The weather today is a great improvement (to our way of thinking) on that of the last few days. It has rained and the skies are gloomy with clouds but this has caused the temperature to fall from the upper 30s to the upper teens. The gentle breeze washes over us like heavenly balm.

In honour of the occasion, we took up our umbrellas and went out for a late lunch.

Gallipoli
Photo by Tigger

And here is where we went – to the Gallipoli Bistro, a charming Turkish restaurant in Upper Street, Islington.

We have often enjoyed a Turkish breakfast here but we were too late for that today even though they serve breakfast until 3 pm. We plumped for the meze lunch with ayran (a Turkish yogurt-based drink) for Tigger and a large cup of Turkish tea for me.

We would be happy for this delicious “coolwave” to continue indefinitely!

You may notice that I have added a hit counter to the blog. It is located at the bottom of the side bar. It is supplied by simple-counter.com and is free (my favourite price!). The user can choose the colour of the digits, the colour of the background and the starting number, that is, the number of visits before the timer was started.

From the point of view of privacy, it is important to note that the counter merely records how many times the site is loaded. It does not record any information about the visitor.

The only fault I can find with the counter is that it records my visits along with other people’s. For example, if I am working on the design of the blog, every time I load the page to see what it looks like, the counter is incremented. It would be good if visits from logged-in individuals could be exempted but this would complicate the programming even if it were possible. All in all the counter is a good compromise and worthy of its name.

What is the point of even having a hit counter? This will depend on your individual motivation but we can say that there are potential advantages and disadvantages. If your blog is popular, you can boast of the high hit count but if it is not, then a low hit count might embarrass you.

In my case, I have installed it for fun. To know how many people are viewing my blog, I can follow the stats provided by WordPress and a hit counter is not needed for that. I also learnt from my previous blog (and if you too have a blog you can check this for yourself) that most hits come from people looking up words and phrases with a search engine, not from people visiting your blog intentionally. At best, the counter gives a general idea of the flow of visitors, whether intentional or unintentional, and if that suffices then the counter serves its purpose.

It is in that spirit that I have installed it and will be interested in any readers’ views of this.