A pox upon vanishing firms ..

.. especially those who create hit counters!

One of the small joys of my blogging has been monitoring the hits on the site.  I used a free hit counter from http://www.simplehitcounter.com/index.asp.  After about 2 years it has suddenly vanished.  No warning, no apology just vanished.  Profanities upon them and their descendants unto the 5th generation. May their next career be  "Lign in dr'erd un bakn beygel" (a fine kvetch meaning "lying in the earth baking bagels" - see Born to Kvetch by Michael Wex for a discussion of the tasty implications of this curse!)

I have checked a blog by the person who referred me to this counter and their enumerations have also gone.

On looking at the other webcounters available they fell into various classes:

• Ones that overtly required you to register (and on reading their terms of use permited them to delete your blog if you did something they didn't like.  This is obviousl;y a high risk if you don't know what they don't like - perhaps they are Liberal Party supporters who would, I hope, find quite a bit not to like on my site).
• One that seemed very sensible and simple and offered a choice of starting numbers.  Unfortunately it seemed to start at a completely random number so I concluded that the people at the site (who from their name were offering web development services)  were either simply malicious or incompetent.  To them I say "Ale tseyn zoln dir oysfaln nor eynerzol dir blaybn af tsonveytik!" (May all your teeth fall out but you should keep one to get a toothache with.)  Wex again!
• Others that didn't appear to fall into the first group but had some characteristics that suggested they would also do nasty things if they didn't like your blog, but were not ethical enough to mention it up front!

Fortunately another blogging friend has given me a reference to Sitemeter.  They look to fall in to the first group above, but if my friend has had no problems I doubt if I will.  Certainly by listing Wonkette as one of their featured sites they suggest a fairly relaxed definition of "unacceptable".  So we are back and running, at least on the main blog and "To the Mother Country".

It appears that they also mail me a report each week.  While I didn't actually need this I can see myself spending a fair bit of time looking things such as where people are coming from, how long they stayed on the site etc etc.  I just hope Sitemeter have a solid business plan so they stay around for a long while!