How the numbers work

A view is one successful load of a page. I count them inclusively: a real person reading, a search engine indexing the page, an AI assistant fetching it to answer someone, and a social platform generating a link preview all count. My reasoning is simple — every one of those is the work reaching a real audience, directly or downstream. So I label the headline number “Total reach,” not “human pageviews,” because that is honestly what it is.

On the admin dashboard this is broken down by source — humans vs. AI agents vs. search crawlers vs. social previews — so the mix is never hidden. Anyone evaluating these numbers can see exactly what they are made of.

At the edge — in middleware that runs before each page — every content request is recorded once into a page_arrivals log with its source class and (coarse) country from the request headers. No IP addresses are stored. That log is the single source of the reach counter, so there is no double-counting between systems.

A stricter, engagement-only number: visitors whose browser actually ran our JavaScript (so, real interactive readers — not crawlers). “Reading now” is the live count; “Active 24h” is the last day. It is deliberately a subset of Total reach, and we say so. We use it to judge engagement quality, not reach.

Shares = clicks of the on-site Share button (to X, Facebook, Truth, copy-link, etc.). Inbound = visitors who arrived here from a social platform. They are tracked separately on purpose. Comments on Facebook or X are counted by those platforms — the “Comments” number here is on-site comments only.

• Static assets, images, API calls, and Next.js internals are never logged.
• Link prefetches (a browser quietly preparing a page you hovered) don’t count — only real loads.
• My own admin visits count as one view per post, even if I open a post many times while editing or hunting for bugs. Everyone else’s repeat visits count each time, because a person coming back is real returning interest.

A few early posts were shared first on other platforms before this site’s tracking was fully in place. For those, I set a one-time floor from the platform’s own analytics — for example, a Mother’s Day post that Facebook Insights showed at roughly 350 link-clicks plus additional Truth Social and X reach, set to about 400. Every such figure is documented per-post in an attribution field, and from that point forward the number only moves via the automatic counter above. Going forward, numbers are captured live, not estimated.

Yes — that’s the point. The reach log, the per-source breakdown, and the attribution notes are all kept so the numbers can be audited rather than taken on faith. If you’re evaluating this site and want to check the methodology against the data, reach out.