Goodbye, Sitemeter

From almost the beginning of this blog, I had a Sitemeter account to track my visitors.

It was great -- I could see who was coming to my site, and where they were coming from. Often, it was the easiest way of alerting me to somebody linking to my blog. It also gave me a sense of the ebbs and flows of The Debate Link's traffic (it never really recovered from the clerkship hiatus, alas -- though the general slump in the "blog market" didn't help matters). And since I've had it for so long, it provided a steady tick-tick-tick of this blog's progression -- like pencil marks tracking a child's growth.

Sadly, Sitemeter is being permanently shut down July 1st. The tracker was clearly in rough shape -- I couldn't even see the widget on my blog's footer anymore -- but the core of it still did its job until I finally uninstalled it last night. It's being replaced with SiteCounter. We'll see how that goes, but seeing as how I hate all change, I expect to dislike it (Blogger also has an internal stat counter, but I'm also finding it unwieldy. Because again, change).

Even more sadly, there's no way to import the data over to my new tracker. So I'll just put the final tally here for posterity.

Starting from December 13, 2004 (so just six months after The Debate Link launched) through June 27, 2017, The Debate Link has had:

665,042 visitors
961,698 page views

Thanks, Sitemeter. And thanks to all 665,000+ visitors, too.