Internet Roundup

After CODOHWeb signed on with a new Internet service provider (ISP), or connection service to the Internet, last May, CODOH was for the first time able to monitor traffic figures for its Website in detail. Previously, the most we could do was to put counters on specific Website pages.

Now, our new comprehensive site stats software enables us to tell at a glance how many people visited a page, when, and from what country, as well as how long they stayed and how many documents they viewed. (In case you’re worried, there is no way anyone can identify your browser on the Internet—at least no easy or legal way.)

The Campus Project, the new BBS discussion page, and other additions account for much of the newly measurable traffic on CODOHWeb. Interest in CODOHWeb from Europe continues to grow as well, perhaps in response to increasingly repressive laws aimed at squelching discussion of the Holocaust and other revisionist topics.

A weekly report of the site traffic is found at the bottom of our Home Page—at U(niversal) R(esource) L(ocator) [http://www.codoh.com]. Here’s an explanation of how to read the stats, plus some illustrations of CODOH’s impressive numbers.

Accesses (aka “Hits”) When a Web browser keys in a URL such as http://www.codoh.com, the electronic address of our site, it asks the computer there to transmit the materials described by the URL to the visitor’s computer so it can be viewed locally. There’s an impression that you’re looking at far-away things when you surf the Web, but in fact everything you see is sitting right inside your own computer.

Each file sent, including each graphic, is counted as one access, or hit. That is, in bar graph form. The top is for the site, the bottom for the Home Page only. Not all visitors come through the Home Page.

Select the link at the bottom of this page, “Reports for the year 1998,” and click on the week of interest (the very top link is always an incomplete record). Here you’ll see the access figures broken down in many different if an article has three pictures in it, then calling it up will register four accesses. True, that’s a bit misleading. But the report shows graphics totals separately, and we subtract from the overall totals. For CODOHWeb, article accesses run about 40 percent of the overall. The weekly access average for the site over the last five months works out to 62,284. Last week the average was up to 92,342! This translates to about 25,000 and 37,000 articles, respectively, an audience size unattainable to revisionists by any other means except radio or TV.

Visits Since a visitor may go to several pages, can you tell how many people have dropped in? In a word, yes. Take the link at the bottom of the Home Page that says “Skip to weekly reports,” and you’ll see a page giving the weekly totals from 5/16/98 to present ways, and the first table gives the actual number of people who visited instead of just accesses. Scroll on down to the first brightly colored pie chart and the table beneath it rates the sections (directories) of the site by activity. Graphics is the top one, always.

The last level of stats is reached by clicking on any one of the directory links in this table. This is a large page (400Kb) with tables that list every file on the CODOH site, by directory, with access figures for each one. Clicking on any one of these file URLs will take you to that page on the site (or deliver that page to your computer, to be more accurate).

That’s How Many, Now How

Much? It’s fine to know how many people visit your restaurant, but just as important is how much they order. The figure for the amount of data accessed, rather than how many items, is given in columns labeled “Bytes.” Computers use only zeroes and ones to represent all numbers, letters, etc. For instance, the decimal number 37 looks like this in binary number form: 37 = 10100100. The zeroes mean what they always do, and the ones represent ordinary decimal numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 for the eight locations in the byte. Thus: 1 + 4 + 32 = 37.

It takes a lot of bytes to make a document, so they’re expressed in multiples of 1,024. That is, 1,024 bytes make one Kilobyte, and 1,024 Kb is a Megabyte, the standard measure of hard disk size and computer memory. CODOHWeb transmits about 1 Gigabyte per week, or 1,024 Mb.

One Megabyte of text is about 170,000 words, so multiplying that times 1,024 and taking 40 percent of the answer to back out the graphics is roughly 68,000,000 words, and a densely packed screen of text 14 inches high by about 8 wide holds about 740 words, giving a final figure of roughly 92,500 pages of revisionist reading (not counting pictures!) distributed per week.

Where Do the Accesses Come From? There’s no way to identify visitors personally (nor would we want there to be!) but your computer tells the ISP where to send the info, which in turn indicates your local network (domain) and country. That’s how we were able to see that the recent increase of 5,000 accesses over the previous week’s total came mostly from international visitors. These are the CODOH access figures since the first week in July. Traffic has increased 177% in that time!

We do not think it is entirely a coincidence that the continuing upswing corresponds to the major thrust of the latest campus campaign.

For the 55 days from 5/16/98 to 7/11/98, the CODOH Website stats are:

• 470,959 total accesses, for 4,701 Mb downloads
• 135,191 document accesses (less graphics), for 2,892 Mb downloads
• 47,449 total visits from 26,245 unique locations