of statistics.)  I personally have visited the site from at least two computers, so the number can't be lower than 00002.  As of today it reads 00006, but as I've just conclusively demonstrated, that number is unadulterated bird poop.

I'm working on fixing it, after which I fully expect a quantum leap in the number of people who have visited, but until I do, I suggest viewing whatever number is in the counter as the square root of the actual number of people who landed here.  Bottom line, don't feel like a social misfit just because you've joined the other 00006 who have visited my site.  You're not uncool.  I swear.

At least, not because of that....