Fun With Hit Counters (Note: Actual Fun Content May Vary)

Okay, folks...here is an entry on that ever-popular question, "Hey, what the [heck] happened to my hit counter!"

Recently, Jackie, she of some very popular reality TV blogs, including Big Brother 6 Live Feed Report & More, kind of let us have it (and we deserved it) because her hit counter crashed, going from over 370,000 to bupkis (nothing).

Now,
your Journal may not be getting that kind of traffic, but the problems
are the same. I asked Ian why this keeps happening (Ian isn't the
Journals Product Manager anymore, but he still has Hometown stuff,
which is where the counters fall under) -- this is what he says:

"The
number of hits is stored in a text file within HT [Hometown] (called
odometer, if you go into your HT space you can see it). When another
hit is recorded for a Journal, that file is overwritten and incremented
by 1. When the hit counter is being updated very rapidly, the file will
attempt to overwrite itself while it is already overwriting itself. This is a write-lock, and the file blows up
- at best it resets to zero and at worst breaks the hitcounter
altogether, thus serving a broken image that we see as the end result."

So, that's the why -- the next part of the question is "So whaddya going to do about it?"
There are a few different courses of action for fixes being proposed,
but none of them can be implemented immediately (they all require
development and infrastructure work.)

If you want to avoid this
problem entirely, you can try any one of a number of free, HTML-based
Web page counters on the Web -- they just can't use Javascript, and the
HTML you use to get the counter in your About Me area counts against
your overall character limit (we know you want to get that raised, too).

Believe
you me, no one over here likes that fact that our best answer right now
is "go use someone else's counter", and the team is working on it. We
will keep you updated.

If your counter is broken right now (that
is, showing a broken image), try removing it from your page and
re-adding it (from the "Edit Journals" button).  If that still
doesn't work:

1. Go to Keyword: FTP
2. Click "See My FTP Space"
3. You should see a file that starts ".odometer" and ends with the name of your Journal.

4. Delete this file. (Highlight it, click "Utilities", then hit "Delete").  Note: Be careful while you do this. Also, note that this will recreate your hit counter from zero.

Thanks. -- Joe