(My experience with the beta site is that large parts of it, like "sort incoming links by 'most authority,'" simply don't work at all; you wait forever for no result.) (We both realize this is arguably a variety of complaining about the free ice cream, and yet.)

I don't know whether this page finds something different behind it from what the proper page does, but there it is.

Both on my own tiny site, and the much-uses sites on campus, I find using the web log (the real one, not a blog) produced by the web server itself in tandem with a very primitive javascript on each page gives me both the instant snap shot data (who's coming to the site right now, from where) and the more in depth stats I can sift and analyze at my leisure.

There are any number of "statistics" java scripts; I've used http://www.sitemeter.com/ in the past, and am currently using the free version of http://www.statcounter.com/. It's only good in the free version for the last thousand visitors, but that ought to let you know within an hours time if you've been linked somewhere new.

And yes, it's crude, and yes, of course I know that there are all sorts of ways to avoid being "counted"--that's fine; people have a right to do what they want with their own data; this is just a way of dipping one's toe in the river of stats to check current conditions.

I noticed when they switched over that it stopped my old plugin that used the technorati api from ever showing me anything new -- the same sites now seem to be permanently listed on my page. And my technorati rss is doing the same thing Teresa describes, with the same last few sites shuffling up and down.

Of course, maybe its because every weblogger suddenly discovered who I really am, and now I'm being shunned as a pariah. I don't know, because Technorati won't help me find out where I was outed.

So I'm glad you're raising the visibility on this.

I know that links to me frequently disappear and reappear later and the numbers don't update at all.

Sorry about the problems, and thanks for pointing it out. I hope you keep coming back to Technorati as we work to fix this problem. And please don't hesitate to let us know about these issues if and when they occur in the future, we really need and love to get your feedback, both positive (of course) but especially negative constructure feedback. We are working really hard to be of service to you, and data quality and performance is paramount in this.

The database meltdown I have been quietly chuckling over is the Truth Laid Bare, which for weeks listed my blog as one of the top 100, an obvious error, even more obvious if you had a look at the supporting info.

The highest I rose was to #84. I'm currently at #107. I think this is terribly funny.

Of course, if you only track blogs that link to Glenn Reynolds, you aren't going to see a lot of the blogs that link to me.

Free ones: Webalizer, AWStats, Analog (with Report Magic)

Not free: Urchin, NetTracker, WebTrends, and ClickTracks.

My favorite is Urchin 5, and I'm profoundly grateful that my host offers it as part of my plan. It isn't cheap -- around $900. Then again, the version of WebTrends that offers the same features costs somewhere around $10K.

Webalizer and Analog are the most common free ones, but I like AWStats better than either. The free ones tend to be inflexible, showing you only the most popular 10 pages on your site. If you want to see numbers on a new page that's getting a lot of traffic right now but hasn't yet surpassed your top 10... no go.

And then there's Refer, which doesn't produce pretty graphs of any kind, but is really great for tracking inbound links as they appear. ShortStat is also really cool. (This seems to be the most recent version.) I gather it's soon to be replaced by Mint. These two don't analyze logs, but rely on bits of PHP embedded in the page instead. Both are free.

Either Refer or ShortStat might be a good solution for you, Teresa, but in order to use them without breaking your permalinks, you'd probably need to do some server magic to parse .html pages for PHP code.

(I'd written a longer reply, but Movable Type didn't like it, and I moved it to my site instead.)

*kicks Movable Type*

But, it seems you're running Apache and have PHP installed, so that is a potential option. The particular magic you want is to find the line in your httpd.conf file that reads "AddType application/x-httpd-php .php" (possibly followed by other extensions) and add " .html" to the end of the line. This should cause the server to process all your HTML files through PHP. Then you can include any tracking code for such things directly.

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Guess that'd be why they're calling this beta.

sure, we all gotta make a buck, but technorati's jumping the gun. if it's gonna be just as ineffective as google, some of us will just go back to google.