By January 2004, several CCC members had expressed an interest in having a visit counter on the home page, so I set about finding a suitable one. There was no shortage of options available. The ideal (I thought) was a Plone add-in, since I misguidedly thought it would be easy and, well, tidy. Keeping it all in the family, like.

A few minutes on Plone.org were enough to cure me of that misconception - tidy it might have been, but far from straightforward.

Then I went to Google and did a search, which turned up hundreds of counters - many of which appeared to be pure cheese. That is, lots of counters that look like odometres or, worse yet, like the green LEDs of a pocket computer c. 1979. Most were free, requiring users to display advertising. No thanks.

So I had a look at www.statcounter.com, which also turned up on the Google search. Eureka! A good website, a counter that can be configured to match the rest of the site with no problems, and - better still - a range of other site statistics. And all free to use and free from advertising!

According to the developer of the site, its mission is to "help webmasters make decisions, and be more successful online by understanding their visitors." And to break even each month, and not make a fortune. They do charge sites that have over 9000 hits per day. Otherwise, completely free.

Our stat counter has been installed since January 22, 2005, at 10:08 GMT.