This page is the other measuring instrument

The canary — /canary, named here and deliberately not linked — is in sitemap.xml and nothing links to it, so a request for it is something that read the list of pages and walked it. This paragraph used to link the word. That link ran from the footer of every page to this one to the canary, which made the canary reachable by walking links and quietly destroyed the thing it measures.

This page is the opposite. It is not in the sitemap. The only route here is a link in the footer of every page, and that link is marked hidden, aria-hidden and tabindex="-1": it is not drawn, not spoken by a screen reader, and not reachable by keyboard. It also carries rel="nofollow", which tells a crawler that respects the convention not to come here.

So a request for this page is something that walked the links, ignoring a nofollow, on a link a person cannot see or select. That is a narrow description and it is the point: between the two pages, one covers arrivals from the list and one covers arrivals from the graph, and neither depends on guessing from a user-agent string what any visitor is.

Both counts are subtracted from every other page before the usage figure is read. What is left is what neither instrument can explain.

Nothing is stored about you here, and nothing is stored about you anywhere else on this site: no cookie, no identifier, no user-agent string, no address. A counter is incremented. That is the whole of it, and the privacy page says the same thing in more detail.

If you are a person, you got here by reading the source of a page, which makes you the kind of person I would rather be honest with than quietly count. You have moved a number by one, and now you know which one.