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Announcements about the site. Important changes, site policy changes, new pages and recently added features.
New Site Statistics
The site no longer displays the statistics provided by Blogger (Google): they are simply unreliable and grossly inflate traffic. To get a better handle on the site traffic I've installed a free counter from GoatCounter.com. There's a bit of a learning curve but it's been very straightforward.
According to claude.ai Blogger's built-in stats and GoatCounter measure fundamentally different things.
Blogger's "stats" count nearly everything that touches the page, including bots. Blogger's pageview counter is notorious for inflating numbers with:
- Bot and crawler traffic — search engine spiders, scrapers, and especially a huge amount of automated traffic from Russia/Ukraine-region bots that has plagued Blogger for over a decade. This alone can be 10-50x real traffic.
- Referrer spam — bots that "visit" your site just to leave a fake referrer URL in your logs, trying to get you to visit their site. Blogger stats count these as pageviews; they never execute JavaScript so they'd never show up in GoatCounter.
- Server-side logging — Blogger appears to count a hit whenever its servers serve the page, before any client-side rendering happens, so even requests that never really "view" the page in a human sense get counted.
GoatCounter counts real, JavaScript-executing visits, and filters bots by design. It:
- Only counts a pageview when the tracking script actually runs in a browser — so any crawler, bot, or scraper that doesn't execute JS is invisible to it.
- Actively tries to detect and exclude known bots/spiders even when they do run scripts.
- Gets blocked by some ad blockers and privacy extensions (it's a small tracker, but uBlock/Privacy Badger/NoScript users, and browsers with strict tracking protection, will simply never fire the request).
GoatCounter estimate about a third of pageviews are "lost" due to adblocking of one sort or another. This is significantly better than Blogger registering 10 to 50 times the human traffic.
As of yesterday, the site stats displayed on the site come from Goatcounter.com and the total reset to zero.
Sun, 23 August, 2026
Automation
I have recently added, or improved, the automation of certain tasks:
- Improved the posting of new posts & comments to Bluesky.
- Started posting random posts to social media.
- Updating the blog index on Google Drive.
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Maintaining a set of simple stats on Google Drive.
These all use scripts of one form or another and, more importantly, they will all save me time.
Mon, 18 May, 2026
Weeding
There were 598 posts on this blog at the end of 2025. There are now considerably fewer! Those removed had not stood the test of time.
For some, the posts have been redirected to a summary page. For example, the series of posts on matting paint with talc all now point to a freshly written summary page. This should make it better for everyone; easier to maintain and no jumping from one page to another.
All redirected pages are marked (*) in the index, label searches, widgets, and general site searches. The last three may show snippets of the original page but clicking the link will take you to the new one.
Wed, 14 January, 2026
Library page
This new page now features in the navigation bar at the top of each page.
The intention is to use it as a central repository for links to the most popular pages from the blog as well as summary pages and wargaming downloads. For example, there's a section with links to my popular Wars of the Roses pages.
Wed, 7 January, 2026
One million views!
Overnight this blog joined the millionaire's club and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who's visited the site since 2007 and issue a special "thank you" to my regular readers.
I'd also like to thank all the Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and other third world bot networks that helped me reach this milestone.
Onwards and upwards!
Sun, 8 December 2024
Future proofing
All internal links on this site will now work whatever the domain name.
For example, all links to my articles page now use the url /p/articles.html instead of the full, but domain specific, url https://blog.vexillia.me.uk/p/articles.html. Techies call this root relative addressing.
I've done this because, were I to stop paying for the domain, links like https://blog.vexillia.me.uk/p/articles.html would no longer work.
In these circumstances, the blog address reverts to the free subdomain provided by Blogger, namely https://vexillia.blogspot.com; breaking any internal links using the vexillia subdomain and significantly reducing the value of the blog.
Wed, 16 February 2022
A change to the RSS feed
Until today the main RSS feed for this blog contained all the text of each post. I usually prefer it this way as you can read the posts in an RSS reader rather than have to visit the site.
Unfortunately, there's an increasing trend of "harvesting" sites. They use full RSS feeds to transfer posts from blogs like mine to their own blog. All without asking permission. I'm not talking about the various news & compilation sites which just post links and snippets.
The "harvesting" blogs are set up to re-post content automatically and seem to be created solely to make money from advertising. Of course I get nothing in return for my work.
To make this process a little harder for the "harvesters" I have changed the way the RSS feed works. It now contains just a short section of the post and a link to the original page. If you use RSS to follow this blog I hope you will understand why I've made this change.
Wed, 1 November 2017
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