Ready Steady Cook

The website itself does not use cookies - those little files that are a pain or a blessing depending on what they do. Remembering a login name and password is one thing, but sending back information to a commercial company about what you do on your computer is quite another thing. Anyway, I have needed to better understand what pages are being visited. So in November last year I placed some code on the front page and news page which links to a statistics facility. Of course, it uses a cookie. The results have been quite useful. I now have a good idea of the numbers of unique visitors (on a daily basis) by correlation with my own simple incremental counter. And a better idea of what operating system and browser folks use - Windows XP and IE6/7 by a long chalk. The most useful stat is the screen resolution being used - which suggests the next major improvement to the website will be a page size of at least 1024 pixels wide. Back to the cookies. I plan to keep the statistics code for a few more weeks and then remove it. I will have sufficient information by then.